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Contradictions in Progressive Primary School
Ideologies and Curricula in England:
Some Historical Perspectives
W. E. Marsden
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 9:2
Educational ideologies have acquired wider meanings than the strict dictionary definition of an ideology, that is, “a system of ideas,” infused as they are with values and beliefs. As the dictionary again indicates, beliefs involve a trusting assent to or acceptance of a statement or proposition as true on the grounds of external authority. The social purpose of ideologies, often covert, is to legitimize (see Alexander, 1984, 14). Through history, education systems have been strongly influenced by pioneering figures who have in some cases acquired cult status. They have laid down principles or doctrines which, over time, have become barely distinguishable from dogmas, that is, decreed bodies of opinion passed on as incontrovertible truth. The doctrines acquire the status of an ideology, broadly defined. In other words, an ideology in practice characteristically means accepting the propositions of an outside authority. The doctrines do not require the support of evidence, nor encourage
divergent thought. Rather, they call for exegesis.
I here show contradictions between progressive primary ideologies and their application in school curricula over time. I pay particular attention to two associated dichotomies, that between child-centred and society-centred aims, and that between child-centred and subject-centred practice. All these elements—subject-matter or content, educational processes, and social purposes—have proved to be continuing components
of educational practice. The presentation of these elements as incompatible dichotomies has distorted educational change in England, and not
least in recent decades.
progressive primary education: child centred and/or society centred?
Froebel’s belief in a Divine unity inclusive of nature, the child, the home, society, and the moral order (Darling, 1994, p. 21), had a significant
impact on English elementary education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Imported from Europe, his ideas stimulated a new
educational movement that included formation of the Home and Colonial Infant School Society and the National Froebel Union, and the
establishment of training institutions based on kindergarten principles, such as the Home and Colonial, and the Maria Grey training colleges in
London. One writer has claimed the peculiarly English achievement to have been the practical application of Froebel’s kindergarten theory.
Another described the emerging infant practice as Neo-Froebelian (Selleck, 1968, 201—3).
Education in Froebel’s scheme was closely tied to social purposes. Pedagogy was overtly child centred, aiming to promote personal growth through warmth and encouragement, rather than inhibiting it by harshness and repression. But his pedagogy’s long-term bent was to deny key
progressive principles held dear in a later period, namely, cherishing present experience for its own sake, and promoting autonomous thought. Froebel’s underlying intention was to instil strict religious rules, serving to ensure a passive acceptance of the socioeconomic frameworks and moral codes to be met with in adult life. My views ought not to be taken as a basis for a critique of Froebel, but rather to point to the omission of this contradiction in the dissemination of his ideas, ideas that legitimated a subsequent version of progressive primary theory and practice. Post-World War II discussion has increasingly polarized child- and society-centred principles. The original Froebelian vision did not conceive of such a dichotomy.
The roots of Froebel’s philosophy were avowedly religious, and based on the Christian notion of a benevolent providence. The school should first of all teach the religion of Christ (Hamilton, 1952, 166). In its social education the Froebelian system was one of moulding or training.
This started on the mother’s lap. Procedures to be followed were spelled out in the “Mother’s Songs” collection. To each item, Froebel added
“mottoes,” a series of maxims in verse for the mother, which preceded the ditties to be sung to the children (Heerwart, 1888; Ronge & Ronge,
1855). No child was too small to be able to acquire an initial awareness of the goodness of God.
You should not think your child is far too small
The smallest child a magnet in him bears
That shows him how life binds together all. (Froebel, 1888, 106)
One of the first principles to be instilled was the virtue of stable family life:
O how I love my peaceful home
Where my dear parents dwell
Where strife and discord never come
Their tales of woe to tell. (Ronge & Ronge, 1855, 56)
Stability stemmed from obedience to parents. Although children should be happy, whether at home or at school, this was not an unconditional
right. Mothers should consistently reward good and penalize bad behaviour.
