ABSTRACT
Educational conservatism has spoken with voices other than the shrill tones of the more extreme Black Paper writers. It has found intellectual justification in some of the work of Bantock, part of whose critique of progressivism is reproduced later in the reader (pp. 162-65). Here, it finds relatively moderate expression in the views of Stuart Froome, former primary head and member of the Bullock Committee. In this extract he offers a reasoned critique of post-war developments in primary education and makes his own suggestions for getting education back on the right track. By seeking to portray children and schools ‘as they really are’, he attacks some of the assumptions outlined by Blyth (pp. 79-82) earlier in this book (p. 000). His concern for ‘more systematic and structured methods of schooling’, the importance he attaches to the acquisition of knowledge by primary children, and his unwillingness to allow children too much freedom in what or how they learn, are representative of the views of a substantial proportion of primary teachers, many more than the advocates or detractors of liberal romanticism or educational conservatism may care to admit.
