ABSTRACT
In the first half of the chapter from which this passage has been extracted, Dearden outlined what he saw as the ‘broad principles of the child-centred tradition’. Such principles included the importance of respect for the child as a person in his own right, the acknowledgement of each child’s unique individuality, the necessity for an imaginative and sympathetic insight into the world of each child, and the need for the teacher to structure the educational environment to provide the child with much freedom of choice, chance to pursue interests and many opportunities for discovery and self-expression. In this passage, he provides a constructive, not unsympathetic, critique of such principles, indicating to what degree he believes them to be justified and to what degree deficient. He believes that fundamentally, the deficiency of ‘child-centredness’ lies ‘in what it neglects rather than in what it celebrates’, especially ‘its failure, or perhaps refusal, to come to terms with the need for adult authority’ — a view shared by Peters in his critique reproduced earlier in this section (pp. 146-51).
