ABSTRACT
The principles underlying the Plowden Report were attacked by some critics for being too ‘child-centred’ and for neglecting the importance of teaching as a way of initiating the young into public forms of knowledge (pp. 117-22). Here, one of the report’s sympathizers criticizes it for not being consistently ‘child-centred’. Wilson accepts the overall aim of the report — to place the child in the centre of the educational process — but criticizes the document for failing to work out the implications of this central aim, owing to its reliance on so-called experts (psychologists and sociologists) who provide misleading ‘facts’ about children’s nurture, nature and education. He attacks passages in the report which, he argues, assume that education is a manipulative process conducted on passive children. He argues that the child’s nature cannot be regarded simply as the product of the interaction between nature and nurture but that it depends crucially on the view the child himself takes about his life and the way it might develop. In line with the thinking in his book (pp. 113-16) Wilson maintains that education should aim to help the child develop his capacity to pursue ‘possibilities of value’ leading to personal development and transformation.
