‘What do they teach you at architecture school then?’ comes the inevitable, well-intended question over small talk in non-architectural circles, after you explain that, in spite of your first three years of architectural education, you are not very good at physics or maths, the accurate dating of historic buildings or, for that matter, knowing how to build a house.

That I sometimes struggle to answer this question explains my weary approach to the hotly-acclaimed new book, Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education and the British Tradition. Furthermore – and knowing how my position may be perceived – I dare to swim against the tide of heated debates and rhetorical manifestoes to declare that I just don't believe this type of pedagogy is what British architecture education really needs. Perhaps rather, in these post-modern times of uncertainty and unsettlingly fast change within the discipline and beyond, architectural education should be taking an unfashionable pause to lay some solid, deep-anchored foundations and – to continue the metaphor – dig down to find its roots rather than spread its wings. As it turns out, however, in their seemingly disconcerted calls for action, the contributions to this book appear to point more to the shared roots of the profession than they are led to believe.

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The tome, in one way, reads like a hymn book to radical approaches to architectural teaching, and in particular, the radicalism of newness and expansiveness. The history of architecture education contained here looks a bit like the Hungry Caterpillar story book, from the narrow early days of the Royal Academy, where training architects would relentlessly copy plaster casts of architectural details, to the expansive endlessly diverse schools of the modern day that take the whole world as its subject. Today, architectural pedagogy, in the words of Cany Ash, is eclectic in that it ‘begs, borrows and steals as shamelessly as a magpie’. Ivana Wingham argues that it could be more eclectic still, following her proposal that [t]he project in a new curriculum could include strands of architecture and beyond, such as design, humanities, art, science, technologies, business and professional studies’. The practitioners at Red Deer argue that the tendency towards expansiveness in content should be duplicated for process (‘we advocate rolling up students' sleeves and exposing them to microbiology and micro-brewing, haberdashery and hadron-collider maintenance, aquaponics and leather curing’) whereas Bob Sheil argues that ‘schools of architecture today must continually relearn how to educate the architects of tomorrow’, an eerie prescription for infinite recreation that echoes deep into the future.

But if there is a crisis in thinking about architectural education, as the book’s introduction suggests, couldn’t this heavy pause for reflection be its own cause? In other words, in this constant quest to expand, borrow, redefine and dismantle, what is architecture? All that is not solid, after all, melts to air.