ABSTRACT
Interests and Education. What I am advocating here has often been called ‘child-centred education’, but a teacher who stands back and just allows children to pursue whatever interests come into their heads is practising, as I have argued elsewhere (Wilson, 1969), a travesty of ‘child-centredness’. The feature of the concept of education which ‘child-centred’ educators were concerned to stress was its connection with the development of whatever is of intrinsic value, and thus, in the case of children just as much as in the case of adults, its connection with the notion of ‘interest’. The point of calling education ‘child-centred’ lies in emphasizing that even when the person who is being educated is a child, and even, therefore, when his interests often seem ‘childish’ or silly or undesirable from the point of view of his adult teachers, nevertheless his education can only proceed through the pursuit of his interests, since it is these and only these which for him are of intrinsic value. However ridiculous a child’s interests may seem, there is nothing else in terms of which he can become more ‘educated’. He can be ‘schooled’ to adopt adult values, but only at the expense of leaving his own in their present childish and uneducated state.
