ABSTRACT
Bennathan (1992) makes the point that the importance of the overall ethos of a school for the progress of its pupils has been well recognised-for example in the classic Rutter et al.’s Fifteen Thousand Hours (1979)—but that teacher training has presented an over-simplified model of the child. This model is one which moves, with the help of a well-presented curriculum, through the Piagetian stages of cognitive development:
It is a model which lacks the understanding of the emotional causes of learning failure that have to do with the child’s early development, its home circumstances, its social experience, all factors which may have been so damaging that learning can hardly take place. This inadequacy was recognised by almost every enquiry into the good management of children in school from the Warnock Report in 1979 to the Elton Report in 1989. The call was always for more emphasis on understanding the emotional realities for many children. Children do not come to school with uniformly good experiences and attitudes. The good teacher knows this and both understands the subject to be taught and the nature of the child who is to be taught. It would be a most retrograde step to encourage teachers to think that understanding the curriculum is more important than understanding the child.
