ABSTRACT
This extract and the report from which it is taken provide a classic statement embodying a conception of primary education which has served as an educational ideal for over half a century. The Hadow Report of 1931 provided a rationale for the primary stage of education, first proposed officially by the same Consultative Committee in its 1926 report (pp. 22-3). The Committee in its later report put forward a powerful vision of what primary education should be: a stage of education with ‘its own standards of achievement and excellence’ and with an aim of awakening children to ‘the basic interests of civilized existence’. It envisaged an expanded role for the school: ‘The schools whose first intention was to teach children how to read have ... been compelled to broaden their aims until it might now be said that they have to teach children how to live.’ Its expressed concern was for all children: ‘What a wise and good parent would desire for his own children, that a nation must desire for all children.’ It stressed the importance of ‘activity and experience’, but not, on closer reading, at the expense of ‘knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’. The whole report is a remarkably optimistic, forward-looking statement, all the more remarkable for being issued at a time of economic recession. Other reports or commentaries on primary education are but pale reflection (some might say ‘distortions’) of its vision.
