In undertaking to treat of Aristotle as the expounder of ancient educational ideas, I might, with Kapp’s Aristoteles’ Staatspaedagogik before me, have made my task an easy one. I might simply have presented in an orderly way and with a little commentary, what is to be found on the subject of education in his various works—Politics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetics, etc. I had two reasons, however, for not adopting this course: (1) that this work had been done, better than I could do it, in the treatise referred to, and (2) that a mere restatement of what Aristotle says on education would hardly have shown his relation to ancient pedagogy as a whole. I therefore judged it better, by tracing briefly the whole history of Greek education up to Aristotle and down from Aristotle, to show the past which conditioned his theories and the future which was conditioned by them. Only thus, it seemed to me, could his teachings be seen in their proper light. And I have found that this method has many advantages, of which I may mention one. It has enabled me to show the close connection that existed at all times between Greek education and Greek social and political life, and to present the one as the reflection of the other. And this is no small advantage, since it is just from its relation to the whole of life that Greek education derives its chief interest for us. We can never, indeed, return to the purely political education of the Greeks; they themselves had to abandon that, and, since then,

A boundless hope has passed across the earth—

a hope which gives our education a meaning and a scope far wider than any that the State aims at; but in these days, when the State and the institution which embodies that hope are contending for the right to educate, it cannot but aid us in settling their respective claims, to follow the process by which they came to have distinct claims at all, and to see just what these mean. This process, the method which I have followed has, I hope, enabled me, in some degree, to bring into clearness. This, at all events, has been one of my chief aims.

…

THOMAS DAVIDSON

“Glenmore,”

Keene, Essex Co., N.Y.

October, 1891.

The profession of teaching has long been characterised by certain habitual convictions, which Spencer undertook to shake rudely, and even to deride. The first of these convictions is that all education, physical, intellectual, and moral, must be authoritative, and need take no account of the natural wishes, tendencies, and motives of the ignorant and undeveloped child. The second dominating conviction is that to teach means to tell, or show, children what they ought to see, believe, and utter. Expositions by the teacher and books are therefore the true means of education. The third and supreme conviction is that the method of education which produced the teacher himself and the contemporary or earlier scholars, authors, and publicists, must be the righteous and sufficient method. Its fruits demonstrate its soundness, and make it sacred. Herbert Spencer, in the essays included in the present volume, assaulted all three of these firm convictions. Accordingly, the ideas on education which he put forth more than fifty years ago have penetrated educational practice very slowly particularly in England; but they are now coming to prevail in most civilised countries, and they will prevail more and more. Through him, the thoughts on education of Comenius, Montaigne, Locke, Milton, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and other noted writers on this neglected subject are at last winning their way into practice, with the modifications or adaptations which the immense gains of the human race in knowledge and power since the nineteenth century opened have shown to be wise.

Charles W. Eliot.

1910

The question, ‘Who should teach courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP)?’ has been a matter of controversy for decades in the field of English language teaching (ELT). However, in the course of time, there has appeared to be a consensus on allocating the responsibility of teaching ESP courses to English teachers due to their overwhelming success in teaching practice in comparison to content experts. In fact, the success of ESP teachers appears to rely on the five key roles identified by Dudley Evans and St. John (1998) who called them ‘ESP practitioners’, which are the roles of a teacher, a researcher, a course designer, a material provider, a collaborator and an evaluator. In this book, you will find a compact pack of how to become ‘an ESP practitioner’ by following the footsteps of the leading researchers in the ESP literature. Besides, it is the responsibility of ESP practitioners at tertiary level education to catch up with the needs and mindset of the generation Z individuals via technology-integrated pedagogical strategies as is the case with one of the recent blended learning approaches, the flipped learning approach. Thus, in this book you will also find the elements of creating a flipped learning environment, relying on the related literature on how to become a flipped learning practitioner. On this basis, driven by Dr İlter’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Developing ESP Courses in the Flipped Learning Environment’ is relied on an evidence-based literature review concerning the flipped learning perspective in ESP practices in EFL settings. It is hoped that this review will satisfy an existing need in the ESP field by suggesting the flipped learning strategy as an alternative to benefit from in the design and implementation processes of developing an ESP course at a tertiary level EFL setting.