The entries in this combined essay ask two questions that are usually kept apart. The first is how teaching should work in a classroom. The second is what schools do for a society, whether or not anyone intends it. The answers to the second question often explain why the answers to the first are so hard to put into practice.
How teaching should work
The most influential recent model is Cognitive Load Theory, which treats working memory as the bottleneck in learning and recommends explicit, structured instruction for novices. Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction turn similar evidence into classroom practice: review, small steps, frequent questions, guided practice. Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Bloom's Mastery Learning add that teaching should target what a learner can nearly do, and should hold the standard fixed while time varies.
Several popular models have fared worse. Learning Styles predicts that pupils learn better in their preferred mode, and studies designed to find that interaction have not. Multiple Intelligences and Growth Mindset drew useful attention to neglected abilities and to how pupils interpret failure, but their measured classroom effects are small. Hattie's Effect Sizes tried to rank everything by one number and drew criticism for the averaging that made the ranking possible.
What schools do besides teaching
The sociological models describe schools as sorting institutions. The Hidden Curriculum teaches punctuality, deference and waiting alongside the stated syllabus. Cultural Reproduction holds that schools reward the habits advantaged families already have. Credential Inflation finds the qualification required for a job rising as more people hold it. Maximally and Effectively Maintained Inequality find advantaged families moving to the next rung whenever access to the current one equalises. Clark's Cooling-Out Function describes open-access colleges gently lowering students' ambitions.
The Asian entries show the same forces at greater intensity. Korea's Gyoyukyeol, the fever for education, and China's Baguwen, the eight-legged examination essay, show what happens when an examination becomes the main route to status: the format hardens, and preparation for it becomes an industry.
Sayings about teaching
The precepts and figures are the oldest material in the subject. Confucius's Xue Er Bu Si, that learning without thought is labour lost and thought without learning is perilous, still describes the balance teachers argue about. San Ren Xing finds a teacher among any three companions. See One, Do One, Teach One compresses medical apprenticeship into three steps, and Shaw's Those Who Can, Do is the most repeated slight on the profession.
Where it applies
The instructional models apply directly to lesson design, teacher training and curriculum planning, and the evidence behind explicit instruction for beginners is now influential in several countries' teacher standards. The sociological models apply to admissions, funding and policy: anyone designing an access scheme meets maintained inequality, and anyone setting entry requirements meets credential inflation. The finance entries, Bowen's Revenue Theory of Cost and the Bennett Hypothesis, apply to anyone asking why university costs rise.
Where it is argued over
The central instructional dispute is between explicit teaching and discovery, and it is partly resolved by the expertise reversal effect: the best method depends on how much the learner already knows. The sociological models are contested as explanations: their critics argue that reproduction and credentialing theories struggle to account for the mobility that education also produces. The Mismatch Hypothesis and the Heckman Curve carry the most politically charged disputes, over affirmative action and over where public money in education does most good.
Why it is worth knowing
Most arguments about education assume schools exist to teach. These entries show them doing several other things at once: sorting, signalling, socialising and reproducing advantage. Knowing both sets of models explains why an instructional reform that works in a trial can falter in a system whose other functions pull against it, and why the questions about what schools are for cannot be settled by evidence about teaching alone.
The entries behind this essay: Model and Precept and Figure in Learning & Education. Every subject has its essays on the essays page.