The personal website of David Halpin
The Contrarian Online
My articles and essays
My career as a university teacher and researcher lasted slightly over twenty years, ending in early retirement, aged 60, in 2007, since when I have been an Emeritus Professor of Education at University College, London.
During those two decades, I co-directed five major externally funded research projects, simultaneously writing for publication four books and over sixty scholarly articles. Seventeen chapters of mine also appeared in other people’s collections, while I pulled together three of my own, concurrently editing two academic journals, British Journal of Educational Studies and London Review of Education, the last of which I founded. Contemporaneously, I regularly presented papers at academic conferences, both in this county and abroad, frequently in the United States, sometimes in Europe.
Despite this high level of academic productivity, my contribution to knowledge as a university scholar was only fair to middling, although I did break new ground in encouraging a more appreciative understanding of the links between progressive forms of education and Utopian and Romantic ways of thinking. My discussion of a positive role for nostalgia in thinking about education also has its original moments.
I am also proud of the fact that I am one of the few academics working in the field of education studies to have discerned value in the writings of each of William Hazlitt and Michel de Montaigne for the development of pedagogic theory.
This page of my website advertises a small selection of the articles about different aspects of education which I published as a working academic.
They are the ones I am most satisfied with, thinking they possess intellectual merit because they offer novel and enduring insight.
A full list of my publications is available here
This page also draws attention to a number of unpublished essays written since I gave up being an academic, including over a dozen that will feature in a new self-published collection – Forget-Me-Nots.
I consider just seven of the many academic articles I published during my university career as positively memorable.
In chronological order, they deal each with tradition and education, Thomas More’s Utopia and education, Romanticism and education, William Hazlitt’s ideal kind of education, teaching and love, Michel de Montaigne and reflective practice and nostalgia and education.
Maintaining, reconstructing and creating tradition in education was published in the Oxford Review of Education in 2000 (26, 2, 133-144). It discusses the central role tradition plays in the construction of teachers’ professional and schools’ institutional identities. It also speculates on the degree to which currently there is taking place in education a reinvention of established and very familiar pedagogic and school traditions alongside the creation and emergence of new ones. Its full text is available here
Utopianism and education: the legacy of Thomas More was published in the British Journal of Educational Studies in 2001 (49, 3, 299-315). It argues that More’s ‘utopian method’ offers a model way to think imaginatively and prospectively about the form and content of social reform in general and educational change in particular. Its full text is available from this website.
Why a Romantic conception of education matters was published in the Oxford Review of Education in 2006 (32, 3, 325-45). It argues that Romanticism’s valuing of love and the life of the imagination, combined with its belief in human potential taken heroically to and beyond its limits, provides a way of addressing fruitfully fundamental issues to do with teaching and learning in schools. Its full text is available from this website.
Hazlitt’s learning: a real and negative education was published in 2009 in the Hazlitt Review (2, 49-66). It outlines critically William Hazlitt’s conception of a ‘real education’, admiringly endorsing its stress on enabling learners freely and imaginatively to link book knowledge with experience and vice-versa. Its full text is available from page 49 of this website.
Pedagogy and romantic love was published in 2009 in Pedagogy, Curriculum and Society (17, 1, 89-102). Inspired by and based upon aspects of the writings of particular British nineteenth‐century Romantic poets, this paper outlines a positive, necessary even, role for friendship, love and passion in pedagogy. Its full text is available here.
Essaying and reflective practice in education: the legacy of Michel de Montaigne was published in the Journal of the Philosophy of Education in 2015 (49, 1, 129-41). It argues that Montaigne’s method of ‘essaying’ anticipates contemporary education theory’s emphasis on the importance of reflective practice and learning from experience. Its full text is available from this website.
Dancing with eyes wide open: on the role of nostalgia in education was published in the London Review of Education in 2016 (14, 3, 31-40). It argues that while nostalgia rightly elicits suspicion, even derision, this does not make it either sentimentally mausolean or falsely reactionary in the education context and elsewhere. Its full text can be read here.
All the unpublished works about to be spotlighted are essays which feature in a final collection of autobiographical writings, Forget-Me-Nots, which will be self published before the beginning of 2025:
Preface, which introduces this collection, can be read HERE
On Memory (2023), which reflects on the reliability of recall in the process of telling autobiographical stories, can be read HERE
On Reading to Write (2023), which tells stories about my life in books and the challenges I face in writing them, can be read HERE
On Private Passions (2020), which explores aspects of my keen interest in western classical music, can be read HERE
On Chess (2022), which discusses why I adore a game that often hates me back, can be read HERE
On Big Sport (2021), which is a hostile critique of the ethics and economics of professional elite sport, can be read HERE
On Wording the Unwordable (2023), which theologises poetically my belief ion God, can be read HERE
On Faith in the Resurrection (2022), which explains theologically what I mean when I affirm that Jesus survived his death, can be read HERE
On Dante and Giotto (2023), which mediates on the significance of Dante’s Commedia and Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, can be read HERE
On Dying (2022), which discusses the Christian sense I have of my own mortality, can be read HERE
On Brexit (2019), which explores my ambivalent attitude about the functions and politics of the EEU, can be read HERE
On Creativity (2020), which outlines what I think contributes to a real education, can be read HERE
On China (2023), which is a set of stories about my love affair with a country, can be read HERE
On Two Images of Ireland (2024), which identifies a pair of ‘ideal types’ which help me to make sense of my Irish identity, can be read HERE
Other essays, each unpublished, which don’t feature in Forget-Me-Nots, include some reactions to various works of fiction I have read since 2019 plus an extended non-fiction book review. To complete the set there are bits and pieces about a section of works of classical music which caught my imagination, and a profile of Chopin. Also included are the texts of three talks I have given since I retired.
The love of literature (2019) is a brief appreciation of John Williams’ elegiac novel, Stoner. Available here.
The ‘poetics and punch’ of John McGahern’s Wheels (2018) discusses a short story written by one of my favourite Irish authors. Available here.
Dreaming back to transcendence (2018) comments on McGharen’s short story The Wine Breath, Available here.
Earthly requirement meets heavenly detail (2014) is a very positive review of John Eliot Gardiner’s major study of Bach’s vocal compositions, Music in the Castle of Heaven. Available here.
Deathly Music (2015) is about Shostakovich’s final string quartet. It can be read here.
All of Shostakovich’s string quartets are profiled here.
An essay about the worldliness of classical music can be read here.
An appreciation of Britten’s Piano Concerto can be read here
A survey of the ins and outs of Chopin’s First Ballade can be read here.
The text of a talk I gave about Chopin’s piano music is available here.
The text of a talk I gave about the Chinese Communist Party in the 21st Century is available here
A short seminar paper I once presented on theologising utopianism can be read here
A short essay of mine on learning for its own sake is available here