ABSTRACT
The chapter which forms this extract clearly and succinctly puts contemporary primary education in context by providing an outline of its development in four stages, and by drawing attention to the forces, legislation and events which have shaped its character. It traces the roots of primary education in the elementary school, acknowledges the longstanding provision of separate infant schools or departments in some areas, and documents how primary schools arose out of a concern for the needs of older children. It discusses a number of important influences on the primary school:
the weight of the elementary school tradition with its concern for literacy, numeracy, conformity and obedience;
the scholarship examination, later to be called the 11+ examination, for which the primary school prepared so many of its pupils;
the views of psychologists such as Burt which justified streaming and selection at 11;
the perspectives of Froebel, Montessori and the New Education Fellowship which permeated training colleges and promoted a liberal romantic view of primary education; and
the abolition of selection at eleven in many local education authorities leading to a liberalization of primary education.
The chapter clearly demonstrates its thesis that ‘primary education, very much the poor relation in the educational system, has been in a state of almost continuous transition throughout its short history, the result both of changes at the secondary level and of changing approaches to the education of young children’. With its overview, this extract forms a good introduction to each of the remaining extracts in this section of the reader.
