ABSTRACT
As the text indicates, this paper was originally concerned with the junior school, an institution only recently established when the paper was first written. It is included here because it applies equally well to the primary school or, with the possible omission of the last point, to the infant or first school. The document was written by Christian Schiller, the first Staff Inspector of Junior Education, and a very powerful, though almost unacknowledged influence, on the development of post-war primary education. Concisely and clearly, it embodies many of the ideas and metaphors associated with liberal romanticism. It refers to stages of development, to phases of growth, and to children’s powers of expression. It emphasizes the importance of language, observation, movement and the arts — all themes later elaborated by theorists and practitioners of like persuasion. It talks of children’s happiness, self-confidence, interests and ‘that pecular absorption which comes when activities exactly meet children’s immediate needs’ (see p. 167). It is a beautifully written and deceptively simple distillation of a very powerful view of primary education — a view which was to have a great influence on the Central Advisory Council for Education, the Plowden Committee, when it produced its report, Children and Their Primary Schools, published in 1967.
