Academics who support traditional education have increasingly relied on stereotypes, hearsay, and prejudice when discussing progressive teaching methods. A comparison of two polemics against discovery learning published over 50 years apart highlights the deterioration in levels of scholarship.
In 1969 Black Paper Two: The Crisis in Education contained Professor Bantock’s critique of ‘Discovery Methods’. The Black Papers were a collection of articles aimed at convincing policy makers and practitioners about the dangers of progressive education.
In 2025 three university academics included a chapter on ‘The Discovery Illusion’ as part of a collection of Instructional Illusions. The small volume aspires to persuade educational leaders and teachers to adopt instructional designs based on cognitive science.
Rousseau
Both pieces locate the origins of discovery learning in Rousseau’s Emile. The similarity ends there.
Bantock gives the reader a considered evaluation of the nuances in the work. He quotes Rousseau on a child’s natural development: “Give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone.” However, Bantock also acknowledges that Rousseau ascribes a role to the teacher, albeit indirect: the teacher, Rousseau says, should prepare the child’s environment “that nothing shall strike his eye but what is fit for his sight.”
In the 2025 book, all subtlety is replaced by a nasty ad hominem attack. The only quote from Emile is a bland re-statement of the basic proposition: “Let him not be taught science, let him discover it.” Then follows a condemnation of the way Rousseau raised his own children, which is twice as long as the outline of his educational philosophy. The reader is invited to dismiss Rousseau’s ideas because of his supposedly hypocritical and irresponsible behaviour.
What is discovery learning?
Bantock starts his article by recounting the events of a discovery lesson. Children are making observations and finding interesting objects on the banks of the river Thames. Then they return to the classroom to analyse their discoveries. Bantock is not actually with the class, but rather watching a BBC programme. That the national broadcaster should schedule a programme on discovery suggests teachers were keen to know how discovery methods worked. However, and notwithstanding high profile cases such as William Tyndale junior school, the take-up of discovery in the classrooms of the 1960s was exaggerated – not least by the editors of the Black Papers. The point, though, is Bantock informed himself of what discovery methods looked like in practice.
The same cannot be said for the authors of the later work. In fact, it turns out that by 2025 traditionalists have converted ‘discovery learning’ into an umbrella term for many different approaches. They include collaborating on a science experiment, debating interpretations of a historical document, and solving a mathematical problem (p. 59) as well as, on a larger scale, inquiry-based learning (p. 62). That teachers would be surprised to know that collaboration, debate, and problem solving constitute discovery learning shows how far detached the authors are from the classroom. Moreover, the amalgamation of such distinct pedagogies as inquiry and discovery reveals their lack of intellectual rigour.
Advantages and disadvantages
Bantock takes a measured approach to discovery learning within his advocacy of traditional teaching. While discovery methods leave the ‘bright’ student bored and lead to a haphazard ‘magpie curriculum’ that militates against an orderly development of subject matter, they do have some limited advantages. Exploration in the search of discoveries arouses interest, motivates students, and makes the world an interesting place. Children begin to identify learning opportunities in their own environment – in short, they learn how to learn.
While Bantock concedes that there is no one way to ‘transmit’ all subjects, he points out teachers’ confusion when implementing discovery methods: “Many teachers even among those who use them, do not understand them in their full ramifications, and hence are not in a position to apply them critically and in the contexts in which they are likely to function best” (p. 102). The main problem, Bantock argues, is that teachers do not have a clear understanding of what they are aiming to accomplish and, therefore, do not know when and to what extent a ‘school structure’ should be introduced into learning situations.
The 2025 authors are not interested in considering the circumstances under which discovery might lead to learning. They reject the model wholesale as representing “one of the least effective, efficient, and fulfilling pathways to robust understanding for most academic content” (p. 64, my italics). That most is interesting. An inquisitive person would wonder about the academic content for which discovery is effective. Unsurprisingly, the authors do not pose the question.
In the next paragraph, however, they do accept that discovery methods can work on rare occasions, although only for the privileged middle-class student who possesses the prerequisite knowledge and metacognitive skills of an ‘expert’ in the field. As the vast majority of children are ‘novices’ who lack both the knowledge and skills, they cannot be expected to discover knowledge in the manner of an expert. Instead, discovery environments result in students failing to grasp key concepts and reinforcing misconceptions. With the arbitrary and harmful distinction between novice and expert, the authors write off discovery methods.1
Dogmatism
Bantock concludes with a typically balanced statement: “Used competently, with an awareness of their place in the general armoury of tools at the teacher’s disposal, these [discovery] methods have a great deal to offer. Used incompetently, as a gimmick or a fashion, they are probably more disastrous to learning than an exclusive reliance on the old formal methods” (p. 116). Today the traditionalists’ point-blank dismissal of discovery learning and their prescription of worked examples and retrieval practice are the fashion. Multi-academy chains reject discovery without analysis and adopt teacher-centred recommendations from cognitive science in a mindless and uncritical way.
Comparing the two polemics, it is easy to forget that teachers in the late 1960s considered the Black Papers to be a virulent attack on progressive methods. Yet, 56 years later, Bantock’s article appears positively enlightened compared to the intellectual sectarianism, arrogant dogmatism, and lazy scholarship of the 2025 chapter.
Footnotes
- The distinction between novice and expert is harmful because it limits teachers’ expectations of what children can learn. Labelling students as ‘novices’ justifies an impoverished diet of direct instruction. Yet all students (and experts for that matter) are capable of developing their disciplinary knowledge (that is, how one comes to know in a particular discipline) at their current level of substantive knowledge. They do not need to complete ‘novice’ training in the far-off future to experience the approaches that scientists, historians, or mathematicians take towards their subjects.
The distinction is also arbitrary as there are no criteria for attaining expert status. This becomes evident when progressive teachers challenge traditionalists to pinpoint the moment at which students pass from novice to expert. They never have a clear explanation, although, to be fair, it is an impossible question to answer. Education is not a dichotomous system in which students graduate from a novitiate; rather, learning is a process in which students continually deepen and enrich their understanding of and thinking with concepts. ↩︎
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