ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that the roots of Progressivism lie in late nineteenth-century assumptions about the relationship between schooling, state intervention and social evolution. In 1898, for instance, London School Board was captured by a 'Progressive' majority. In the decades that followed, however, Progressivism broke up into various fractions. The rise of the Prussian military machine and horrors of World War One damaged the image of the benign, 'positive' state. Recently, Malcolm Skilbeck has suggested – in School-Based Curriculum Development – that the Progressives chose to make break with past. The solution to the problem of curriculum implementation is represented by the work of Lawrence Stenhouse. Following the completion of Humanities Curriculum Project in 1972, Stenhouse, his immediate colleagues and a network of participating teachers pushed these ideas even further. A 'child-centred' curriculum is highly functional vis-à-vis the labour market. Youth unemployment is accounted for, not in terms of structural deficiencies in the economy, but in terms of individual deficits.
