ABSTRACT
In the tough managerial atmosphere of our decade the aims of child-centred education often appear irrelevant and naive. The Plowden Report's humane insight that 'At the centre of the educational process lies the child' is nowadays usually referred to only for the purposes of ridicule (Straughan and Wilson, 1983, p. 17). Research, showing some teaching styles to be marginally more effective than others (Bennett, 1976), is often construed to suggest that teachers who consider themselves child-centred are professionally inferior to those who are more hard-boiled and coercive.
