ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the educationists and teachers who would maintain that the relationships between the school, its community, the child, and his parents—a complex four-way interaction—are of prime importance. It looks at the relations between the pupil and the school, bearing in mind that an over-readiness to take up positions of conventional piety at one extreme or the other has led to much not being talked on the subject. In many schools, great importance is attached to after-school activities, and parents seem to regard them as a major test of a school's educational worth. If teaching is going to be effective, every teacher must be in the pastoral care business, in the sense of getting to know the child and using that knowledge to initiate him into those learnings which reflect curriculum strategies. Teachers will need to look beyond their specialisms to a wider culture; beyond their own life-styles to those of other backgrounds, other interests, other professions.