ABSTRACT
Statements of ‘need’ abound in educational writing. One of the most recent examples relevant to primary education is to be found in Primary Education in Scotland (HMSO, 1965), the first chapter of which is not, as one might reasonably have expected it to be, devoted to setting out aims, but rather gives a statement of the ‘needs of the child’, which are apparently five in number. Furthermore, this statement of needs concludes a chapter the character of which is almost purely psychological, so that one is led to suppose that if one wants to know what children need, then it is to psychology that one ought appropriately to turn. Empirical research will show the way, or so it is implied.
