ABSTRACT
The landscape garden was, in some senses, designed as a revolt against the formal gardens of earlier generations. The catch in this is that, however naturalistic it appeared, it was designed: it was an artifice, created to appear how it was imagined the countryside might look had it been undisturbed by humans. But, first, there was no inert state of nature before the arrival of people-the landscape is always in a state of flux, subject to ecological and environmental swings; and, second, there is no way of knowing what might have been without a human population. These factors are as true of education and the idea that children should be allowed ‘to develop’ as they need, at the rate, direction and pace they need. Children are from birth members of a wider society, and they inevitably interact with that society. Durkheim suggested that ‘the man whom education should realise in us is not man as nature has made him, but as the society wishes to be’ (1956, p. 65); but there is no such thing as ‘man as nature has made him’: no society can prevent its activities having an effect on the children living within it. All education necessarily must take place within a social setting, and this social setting will constrain, shape and mould the learning that takes place. Nurse and priest impose on the child, ‘the child imposes on the man’ (or woman) into which she or he will grow (Dryden, The Hind and the Panther).
