Dictionary of British Education
(1) The belief that there is an ‘essential’ body of knowledge that all students should acquire. The term is sometimes employed in comparative education to refer to continental school systems such as the Soviet or the French.
The term is also sometimes referred to as encyclopaedism, which suggests that where there is a compulsory system of education, then this should be general education up to the compulsory school leaving age. (2) In philosophy, the term is used to describe Plato’s theory that words only have meaning by reference to the resemblance of a particular object or quality to an ideal form. This kind of essentialism rests on the assumption that ideal forms exist in some meaningful sense. The curricular implications of this theory are that art and poetry are inferior to mathematics: whereas mathematics focuses upon the abstract form, art and poetry are concerned with imitation and, therefore, stray further and further away from ideal forms or ‘the truth’.
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