Introduction

Views about the proper aims of education often depend on the perspectives of those considering the question. Policy-makers may stress the needs of a commercially sophisticated society, whilst others assert the potential value to the individual pupil of a good education. The Warnock Committee perceived the tensions in these two approaches. In their view, education is not an end in itself, but also a means to an end. It has dual aims: to enlarge the ‘child's knowledge, experience and imaginative understanding, and thus his awareness of moral values and capacity for enjoyment’ and also to enable the child ‘to enter the world after formal education is over as an active participant in society and a responsible contributor to it, capable of achieving as much independence in it as possible’.

School life may enable some children to escape from narrow and stultifying home environments and help them assess critically the ideologies with which they have been brought up. But the principles of education law are only slowly adjusting to the maturing pupil's capacity for undertaking responsibilities in school and reaching important decisions over his or her education, without parental interference. Indeed, the efforts of policy-makers to cast parents in the role of the consumers of education has produced a system of education law which, more often than not, treats children as adjuncts of their parents, rather than as responsible agents in their own right.