ABSTRACT
Judging from the surveys reported by Ashton (1975, The Aims of Primary Education, Macmillan), Bennett (1976, Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, Open Books) and Taylor (1974, Purpose, Power and Constraint in the Primary School Curriculum, Macmillan), liberal pragmatism may well be the most widely held of the four ideologies outlined in this section of the reader, but paradoxically it is the most difficult to characterize and to exemplify clearly and concisely through extracts. At the primary stage advocates of liberal pragmatism advocate a broad curricular grounding for all children, in part preparatory for secondary education, but a grounding which takes account of the fact that children learn through both first- and second-hand experience, which uses children’s knowledge and interests as starting points and contributions to ongoing work, but which shapes and refines children’s experience along teacher-directed lines. Liberal pragmatism is characterized by a concern for planning and policy-making, for ‘systematic progression and continuity’, and for evaluation and assessment of children’s learning. The ideology finds intellectual justification in the work of writers such as Dearden (pp. 156-61) and Richards (Volume 2), and underlies many of the recent HMI statements on primary education, such as (1980) A View of the Curriculum (London, HMSO, Volume 2) and (1978) Primary Education in England (London, HMSO). Neither of the latter contains a short passage which neatly exemplifies the ideology. Here, an extract from the HMI book, Mathematics 5-11, is reproduced. The concerns it voices about primary mathematics are very much the concerns that liberal pragmatism has for each area of the curriculum.