Things in Mother’s face will smile
Only if she feels the while
That her little Daughter’s good
And does everything she should
But if she should sulk or cry
That would close up Mother’s eye . . . (Froebel, 1888, 102)
The character-formation component of the Froebelian system was later explicated to students in methodological texts and progressive
educational journals, as in The Teachers’ Times1 of 22 January 1904:
A bad habit in a child is often a lack of some virtue, a want of some good quality. . . . Develop the right habit by giving the child something of his own to take care of, and so inspire him with a sense of responsibility. Physical habits are important . . . cleanliness of person is a great help towards purity of thought and deed. . . . Punctuality is looked for. Let the children realise the loss to individuals and to the class by lateness, and try to make the clock the inexorable timekeeper. (p. 65)
The brilliantly conceived Froebelian “gifts” and “varied occupations” provided resources for the pedagogic design. The gifts at one level were surrogate toys, devised for enjoyable learning. The first gift of God, six soft balls, was symbolic of the warmth and security of the mother’s lap. Then followed wooden cubes, cylinders, and blocks, which could simulate chairs, steps, thrones, monuments, churches, or castles. From each a moral lesson could be drawn. The monument in the churchyard might be to a naughty little girl who had died because she had disobeyed her mother by playing with fire. The dire consequences were harrowingly described: “her dear face was spoiled, her hands and arms and neck were all burned to a cinder” (Ronge & Ronge, 1855, 11). After the gifts, the varied occupations took over, such as cutting paper, stick laying, rug making, and cane weaving, training children in useful “industrial” activities. As the English Froebelian M. E. Bailey (1876) wrote, the gifts and
occupations contributed to the three major social objectives of the infant school: “training in the fear and love of God and duty to parents,” "training in showing kindness, good-will and justice to all whom the little pupils came into contact with,” and “training in their future positions as workers in the world. Through play they would come to regard work as a pleasure” (22).
Froebel’s principles gained further ground in England after they were taken up by large progressive urban school boards, which introduced the kindergarten system into their infant schools. A London Board Infants’ School in Hampstead, Fleet Road, under its headmistress, Louisa Walker,2 was regarded by at least one educational journal, The Practical Teacher, as being at the fountain-head of the modern implementation
of the kindergarten principle (1898, vol. 19, 61). Trained at the Froebelian Home and Colonial Training College, she told of how she emerged full of enthusiasm for the principles of the system (Marsden, 1990). She applied classic Froebelian concepts of nature as guide, and
play as the natural activity, or the work, of children.
Louisa Walker was an independent thinker, however, and accepted some but not all the credos she had assimilated at the College. She enthusiastically applied the pedagogy, but was iconoclastic about its underlying social and moral purposes. She was antipathetic also toward
the political trappings of the Froebelian movement, and was not formally part of that movement. As her commercially published action songs and games show, along with her object lessons and varied occupations, she offered a clashing secular counter-culture. Froebelian orthodoxy,
for example, disapproved of dressing up, showing off, indulgence in entertainment, and developing ideas above one’s station, in tune with
traditional Victorian injunctions regarding appropriate behaviour for respectable women. Like “the inner petals of a flower . . . the truly modest
woman” would protect herself from “the eye of the rude gazer.” She would never “wantonly display” her attractions, but rather live and be
happy “in the shade of obscurity” (Ventum, 1802, pp. 60-61).
Louisa Walker discarded all such inhibitions. Her action songs and games were part of the day-to-day curriculum and, more importantly, were
the stuff of extra-curricular school entertainments for parents and public. Although some tales contained an authentic Froebelian moral sting,
such as one about a little fish which disobeyed its mother and died an early death on an angler’s line, others were based on the debunking spirit
of the music hall and Gilbert and Sullivan. They were characteristically secular in theme, and meritocratic in social and gender terms, as in a
song, “Nineteenth-Century Girls,” inciting Walker’s infant charges to aim for university careers.
Her school entertainments and educational philosophy were extremely unpopular in wealthy middle-class Hampstead, which looked to schools
such as Fleet Road to provide reliable and amenable domestic servants. Her action song “Five O’Clock Tea” was a direct satire on Hampstead
mores. Neither were her compositions to the taste of the Froebelian establishment, which criticized them as educationally irrelevant and
designed to promote what it regarded as a bugbear of the time, the annual school entertainment. The reviewer in the Froebelian journal Child
Life (1900) disliked, among other things, the dressing up of young children as animals, and was disturbed that the song “Up-to-Date Young
Men” was considered as suitable for young children. “It cannot be anything but a mistake to allow our children, even in game and song, to treat
the serious matters of adult life with foolish frivolity” (p. 64).
