Child-Centred Education

Harold Entwistle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415675420
• eBook ISBN: 9781136670039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume is a critical study of one of today's most controversial topics in educational theory, setting the many arguments in perspective and clarifying the issues that arise when attention is focused on the learner. The author examines the problems of individual education, the distinctive demands childhood makes on the school and the claims of social education. The related questions of freedom, authority and discipline are then discussed, together with the ways in which curriculum development must take account of the learner's interests, needs and dispositions in preparing him/her for life. The concept of educating the whole person is critically examined, together with the claim that education for life and the development of personal integrity require an integrated curriculum. Since child-centred educational theory is often dismissed as irrelevant to practice, the book concludes with an assessment of the various limitations which concern with practical activity imposes on educational theorists.

Acknowledgements

This text is an adaptation of materials forming part of a Ph.D. thesis, The Concept of Activity in Education, accepted by the University of London in 1966. In rewriting this material for a more general readership I have had the benefit of valuable critical comments from the following friends and colleagues who have read all or parts of the manuscript: Jeanette Coltham, Ken Dagnall, David Hargreaves, Eric Hoyle, Philip Jackson, John Naylor, Geof Roberts, Raymond Ryba, Phil Walking and Keith Whalley. My grateful thanks are due to these and to my wife, who has also assisted with the numerous secretarial chores inseparable from work of this kind.

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Introduction:
Child–centred education

It is sometimes argued that the child-centred emphasis in education is at least as old as Plato's prescription, ‘Let your children's education take the form of play’. But whilst most educational systems have recognized that some concession must be made to children's intellectual limitations, it was with Rousseau that there entered into educational thought a completely new emphasis which Dewey likened to a Copernican revolution: ‘the old education … may be summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself … Now the change which is coming into education is the shifting of the center of gravity … the child becomes the sun about which they are organized’¹ This emphasis upon the child has been a recurrent theme in educational literature over the past two centuries. ‘Child-centred education’ has thus become a slogan with all the potential for promoting change and creating misunderstanding which is characteristic of sloganmongering in education, as in politics or the arts.² Not surprisingly, it has provoked a critical, even hostile, reception from many educationists. However, what is attempted in this text is neither an apologia for child-centred education nor an attack upon this tradition but, rather, an attempt to escape from some of the unreal either–or dilemmas into which both child-centred theorists and their critics often want to force us. The intention is to sift the arguments and clarify the issues which arise when we bring the learner into the centre of our attention and to examine some of the conceptual distinctions which have to be made if the idea of child-centred education is to be a useful instrument in the theory and practice of education.

The impression that we are confronted with exclusive choices in education (for example, ‘children not subjects’, child versus teacher, subjects or the integrated curriculum, individual or society, freedom versus discipline, etc.) has perhaps been fostered by the strong resistance the child-centred movement has encountered. This has arisen partly from the stubborn refusal of a majority of teachers to embrace child-centred doctrines and practices, and partly from the sort of backlash exemplified by the recent Black Paper, Fight for Education.³ Some critics tend to see in child-centred education the source of all society's ills: everything from illiteracy to violent crime is debited against the progressive educationist's pre-occupation with the values of childhood as against those of the mature and responsible adult members of the community. The authors of the Black Paper wrote as though they had discovered a new and malignant growth within the body educational, and the illusion that the document was saying something novel was underlined by Mr Edward Short (Secretary of State, Department of Education and Science) who pronounced the document's publication ‘the blackest day in English education for over a century’. In fact, the Black Paper epitomizes nothing more than the perennial conviction of the ageing that nothing in the universe is quite what it used to be. As such it is nothing new. A decade before the appearance of the Black Paper, Jacques Barzun denounced ‘education without instruction’ which issues in ‘no knowledge that is precise and firm, no ability to do intellectual work with thoroughness and despatch’. He catalogued the consequent deficiences of college graduates who ‘cannot read accurately or write clearly, cannot do percentages or fractions without travail and doubt, cannot utter their thoughts with fluency or force, can rarely show a handwriting that would pass for adult, let alone legible, cannot trust themselves to use the foreign language they have studied for eight years …’ and so on.⁴ Although this criticism refered to American education, Barzun saw European education going the same way. But forty years ago Godfrey Thompson wrote: ‘In commercial circles a common criticism of the schools has been, for certainly twenty years and perhaps more, that they no longer attend to the three Rs thoroughly as in the good old days, but fritter their time away with all sorts of fancy subjects’.⁵ This puts the backlash in Britain as far back as the turn of the century. And although Barzun implies that before 1900 the child-centred malaise had not afflicted American schools,⁶ Butts and Cremin note the existence of mid-nineteenth-century diatribes against the corrupting influence of the ‘new’ education: ‘In general, three reasons were cited for the utter failure of public education: first, a curriculum full of frills like art and music which detracted from teaching of the essentials; second, the absolute decadence of the teaching of English; and third, the tendency of modern education to make study too easy, too entertaining’. The remedy advanced was simple: ‘a return to a curriculum which demanded of the students practice and skill in the essential subjects of language and arithmetic’.⁷

