A Curriculum for the Pre-School Child

Audrey Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415139762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134770458
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1986, this book has been enormously influential in the training and professional development of early years workers. This new edition has been fully revised to take account of changes in the National Curriculum, the publication of the government's 'desirable outcomes' statement for the under-fives, and the introduction of NVQ's in child care and education. The new edition also includes sections on: * the effects of developmental psychology on the early years curriculum * working with two-year-olds on self-awareness and social skills * developing communication, motor, analytical and problem solving skills * fostering aesthetic and creative awareness * play and the learning environment * record-keeping and assessment * involving parents * continuity from pre-schooling to statutory schooling.

Part I

1 Early educators and their influences on the curriculum

No book concerned with the curriculum for children between the ages of two and five can afford to ignore the effect which the early childhood educators have had on our current thinking. In this chapter, the names of five educationalists have been singled out: Friedrich Froebel, Rudolph Steiner, Maria Montessori, Margaret McMillan and Susan Isaacs, each of whom is still exerting an influence on early childhood education today, either directly or indirectly. These five all held the view that the young child is first and foremost a whole person, with thoughts, feelings and imagination that need to be cared for and cherished. That young children no longer sit in rows of desks all day and are free to carry out various activities inside and outside the classroom is due in the main to these early thinkers who had a child-centred approach to education and who believed that young children are intrinsically motivated and wish to learn.

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL

The earliest of the five educationalists I am going to consider is Friedrich Froebel, who died more than a century ago yet still exerts an important influence upon early childhood education in this country. Although his pedagogy has long been considered sterile there is no doubt that Froebel pioneered a new approach to our understanding of children’s activities and ways of learning, demonstrating that children need a vast number of experiences before they can arrive at an awareness of themselves and the world.

Froebel, influenced by both Rousseau and Pestalozzi, argued that play was a serious and deeply significant activity for the young child. He wrote (1896, para. 30): ‘at this age play is never trivial; it is serious and deeply significant. … The focus of play at this age is the core of the whole future, since in them the entire person is developed and revealed in the most sensitive qualities of his mind.’

The kindergartens, for him, were institutions where children instruct and educate themselves and where they develop and integrate all their abilities through play, which is creative activity and spontaneous instruction. That children learn through play is indeed a basic tenet of Froebelian philosophy and one which has been embraced by many early childhood educators. However, Froebel did not believe that the play of young children should be unstructured, as was the approach of many of his later followers. For him play was too important to be left to chance and in discussing the pedagogies of the kindergarten he wrote:

just because he learns through play, a child learns willingly and learns much. So play, like learning and activity has its own definite period of time and it must not be left out of the elementary curriculum. The educator must not only guide the play, since it is so very important, but he must also often teach this sort of play in the first instance.

(Lilley 1967, p. 167)

In order to help children learn through play Froebel devised a series of playthings and games. The six sets of playthings or ‘gifts’ which Froebel designed formed a sequence beginning with a number of soft balls leading on to wooden spheres, cubes and cylinders. There were also ‘occupations’ which trained children in activities such as drawing or modelling.

The ‘gifts’ and ‘occupations’ were a fundamental part of Froebel’s doctrine of innate ideas but stripped of their symbolism they are the timeless playthings of childhood. Balls, boards, sand, clay, for example, have made up children’s play activities throughout the ages. The role of the adult was to plan and supervise these activities. In the Froebelian kindergarten the gifts, occupations, singing games, stories and talk made up the curriculum in contrast to the stark infant schools of the time where the 3Rs occupied most of the daily routine.

Our modern infant schools owe much to the influence of Froebel and most of the experiences which we offer children in present-day nurseries and reception classes have their roots in the ‘occupations’ of the Froebelian kindergarten, although these have been extended and amended to meet the needs of children in the late 1990s.

The idea of treating the school day as a complete unit in which activities continue for varying lengths of time to enable children to pursue their own interests is but another of the legacies which the modern primary schools have inherited from the Froebelian tradition. Friedrich Froebel was one of the great pioneers of early childhood education and although his influence can still be seen throughout our primary schools, his writings are little read today by students, since his main work, The Education of Man (1896), is not the lightest of reading.