For good or ill, the Walker achievement was to adapt Froebelian principles to an urban meritocratic setting (Marsden, 1991a). Her children
were socialized into a culture quite different from that of the central European rural society from which they emerged: one which discerned, in
the adult life to come, burgeoning employment opportunities, the prospect of socioeconomic mobility, and the enjoyment of increasing leisure
time. Thus while she celebrated its pedagogy, in the eyes of some contemporaries Louisa Walker lowered the tone and dislocated the social
purpose of Froebel’s system.
English educationists’ attempts in the early twentieth century to fashion a progressive synthesis were complicated by competing ideas of the
true philosophy of “the new education.” Apart from Neo-Froebelians, there were Herbartians, Montessorians, and others, all sharing a distaste
for the extremes of instrumental and mechanical instruction, and all holding a belief that education had an essential character-forming purpose.
But there were inevitable tensions, as promoters claimed theirs to be the one best system. There were, for example, disputes between Neo-Froebelians and Herbartians. The influential Professor John Adams of London University concluded that these two “progressive” approaches
were based on fundamentally conflicting pedagogical principles (Selleck, 1968, pp. 255-258).
A more secularized society after World War I brought with it less clear-cut social purposes and moral certainties. Distinctive features of English
progressive thought during the 1920s consequently included the search for a moral regeneration not necessarily based on an evangelical,
divinely sanctioned religious rule-book. This regeneration was to be achieved through developing the spiritual life of the child, primarily by
means of promoting individual creativity, seen as the only sure way to realize human beings’ innate potential (Mathieson, 1990, p. 377).
Priority was given to child-centredness and a retreat from book-learning. The aesthetic component of the curriculum loomed large in this
endeavour. The child was no longer so much a learner as a doer or creator. But Herbartians and Neo-Froebelians were not at one as crusaders
in this good cause. In the different versions of progressivism, the balance between child-centred aims and those of, on the one hand, social
reconstruction and, on the other, moral rearmament, were difficult to disentangle. This was arguably the transition period in which the
forerunner of a later, more open dichotomy between child- and society-centredness could be identified.
child centred versus subject centred
A perennial contention used over the years to bolster the case for progressive primary practice in England has been that such practice is
intrinsically child centred, and incompatible with subject-centred approaches. The ambiguities and contradictions of this dichotomy may be
illustrated through a longitudinal case study of geography. Part of the armoury of those who have opposed the introduction of subjects into the
primary curriculum has been the appeal to higher authority, their case being legitimated through selective quotation from the great figures or
official position statements of the past. In this instance, however, the historical evidence suggests that pioneering progressive voices neither
countenanced nor authorized polarizations such as that between child-centredness and subject-centredness.
For example, from the late nineteenth century there was already support from Herbartians for authentic subject inputs into a progressive
primary curriculum, albeit one holistically conceived. Charles McMurry (1899), a prominent American Herbartian, whose work was published
in England also, teased out relationships between geography as a subject and the pedagogic frame into which it should be inserted. He
conceived the relationship in terms of “type studies” of particular places, rich in instructive and interesting particulars, which must be graphic
and visual, and combine the two great merits of representing wide-ranging meanings in the subject, yet being at the same time concrete,
attractive, and realistic to the children.
Geography’s bridging function was also noted, again as offering a rapprochement between subject and topic approaches, through giving the
latter a distinctive focus.
In order to secure and establish the independent right of geography in the sisterhood of studies, it is necessary to make out a series of important type-subjects in each of which a characteristic central thought is so distinctly geographical that no other standpoint of natural science or history is able to dislodge the teacher from his
geographical stronghold. (McMurry, 1899, 122–25)
John Dewey equally valued the potential of geography and history in the primary school curriculum. To him also the polarization of child-centredness and subject-centredness was an aberration. As he wrote in A Child and the Curriculum (1902),
How, then, stands the case of Child vs. Curriculum? . . . The radical fallacy in the original pleadings with which we set out is the supposition that we have no choice save either to leave the child to his own unguided spontaneity or to inspire direction upon him from without . . . the value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that
makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus by indirection to direct. (30)
To Dewey, geography was a unifying subject, and he regarded geography and history, correctly taught, as
the two great school resources for bringing about the enlargement of the significance of the direct experience. . . . [T]heir chief educational value is that they provide the
most direct and interesting roads out into the larger world of meaning. (1916, pp. 210–13)
In their attacks on subjects, latter-day English proponents of the progressive primary ideology, seeking to authenticate their case, have drawn
selectively not only on Dewey, but also on the former government inspector Edmond Holmes, whose writings recorded his revulsion against
mechanical teaching and his Pauline conversion to “the true gospel of education,” namely child-centredness (Selleck, 1968, 205). But
Holmes’s attack was on the instrumentalism and pedagogic rigidities of elementary school teaching, and not on subjects as such. Indeed, he
regarded the memorization and recall procedures of this tradition as inimical to subjects as well as to children, in a statement referring to both
geography and history.
