Researcher and educator John Inkster Goodlad (born 1917) was one of the chief movers in American education during the last half of the 20th century.

John Goodlad, one of two boys born to William James and Mary (Inkster) Goodlad, spent the first nine years of his life on the hillsides of North Vancouver, British Columbia. Attendance at the six-room school required a long walk down the hill at the beginning of the day and another back up the hill in the afternoon. The three boys who lived on the hillside had to get along with one another because there were no alternatives.

That isolation, accompanied by periods of isolation from school because of the usual measles, chicken pox, and the like, "probably was a blessing," he noted. "It pushed me into a great deal of reading--a novel a day during times of illness and a great deal of continued...