ABSTRACT
From the day-to-day life of primary classrooms to broader questions again: this chapter looks at versions of primary education past, present and future, and to primary education’s construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. It traces the roots of our modern system, examining the continuing legacies of elementary and progressive education and how these intertwine with the purportedly radical alternative version embodied in the National Curriculum. It looks ahead to the millennium and identifies a number of key areas where choices must be faced and resolved: the structure of primary education, funding, teaching roles, teaching methods, the curriculum, and, above all, values and purposes. On the way, the poet William Blake provides a starting point for our reassessment of progressivism. He also provides the metaphor for some of British education’s most pervasive tensions: the two main primary traditions and the very different values they embodied; the contrast between the broad consensus of the 1960s and 1970s and the conflict of the 1980s and 1990s; the dilemma about where education for childhood ends and education for adulthood begins; and the tension between a primary agenda defined in terms of the preoccupations of the classroom here and now and one which looks to the future and to wider cultural and global imperatives.