Information as to the names and positions of capes and bays, as to areas and populations, and other geographical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those
facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of geography. (Holmes, 1911, p. 90)
[I]n the absence of . . . the geographical sense, the possession of . . . geographical information cannot possibly be converted into knowledge of . . . geography. (Holmes,
1911, p. 134)
Similarly, the Dalton Plan, an import from the United States, demanded a child-centred approach, based on individual work. Each child
proceeded at her or his own pace, and in a “laboratory” rather than a class. Children would not necessarily stay in the same classroom,
therefore, but would move around from specialist room to specialist room. In each an appropriate set of resources was provided for each child
to use. But no child- versus subject-centred schism was evident in advice given in the progressive teachers’ press as to how to incorporate
subject approaches into the Dalton scheme. One of the Dalton Plan’s English protagonists was a London elementary school headteacher, A. J.
Lynch, who pointed out “that there is little difficulty in getting the right environment and creating the right atmosphere in the Geography room"
(1924, p. 228).
Progressive writers in the journals and methodological texts were in general not at all averse to introducing subjects such as geography to
young children. For example, Miss Mackenzie’s The Principles and Practice of Kindergarten, published in 1896 by Joseph Hughes, Froebel
House, included a chapter on geography. Child Education in 1926 ran a series on developing a geography scheme of work for infant classes, as
did The Teachers’ Times regularly between 1924 and 1927, as well as The Teachers’ World in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Similarly, the
Froebel Society’s journal, Child Life, periodically offered special editions on particular subjects, as in the case of geography in July 1936. In
this edition one of the Goldsmith’s College, London, team, E. M. Forsaith, expounded her views on geographical approaches for pupils under
age 11 (pp. 98-100), while E. J. Orford, another geographical educationist, gave guidance on “Geography through Literature” (pp. 101-103).
Even more strikingly, the National Froebel Union ran examinations for a teachers’ certificate for students wishing to enter into kindergarten and
preparatory school work. To help such students, E. Bown, a lecturer at St. Mary’s College, London, wrote The Approach to Geography (1931).
Geography, it was stated, could be taught to children from six years upwards, so long as it started with their own experience. This would be
directed in time toward a broader view of the subject, which she regarded as foremost in bringing children into contact on the one hand with
the marvels of the natural landscape and, on the other, in enabling them to recognize “their responsibilities as part of the great family of
mankind,” based on the ideals of the League of Nations (p. xi).
Progressives have also argued that the teaching of subjects is geared to instruction for later life rather than concentrating on education for
current personal growth. It is true that geography, history, and literature were once defined as the “Empire group” of subjects, and had an
overriding socio-political purpose. But imperial study was equally strongly espoused as a vital part of the integrated primary curriculum.
Indeed, recognizing the unifying potential of the Empire as a popular topic, progressive primary teaching journals, whether Child Life, The
Teachers’ World and Schoolmistress, or The Teachers’ Times and Kindergarten Gazette, offered regular guidance on how to link subjects in
constructing suitable Empire Day projects. Among many other things, they printed patriotic songs and plays that the children could perform.
For over fifty years, the pageantry of Empire Day was a significant event in the calendars of British schools.
