ABSTRACT
Neither policy-makers nor educationists have long memories, but both could benefit from the hindsight a knowledge of the recent and more distant past can bring. As has been said previously, primary education is particularly susceptible to myth-making but some knowledge of the past is indispensable in ‘debunking’ such myths, as well as valuable in informing decisions about future directions and policies. For example, particularly recently but periodically throughout the last century, it has been claimed that primary education has neglected the so-called ‘basics’. Such a myth can be easily refuted by those willing to investigate past policy and practice and those willing to hear and reflect on the results of such investigations; literacy and numeracy have long, and always, been seen as the core of the curriculum and the raison d’être of primary schools. Again, the autonomy of primary school teachers in matters of curriculum and pedagogy has been asserted as long-established, unlicensed and unbridled; closer study reveals a curricular and pedagogic conservatism born of an acute awareness of the constraints of political, public and professional opinion and a general unwillingness to risk the educational life-chances of children by undue experimentation. A previous section of this book (Chapter 4) has laid bare the myth of a ‘primary school revolution’; a third example of comment that is not based on a knowledge of the realities in schools and classrooms. Many other examples could be cited whose validity could and should be re-assessed in the light of historical research.
