Education: A Historical Study of Education, Reform, and the Old Roots of Modern Ideas Paperback - 2011

Education: How Old the New argues that many ideas treated as modern educational discoveries have deep roots in older schools, universities, teachers, and intellectual traditions. James J. Walsh challenges the assumption that serious educational progress belongs chiefly to recent centuries, turning instead to the long history of teaching, scholarship, discipline, memory, languages, science, professional training, and the formation of the mind. Project Gutenberg classifies the book under education theory and practice, with the subject Education - History, and the preface states Walsh's central concern: that modern educators too often view the history of education with "short-sighted vision."

First published by Fordham University Press in 1910, Education: How Old the New is both a defence of historical memory and a critique of educational self-congratulation. Walsh does not deny modern reform, but he insists that older systems often understood important educational principles more clearly than later reformers admitted. For readers of educational history, classical education, Catholic intellectual history, pedagogy, liberal learning, and debates over tradition and innovation, this book offers a useful counterweight to the recurring claim that every generation has invented education anew.