Yet while the political intention of this pedagogically progressive device was in no way disguised, the moulding of minds that it assumed was
evidently not seen as flouting good primary practice, as implicit in the following justification of Empire Day celebrations by an anonymous
columnist, “The Pathfinder,” in The Teachers’ Times of 19 May 1922:
To catch the fire of enthusiasm, to disclose the gleam of inspirational light, to impress the plastic nature of the pupil with spiritual ideals to help him in those dready
hours when he must work out the task conceived in brighter moments, this is to bring a healthy rhythm of mental activity that will be of undoubted value in future life
. . . the Empire Day celebration movement holds within it a germ which in later years will give the pupil a pride of race and larger patriotism that will consolidate and
strengthen the Empire. (p. 311)
Perhaps the most frequently launched historical salvo of progressives against subject specialism in the primary school is the celebrated maxim
of the Hadow Report on The Primary School (Board of Education [U.K.], 1931) that “the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and
experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored” (p. 93). The much less often cited quotation from later in the same
Report is that "in geography, as in other subjects,” primary school work was to be thought of in terms of activity and experience, rather of
knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored (p. 171). Although Hadow accepted the view that organization of the curriculum into subjects
was not a priority for younger children, nonetheless there was need for a distinctive geographical input. For example, it was argued that the
teaching of distant places through topics would, when complete, help to build up to a conception of the world as a whole, seen as a necessary
part of citizenship education.
Even more aggressive polarization followed the later Plowden Report of 1967 (Department of Education and Science, 1967). As is well known,
Children and Their Primary Schools was immediately hailed as a linchpin document, affirming the true values of English progressive primary
practice. Yet whereas the Report clearly rejected subject categories as suitable for the needs of young children, it accepted that subjects became
more relevant as children progressed into the upper junior phase. Thus it identified, among other things, a need for specialist subject co-ordinators in the primary school (paras. 555- 556). It included a section on the potential contributions of subjects to the primary curriculum.
One of these subjects was geography, and the scheme presented (pp. 230-235) was in essence similar to that of the later much-maligned
subject-centred National Curriculum (Marsden, 1991b, pp. 42-43).
recent ideological confrontations in england and wales
Primary educational practice in England by the early 1980s was thus riddled with ambiguities and contradictions. Right-wing anti-Plowden
reaction was by then a strong political force, presenting an unrelentingly negative image of a rampant progressivism undermining educational
standards. The disputation became not only more polarized but also highly politicized. Countering the right-wing assault, many primary
teachers, and even more so persons engaged in primary teacher education, held their ground, insisting anew that subject approaches were
antipathetic to the spirit and purpose of good primary practice. They also began to locate those attacking the Plowden ideology and those
promoting subject study in the same enemy camp.
Two of the most vigorous proponents of progressive primary principles, Blenkin and Kelly, made clear there were two sides of the fence.
Although aware of inconsistency between the rhetoric and reality of progressive primary practice, they allowed no disagreement with the
underlying principles. Progressive theory was “the basic philosophy of English Primary education” and between the opposing views of
education there was “fundamental incompatibility” (Blenkin & Kelly, 1981, p. 62). Developmental approaches (Kelly, 1988, p. 112), needed to
be protected from “less satisfactory” ideologies (p. 122).
It is perhaps a caricature (though only slight) or an over-simplification (though not a great one) to see this as to a large degree a conflict between the traditional,
subject-based approaches of the secondary school . . . and the less formal process-based approaches adopted (perhaps more often in theory than in practice) by many
primary teachers. (Kelly, 1988, p. 98)
Although Kelly accepted that at secondary level there was a case for insinuating subjects into a structure of inter-disciplinary enquiry (1982, pp.
72-73), in the primary phase, even where informal approaches were applied to subjects like geography, he contended that any subject input
either “switched off” children or that children were cognitively unready. He dismissed the idea that a subject-based approach could
satisfactorily be implemented through experiential enquiry.
Reinforcement of these confrontational views appeared in the 1970s with the rise of “new directions” in the sociology of education. A key
concept was the proposition that knowledge was socially constructed and embodied both the distribution of power in society and the principles
of social control (Young, 1971). This notion rapidly entered the debate over structures of curriculum in the new secondary comprehensive
schools. On this view, the secondary grammar school curriculum embodied a rigid and historically arbitrary stratification of knowledge,
dominated by traditional academic subjects, unlikely to be congenial to the new mixed-ability pupils groups in comprehensive schools. A trend
against separate subject timetabling at secondary level thus gained ground, and predictably encouraged similar developments at the primary
level.
There was at the same time more nuanced discussion about the place of subjects in the curriculum. Thus the Schools Council’s 1970s project “History, Geography and Social Science 8-13” regarded subjects as resources, differentiating their position as labels in the curriculum from their states as distinctive intellectual disciplines. It countered the negative stereotype that subjects were inevitably dull and arbitrary bodies of factual content, merely to be absorbed by rote. The disciplines of geography, history, and selected social sciences were presented in a more positive guise as offering the curriculum not only knowledge about the real world, past and present, but also discrete skills and conceptual frameworks helpful in making sense of that world, of potential benefit whether or not they were timetabled separately (Blyth et al., 1976, 32–3).
