ABSTRACT
The child centred teacher sees him, or herself, as engaging in a radical critique of the authoritarian-élitist assumptions of the more formal, traditional approaches to education. He does not wish to subordinate the child’s individuality to some predefined social requirements or impose ‘high culture’ upon the child in an arbitrary fashion because these would frustrate the realization of the child’s inner potential. We attempt to show some of the ways in which the well-intentioned ‘radical practices’ of the progressive educator produce effects very similar to the hierarchical differentiation of pupils characteristic of formal methods. Whilst laying emphasis upon the freedom of the child, the teacher who has adopted the ideology of child centredness may well find himself unwittingly constrained to act in ways which pose serious problems concerning the efficacy of accommodating to and encouraging the ‘spontaneous development of the child from within himself. In our explanation of these and other phenomena which we have researched, what is being suggested is that the child centred educator, with his individualistic, voluntarist, and psychologistic solution to the problem of freedom fails to appreciate the ways in which, even in his own practice, the effects of a complex, stratified industrial society penetrate the school. It is suggested that the radicalism of the ‘progressive educator’ may well be a modern form of conservatism, and an effective form of social control in both the narrow sense of achieving discipline in the classroom and the wider sense of contributing to the promotion of a static social order generally…. In our analysis of the theory
and practice of the teachers in their classroom activity, we observed them subject to conflicting expectations and ambivalencies stemming from several sources. The practical implications of the child centred methodology were not clearly articulated amongst the staff community. In operation they tended to mean the ‘free day’ or the ‘integrated curriculum’, both these and other notions being loosely formulated. These became, in practice, organizational precepts whereby children tended to be given wide discretion to choose between many activities, and in so far as they appeared to choose to do things, i.e. satisfied the conditions for ‘busyness’, the child centred approach was assumed to be in operation. The teachers seemed to be left unclear as to their precise role in interacting with their pupils to further their development in various approved areas of knowledge. The vocabulary appealed to such concepts as ‘needs’, ‘interests’ and children’s ‘readiness’ without specifying their operational indicators. The teachers’ rationales fall back upon the idea that ‘what children do they need to do’, ‘it is important for children to be happy at school’ or ‘play is work’. These are operationalized or informed in practice by the teachers’ common sense concerning how normal children behave, derived from their immediate colleagues, from the wider context of their professional relationships and from their continuing biography as lower middle class members of society…. [In the primary school studied] the teachers are able to organize the environment of their classrooms to allow a wide range of choice but have to generate their own theory of instruction for the children.
