Child-centred education and beyond: Shifts, continuities and contradictions from whole children to feral parents

This chapter takes up themes associated with Piaget’s work to explore their inscription and development within ‘child-centred’ approaches to education. Child-centred pedagogy plays out the conflicts and internal contradictions of both emancipatory and normative tendencies. These tendencies are prevalent in, but by no means exclusive to, Piaget’s model. This childcentred pedagogy subscribes to a naturalised, individualised model of childhood which confirms social privileges and pathologises those who are already socially disadvantaged.