This paper presents an argument for aesthetic knowledge in the arts and more specifically, for an aesthetic model of literature to be central in the curriculum. I argue that there are important distinctions to be made between the everyday experiences unique to us as individuals, and the universality of human experience. In the English Literature curriculum, this important difference is manifested in the status of the text because it is through a triadic engagement between educator, text and pupil that the meanings of experience can be evoked objectively. Through changing cultural and policy contexts in the post‐war period, the text has been marginalised in the curriculum. This has contributed to two detrimental effects. The first is that direct personal responses and experience have been overvalued in the English Literature curriculum. The second is that the idea of objective knowledge in literature has been misconstrued as knowledge of its linguistic substratum. Consequently, an important form of aesthetic knowledge is largely absent in Britain's secondary curriculum. The paper is organized into three sections. Section one describes main shifts in the cultural and policy contexts. Section two provides a brief empirical example of how shifts at the macro‐level have been re‐contextualised within the implied curriculum found in examples of national exams. Section three elucidates the deeper significance of these changes in light of a theoretical discussion of Kantian aesthetics and implications for a social realist approach to knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy derived from Durkheim.

To date, there has been little opposition to the growing inf luence of cognitive neuroscience in education from the education profession itself. However there is growing criticism from the fields of psychology and philosophy. This paper aims to summarize the central arguments found in literature critical of the claims made by cognitive neuroscientists who advocate its potential to improve education. The paper is organized around three sections which draw together assessments from psychology, philosophy and sociology of education. The first, "Brain, Mind and Culture," lays out the general argument against neuroeducation and evaluates two common assumptions made by advocates of neuro-education: that there is a causal relationship between brain and mind and that learning is a central tenet of education. The second section, "Promises and Problems," critically considers an example of neuro-educational research and then goes on to discuss how neuro-education has detrimental consequences for two necessary conditions of liberal subject-based education; disciplinarity and pedagogic authority. The final section, "Discourses of Risk, Vulnerability and Optimal Outcomes," considers wider sociological literature to locate neuroeducation within its contemporary cultural context. The paper concludes with a summary of the main philosophical and moral objections to neuro-education.

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