ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the need for an anti-racist intervention in the all white primary school and suggest how facets of primary teachers’ pedagogic discourse may be inimical to its implementation. The major ideological constraint upon which people focus is ‘sequential developmentalism’ — the belief that children pass through a series of qualitatively distinct and hierarchically ordered cognitive stages and can only master a given type of intellectual activity when they have reached the appropriate stage. There is abundant evidence for asserting that racial attitudes in many children are well advanced by the time they start school. The project had its origins in work done on the Second World War during the spring term. The children were provided with background information on the sending countries, the scale and timing of the migration and the main areas of settlement in Britain.