Attacking the “unnecessary dichotomies” that underlay progressive primary school practice—including subject-centredness versus child-centredness, child-centredness versus society-centredness, product versus process, and the like—Alexander (1984) accepted the view of the Schools Council’s 8-13 Project that it was necessary to distinguish the concept of a subject as a means of dividing up the school timetable, and that of a discipline, implying a distinctive mode of study, enquiry, and explanation. Thus a pedagogic argument for resisting the break-up of the primary curriculum into subject compartments would be different from, and probably more sustainable than, one refuting altogether the value of infusing distinctive modes of geographical or historical practice into primary education.
An associated “unnecessary dichotomy” noted by Alexander was that implicit in the notion that knowledge about children was more important than knowledge about subjects—“I teach children, not subjects” being the approved maxim. Yet the contradictory fickleness in the application
of this precept could be demonstrated by the widespread presence, within self-proclaimed progressive primary curricula, of tightly demarcated,
carefully graded schemes of work in subject compartments as, for example, in mathematics. By contrast, in humanities/social subjects
provision, a variety of loosely integrated topic approaches, some including no authentic geographical or historical element at all, was
considered to be good practice.
Alexander explained this discrepancy as a long-term consequence of the English tradition of employing generalist teachers in the primary
school. Whereas such teachers were trained to cope with a degree of specialized knowledge in the basic subjects, this was not expected of them
in other areas. A topic-based approach was thus a means of denying the need for specialist expertise outside the basic subjects. He went on to
identify the historical roots of this situation, based as it was on the elementary tradition of the nineteenth century:
The class-teacher system . . . was the cheapest and most straight-forward means of educating children to the minimal levels required. . . . [In] the twentieth century . . .
there was need to develop a conceptual framework for the practice of class teaching which . . . would support and sustain class teachers. Child-centredness . . . provided
the best ideology to meet the primary teacher’s class situation. (Alexander, 1984, 14)
In this persuasive argument, the presence of a broad and balanced range of subjects was interpreted as a threat not only to primary children, but
also to their teachers. Supporting this view, in defining the paradigm of the model primary teacher as the “mother made conscious,” Steedman
(1985) drew attention to the historic definition of her important virtues as to do with feeling, intuition, sympathy, and empathy, rather than with
intellectual capacity. The woman primary teacher did not need to be very clever (160). Thus a de-intellectualized and deficit view not only of
primary children, but also of generalist primary teachers, was implanted.
The imposition of a National Curriculum on England and Wales, through the so-called Education Reform Act of 1988, has added fuel to the
flames. As a subject-based enterprise, the National Curriculum has confirmed the worst suspicions of child-centred lobbyists, who have
portrayed it in apocalyptic terms, as a curriculum for the doomed, the damned, and even the dead. It has also been derided as a reversion to
nineteenth-century didacticism and utilitarianism, to early twentieth-century academic parochialism and protectionism, and as a positivist
edifice irrelevant in a postmodern world, and therefore in immediate need of deconstruction.
The increased politicization of the educational debate from the late 1970s has therefore served to intensify division. There now seems little
comfort either for progressive child- or subject-centred advocates, since the official mid-1990s revisions of the National Curriculum have
favoured a limited, “dumbed-down” (to use the American terminology) curricular provision, within a prescriptive and moralistic set of social
purposes. Although a subject-centred structure will remain, it will be as part of an attenuated “back to basics” training agenda, and one
reminding its advocates of missed opportunities of achieving something more broad, balanced, and liberal. Child-centred proponents may look
back even more plaintively to a world they have lost. The idea of a constructive synthesis in which the subject content, pedagogic processes,
and social purposes of education are seen as complementary and not in conflict appears an increasingly hazy prospect.
NOTES
1. For part of its existence, this journal was entitled The Teachers’ Times and Kindergarten Gazette.
2. A fuller account of the work of Louisa Walker may be found in Marsden (1990); Marsden (1991a) offers a broader study of the social context of the London school
at which she was headmistress of the infant department.
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Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 9:2
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