ABSTRACT
Unlike the writing of the educational conservatives, where the political underpinning is implicit though easy to detect, social democratic views of primary education have an explicit political stance. They are concerned with the promotion of social justice and with the role of the school as an essential (though by no means the only essential) agency in the creation of a fairer society. In the words of the last sentence in this extract, social democracy as an educational ideology seeks ‘to make the state’s educational system more truthfully the people’s system and to deploy it more beneficially as a support and as a keystone for grassroots democracy and community involvement.’ Social democracy was powerfully represented by certain members of the Plowden Committee and was reflected in the report’s recommendations on educational priority areas and on the importance of home-school-community links (see pp. 206-10, 211-13). With some influential individuals in primary education such as Schiller (pp. 87-8) social democracy seems to have co-existed along with liberal romanticism. As an ideology, social democracy was particularly influential in schools associated with the Educational Priority Area action research projects (see pp. 214-19) set up after the publication of Plowden and in inner-city areas such as Coventry. One of its leading spokesmen has been Eric Midwinter. In this extract he develops his ideas of social education, community education, and community development, all aimed at ‘self-renewal and community revitalization’ in the disadvantaged areas of inner cities. [He begins by suggesting that there is an alternative to the kind of education usually offered children in disadvantaged areas:]