That this invective against child-centred education has to be renewed afresh with almost every generation suggests that there is something valuable and enduring in the tradition, an assumption underlined by the fact that child-centred education is not merely the plaything of a lunatic fringe; it has become institutionalized and is official policy in many educational systems. In 1921, for example, the Superintendent of Schools in Berlin declared that ‘All youth have a right to a happy life in school’.⁸ In Britain this article of faith was the basis of the 1944 Education Act⁹ as it was also of more recent Scandinavian school reforms.¹⁰ And this notion that children should be happy in school has brought real educational gains. School discipline is rarely the repressive, even brutal, thing it often was a century ago. Teachers are much more approachable than they once were and children are no longer expected to be seen but not heard. Undoubtedly schools are happier places for being child-centred. Despite the sombre pictures of some contemporary secondary schools painted by Hargreaves¹¹ and Partridge,¹² and however much some child-centred educationists believe that schools have remained largely unaffected by their crusade, there is a world of difference between today's schools and those of a century ago portrayed fictionally by Dickens or in the reports of Matthew Arnold, H.M.I.¹³

Nevertheless, the fact that the tradition of protest against the alleged evils of child-centredness is as persistent as the movement itself suggests that the ‘backlash’ is rooted in genuine concern at what seem to be the excesses and omissions of those who locate the child at the centre of the educational situation. A particular danger seems to lie in the literal and slavish application of child-centred slogans. Contemporary critics have not been slow to seize on these, often ignoring the contexts which gave the slogans their initial relevance. Others, not unsympathetic to the aims of child-centred educationists, have warned of the dangers of an exclusive emphasis upon the child. There exists the danger of not taking sufficient thought about the curriculum (see Chapter 6). Or there is sometimes too limited a conception of what the child is capable of learning: whilst emphasizing the child's right to happiness and freedom from the contraints of adult life, we are under an obligation to form an adequate conception of what he is capable of learning at a given stage of development (see Chapter 5). Again, perhaps child-centred educationists are in danger of sentimentalizing childhood. How far does the stress upon the child come from wanting to prolong his innocence – to delay his growing up, not for his own sake but for ours? Is there an element of adult self-indulgence in all this?

