In the grip of the past? Tradition, traditionalism and contemporary schooling

This article theorises the nature of tradition, in particular the role it plays in the formation of identity and the legitimation of authority. It draws on recently concluded research carried out in England involving a sample of self-governing grant-maintained (GM) and local education authority (LEA) maintained secondary schools to illustrate the various ways in which a particular version of a traditional education, sometimes influenced by interpretations of local market conditions, amounts to a form of educational fundamentalism in which a 'good' education is unproblematically associated with an old-fashioned one. The paper suggests that presently there is an exceptional convergence between the United Kingdom's government's advocacy of such old-fashioned ideas in education and popular preferences for a form of traditional schooling that eschews progressivism.