RUDOLPH STEINER

Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and theosophist, opened the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart for the children of cigarette factory workers. Although designed for children of all ages, there is currently an increase in the number of Rudolph Steiner nursery schools in this country and in many other parts of the world. Steiner was concerned primarily with the whole child and his principles are based upon a specific view of child development. The philosophy behind the curriculum is that through understanding the nature of children it is possible to develop their individuality. If children are presented with a creative curriculum which offers them balanced experiences of both the arts and sciences, and opportunities to develop processes of thinking, feeling and willing then they will grow into flexible and creative adults. For him the best nursery teacher is one who can create the atmosphere of a home in the school setting.

There is a strong emphasis upon free play and the use of toys that are multipurpose so that they encourage children’s play and imagination. In Steiner nursery schools there are such natural materials as pine cones, shells, pieces of wood and textiles always available and children are encouraged to sew, draw and engage in woodwork. In the woodwork area children have access to miniature, but real, tools so that they can make their own toys to use in their imaginative play. Outdoor play is encouraged, but the amount of commercial equipment is minimal, although there are plenty of natural playthings (e.g. trunks and logs for children to climb over). This lack of commercial materials is intentional so that children become more creative and imaginative in their play. While visiting a Steiner school in Hungary recently I was able to see this philosophy in practice as children between the ages of three and six demonstrated high levels of concentrated imaginative play using the few natural ‘props’ that were available.

Children are also encouraged to use colour in a variety of ways, as Steiner believed that children should think of colours as living and active entities, but the children do not necessarily need to be painting something. Singing and singing games are seen as important, as is eurhythmy, a new art of movement developed by Steiner which involves movement to both music and speech. Storytelling is also important in the Steiner curriculum as he argued that if a story is read the book comes between the storyteller and the children. The children will be better able to imagine the situation if they do not have pictures in a book to destroy their own images.

Children are not offered any instructional materials nor is any attempt made to force children to read and write. Maybe this is one of the reasons for the increase in interest in Steiner nursery schools by parents who are becoming concerned about the ‘academic’ pressure which is being placed upon children in many nurseries today.

MARIA MONTESSORI

The ideas of Maria Montessori, the doctor who worked among the socially and mentally handicapped children of Rome in the early years of the twentieth century, have been more widely adopted in the USA than in Britain, although there is currently a revival of interest in her methods.

Maria Montessori, in the same way as Froebel and Pestalozzi, saw development as the inevitable unfolding of a biological programme. From her observations in her Children’s House (the name she gave to her nursery schools), she concluded that each child passes through sensitive periods of development when it appears that certain skills and concepts are learned more readily. Her stages covered the periods 0–6, 6–12 and 12–18 years. She believed that children learn from their own spontaneous activities and therefore a prepared environment was all important. She argued that the child under six cannot reason or use language in the same way as the older child and therefore adults need to be aware that they do not use language which cannot be understood by small children.

She considered that every child is unique and is profoundly affected by society and the environment, and in the quiet surroundings of the Children’s House the child is able to develop her natural potential. She also believed that children have an intrinsic love of order and expected each one to take responsibility for taking and replacing materials and equipment in good order.

The Montessori method rests on a sequence of activities which must be followed exactly with every child. In The Absorbent Mind (1964, p. 205) she wrote, ‘We take certain objects and present them in a certain fashion to a child and then leave the child alone with them and do not interfere.’ Within these restrictions the child has the freedom to explore and interact with the prepared environment, choosing from a variety of materials appropriate to her stage of development, but that does not mean a licence for children to do as they please. Montessori argues that we cannot be absolutely free if we wish to live in society.

The role of the directress in the Montessori schools is to prepare the environment and act as a link between the child and the materials. This is achieved through close observation so that the directress is able to help out at appropriate moments but overall her approach is to emphasise independence in children’s development. By using the prepared environment, Maria Montessori argued that it would be possible for children to learn even if the directress was not of a very high calibre, the skill of the teachers being of less importance than the method. This is a view which may seem alien to current readers but which was a very important issue at the beginning of the twentieth century when many early years teachers were untrained, particularly in Italy.

