ABSTRACT
A problem facing many primary teachers is the indefiniteness of their job – its lack of clear aims and methodology, as well as its increasingly uncertain ‘professional’ nature at a time when external bodies are claiming a larger say in determining curriculum content. Until recently things were more clear-cut, at least for teachers leaving their colleges of education with a belief in ‘progressive’ education. On a ‘progressive’ view, as I am using the term, educational aims are not things to be imposed on a child from without, but implicit in his own nature: the teacher’s job is to create the conditions which best enable each child’s individuality to unfold harmoniously. This picture of the ‘progressive’ teacher is very familiar and I need not elaborate it. What I do wish to emphasise is that progressivism gives the primary teacher status, indeed a remarkably high status. It makes her the unqestioned expert on how children should develop. How could external bodies, whether in the shape of the state, LEAs, Taylor Committee governors or whatever, decide on aims and content? The only person who knows what these should be must be both an authority on the laws of child development, and an expert on applying these sensitively to particular cases, i.e. the teacher-psychologist of the progressive tradition. How, too, could a teacher have doubts about her basic aims and methodology? Once again, the theory leaves no room for worries like these. It sees the teacher as a confident professional, the supreme authority on all classroom matters.
