ABSTRACT
In his book from which this extract is taken, King provides a detailed sociological account of English infant education based on close observation and discussion of practices in three infant schools, including one (Burnley Road) designated as a social priority school because of its high proportion of disadvantaged children. In describing and explaining the activities occurring in the classrooms, he relates teachers’ actions to the ‘child-centred’ educational ideology they hold with its elements of (i) developmentalism (belief in the existence and importance of physical, intellectual and emotional development); (ii) individualism; (iii) play as learning; and (iv) childhood innocence. (This constitutes a variant of ‘liberal romantic’ ideology discussed on pp. 79-94.) He shows how this ideology gives teachers a sense of what infant children and infant education are and how they should be. He argues that where (as at Burnley Road) there is a discrepancy between how children actually behave and how teachers assume they should behave, the latter resort to a ‘family-home background theory’ which, in crude summary, suggests that children’s poor behaviour and progress are due to the conditions and the way they are brought up by their families (see Goodacre’s ‘good’ and ‘poor’ homes, pp. 246-50). Through this means teachers preserve their belief in the innocence of childhood and their own identity as effective practitioners. The passage below indicates some of King’s summary reflections on the nature of infant education in the light of his empirical work.
