ABSTRACT
Educators differ widely in their responses to the radical proposal that parents and teachers should work in partnership over children’s learning. While many have welcomed the idea, and done their best to put it into practice, others have ignored or downright rejected it. In this chapter we look at these positions from psychodynamic perspectives, and try to show that the first indicates a state of fundamental health, while the second is frequently based, pathologically, on inhibition and defence. Conscious of the dangers of applying theory in the absence of the client, and still more dubiously to a profession of hundreds of thousands, this chapter nonetheless attempts to diagnose the causes of the resistance underpinning the second position, and by implication to suggest suitable treatment.