Whilst not wishing to create unhappiness in schools where children spend the major portion of their waking lives, some critics argue that the obsession with children's happiness elevates to the status of an educational aim something which can only be an accompanying condition of schooling.¹⁴ Others wonder if there really ever can be education without tears. In their view the mastery of human knowledge and skill requires disciplined application to repetitive drills and procedures which (whatever the glow of satisfaction they ultimately induce) must seem tedious in the event and far enough removed from the conventional view of what constitutes a happy state of affairs. Those critics who believe that the educational reaction in favour of the child has diminished the care for disciplined learning fear for standards of scholarship and even for literacy itself. The failure of some children to learn to read or write or calculate (and the belief that the average man does not possess these skills as competently as he once did) is debited against child-centred methods. Encouraged to do as they please (the popular epitome of child-centred classrooms), few choose to make the effort to master the symbolic processes and most are content with second best. Against this view, and so far as there is any validity in the common belief that our educational achievements are not good enough, child-centred educationists might well retort that the continuing impoverished standards of mass education stem from our failure to apply, with sufficient insight or enthusiasm, those discoveries about the child and his nature which have been the product of developmental psychology. It is not that child-centred education has been tried and found wanting; it has never really been tried. In particular, defenders of this tradition would argue that in pursuit of literacy and numeracy, schools have mistakenly over-emphasized symbolic and abstract operations to the neglect of those concrete experiences which are necessarily antecedent to the mastery of abstractions: in Piagetian terms, formal-operational learning has taken over prematurely from concrete experience. The authors of the Black Paper have emphasized the importance of getting behind the sentimental platitudes about education to the facts of what is really happening in schools. But in fact, evidence on this question of how far schools have become child-centred is almost impossible to come by. A child-centred or progressive school is a quite subjective notion and it is difficult to envisage how any criteria of child-centredness which might be agreed could be susceptible to statistical measurement. It is ironic that though the authors of the Black Paper set much store by the facts, there is hardly a fact in the entire document. One's impression is that our primary schools have not been taken over by the progressives to anything like the extent these conservatives would have us believe. Far from being hotbeds of progressivism, ‘chalk and talk’ still accurately describes teaching methods in the majority of schools and child-centred educationists might cogently argue, from the facts, that if our educational standards are as appallingly inadequate as the critics maintain, it is educational conservatism rather than progressive education which is at the root of the problem.

Other critics of child-centred education argue that the emphasis upon happiness in schools ignores the essentially tragic character of human life (see pages 83–4). Too much freedom in education is believed to dispose the child towards an unhealthy, egocentric view of experience. Children are unwilling to accept reasonable authority. The untutored values, preferences and whims of children are elevated above the mature, experienced judgements of parents, priests, teachers and others who might expect to evoke respect from the young. The related problems of freedom, authority and discipline are clearly central to an evaluation of child-centred education (see Chapter 4).

It is also important to ask how far the child's present interests and needs should determine his curriculum (see Chapter 5). Is there anything to commend Rousseau's conviction that education which is concerned with preparation for future life is a waste of time for both teacher and child? How far are the child's interests served by encouraging a preoccupation with his personal interests and problems; with life as he sees it? In what sense, if any, can preparation for the future be reconciled with the requirement that schooling should have meaning for the child as and when it happens? Does the idea of the autonomy of the child's interests give an adequate account of what his present life might be or of what he is capable of becoming? How far do we need a concept of the educated man as well as (indeed, as a necessary correlate of) the notion of the educated child?

The relationship which should exist between the child and his teacher is fundamental to many of these questions (see Chapter 9). Some child-centred educationists adopt the extreme view that any manifestation of teaching is a threat to the child's integrity as a person. A somewhat less radical conclusion is that ultimately no one can teach anyone else anything: that whatever the teacher's role in the educational process, the child is ultimately the agent of his own education. This concept of the self-activated learner merits sympathetic examination before one concludes wit...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 2 INTRODUCTION: CHILD-CENTRED EDUCATION
• 2 THE INDIVIDUAL CHILD
• 3 THE CHILD AND SOCIETY
• 4 THE FREE CHILD
• 5 THE EDUCATED CHILD
• 6 THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM
• 7 EDUCATION FOR LIFE
• 8 THE CHILD AS AGENT OF HIS OWN EDUCATION
• 9 THE TEACHER AS AGENT OF CHILD-CENTRED EDUCATION
• 10 TEACHER TRAINING AND CHILD-EDUCATION
• 11 CHILD-CENTRED EDUCATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
• 12 CONCLUSION: LEARNER-CENTRED EDUCATION
• APPENDIX A note on Whitehead's principle of rhythm in education
• INDEX