Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 to 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher who also became one of the twentieth century's most quoted thinkers on schooling. Trained in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught there until 1910, then held posts at University College London and Imperial College London, where he took on senior administrative roles in the University of London and helped widen access to science degrees for less wealthy students. In 1921 he sat on a government committee that reviewed the educational system of the United Kingdom. His best known educational work is The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929), which gathers addresses given between 1912 and 1927. In it he warned against teaching "inert ideas", disconnected scraps of information with no use in life, argued for teaching a few important concepts that students can link to many areas of knowledge, urged that curriculum be shaped by each school's own staff rather than by external examinations, and put imagination at the centre of learning. From 1924 he taught philosophy at Harvard University, where his process philosophy took shape, and later educators founded groups and models of teaching on his ideas.