Another of Maria Montessori’s viewpoints which has been widely criticised concerns her attitude to play, and to imaginative play in particular. Montessori argued that ‘play is the child’s work’, but the only form of play that was acceptable was that which had a preparatory function for adult forms of interaction. Thus the concept of imaginative play is not admissible because it takes children away from adaptive learning and therefore was of very little value. It is interesting to note that many years later Corinne Hütt adopted this view when she argued that during ‘ludic’ play activities there was little or no learning taking place, whereas during exploratory play, adaptation and learning occurs. Montessori and her followers considered fantasy play to be essentially dishonest, because in talking about stories involving witches and ogres or talking animals, children were being presented with a false picture of reality; an approach which is opposed to that of many pre-school educators in Britain today.

Few modern educators would disagree with the need for a planned environment, but the rigidity of the Montessori method, with its sequential stages, has been criticised as it is argued that there is no place for spontaneous, incidental learning, and no opportunity for teachers to build on experiences which the children may bring from outside the school environment. Modern critics point out not only that Maria Montessori’s methods do little to encourage language development or symbolic thought but also that her approach fails to take into account the possibility that a child’s development might deviate in any way, thus necessitating the modification of the method. This is a strange criticism when one considers that her original method was devised for children with learning difficulties.

In spite of these criticisms, few would disagree that Maria Montessori has made a number of contributions to early childhood education which have become basic to our thinking about small children. At a practical level it was Maria Montessori who was responsible for introducing childsized furniture into our nursery schools and classes, a regular feature nowadays in all classrooms for young children. Likewise, much of the mathematical and sensorial equipment which is used with young children stems from the principles of Montessori education. Above all, Maria Montessori brought to early childhood education a respect for young children as individuals. At a time when most young children throughout the world were being instructed in large groups she was advocating the need for them to engage in modes of learning which would lead them to become independent, spontaneous thinkers. Her attitude towards children was that they were active, intrinsically motivated beings, not passive learners who had to be ‘force fed’ with information.

The prepared environment in which each child could work to achieve autonomy has been adopted with modifications by several generations of nursery educators who may not appreciate the contribution which Maria Montessori has made to their thinking. Her influence pervades much of the work carried out in early childhood education today and although her method is seen by many as static and inappropriate in the 1990s, we nevertheless owe much to this forward-thinking doctor. Many of her most deep-thinking followers, particularly in the USA, although they do not challenge her philosophy, are reconsidering some of the approaches to teaching in the light of modern educational though* as they appreciate that however useful the method, changes must be made to meet the needs of present-day society if the movement is to survive.

MARGARET McMILLAN

Margaret McMillan was one of the most practical educational innovators of her time, once termed by J.B. Priestley as ‘the nuisance who worked miracles’. P. Ballard, a nursery inspector, wrote in 1937 that ‘the modern nursery school is the product of Miss McMillan’s genius’. A brief look at her ideas and career will give some idea of the truth of this statement and show how in the late 1990s her views have relevance, and that much of what she strived for is pertinent today.

Margaret McMillan and her sister Rachel were both concerned with the health and home conditions of the poor children and their families among whom they lived. Starting with medical treatment centres, Margaret McMillan attempted to improve the health of children first in Bradford and later Deptford, arguing that ‘health was the working-man’s capital’, since in those days when there was no National Health Service, ill health for an average worker was synonymous with poverty.

Margaret McMillan was one of the first to appreciate the educational value of the home. In acknowledging the importance of the home she also fully realised, as a former governess, the great gulf between the experiences of the middle-class child and those of the working-class child where either the mother was working or else was tied down to coping with a large number of children all living in one room. It was this deep concern for the community and family life in which the children were brought up that led Margaret McMillan to consider the value of creches. Some writers have suggested that the concern for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index