Amidst the resurgence of an often polarised and occasionally toxic confrontation of educational progressivism and (neo)traditionalism––exacerbated also by express government policies and preferences––this paper seeks to historicise and philosophise afresh the relationship of traditionalism and progressivism across the British educational systems.  It re-engages in particular with the crucible period after the Second World War when from multiple sources as diverse as Owenism and American Pragmatism, a generation of educational theorists, policy-makers and classroom teachers began to identify with progressivist principles in opposition to what they increasingly regarded as an ossified and coercive educational regime in the nation’s schools incompatible with the values of the inclusive, democratic and mobile post-war society surrounding it.  This far-reaching reimagining of fundamental educational purposes found traction all across the British archipelago in landmark innovations such as the Scottish Primary Memorandum of 1965 and the Plowden Report of 1967.

Drawing upon the recent work of thinkers such as Selina Todd and Laura Tisdall, the paper investigates anew the origins of this indigenous UK progressivist moment and locates it in neglected wider social and cultural trends which call into question some established accounts of its rise and fall and which also problematise several of the declared assumptions underpinning its models of learning, teaching, curriculum and the aims of mass education. Central to these concerns are the twin concepts of ‘child-centredness’ and ‘the whole child’, which originated in Rousseauvian and Pestalozzian constructions of infant education, which acquired a new philosophical rigour under the influence of John Dewey, and which by the early 1960s had become powerful moral drivers around which a major and radical reform of classroom pedagogy could be organised. 

Without necessarily rejecting the educational goals of the progressivist project, or disputing its potent critique of the educational systems that preceded it, this paper argues that some of the tensions and paradoxes of child-centredness have been for the past half-century insufficiently acknowledged or examined. While the new generations of progressivist teachers in the 1960s were encouraged to see the ‘whole child’ as the foundation of their practice and the locus of their attention, both the social science disciplines and the wider literary culture to which they were exposed in their own professional formation were disclosing to them a figure of the child that was far from whole or integrated. The psychological sciences dominated by Piaget and the behaviourists were insisting upon a ‘developmental’ account of childhood that highlighted egocentrism, anxiety, domination, oral fixation and the unquenchable yearning for an ever-receding horizon of security. The Annales school of historical studies, led by Philippe Ariès, was instructing childcare professionals that childhood itself was a contingent ideological construction of the very bureaucracies they were training to serve. The popular psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, was tracing the roots of psychosis to the dysfunctional nuclear family with which teachers were elsewhere urged to be in a new and integral partnership.   From social realism to high fantasy, the award-winning children’s novels of the period––boldly annexed to a new literacy strategy centred on real books and real reading––were portraying with renewed creative honesty and convincing dramatic energy a childhood marked candidly by dislocation, maladaptive families, social exclusion, intergenerational conflict, sexual tension and adolescent rivalry.  Few of the signature features of a stable and optimistic ‘child-centredness’ were in fact visible in any these key cultural messages of the period.

The paper investigates the roots of this contradiction of educational optimism and cultural pessimism, suggesting that some of the original philosophical reservations expressed by eg Richard Peters and Robin Alexander towards progressivism may help explain both its representation and its misrepresentation today.

This paper threads three methodological strands: philosophical enquiry, historical-documentary study and literary criticism. The braiding of these approaches in turn supports a wider philosophical and cultural studies assessment of a vital period of educational change. The ramifications of this change remain central today and are restated polemically at the present time in a fresh international debate about the relationship of progressivist ideas and practices to rediscovered and reasserted traditionalist suppositions and strategies. The paper itself is however not polemical but reflective. Through its close documentary and literary readings of its key texts, it invites discussion of topics forever integral to the perceptions of childhood in education and to the relationship of literacy to philosophies of childhood and to the pedagogical practices adopted and favoured in modern schools.

The presentation draws provisional conclusions that favour a reappraisal of the key legacy concepts of 'the whole child' and 'child-centredness' in education and in Teacher Education––arguing that both in fact incorporate philosophically and historically questionable and incomplete constructions of childhood. As several commentators highlighted at the time and subsequently, these terms lacked traction in the period of their initial policy dominance in the 1960s, sat in serious tension with other and less benign cultural representations of the child and young person in the same period, and commanded only faltering and patchy support from education professionals. Confronting in 2022 a renewed, sharply polarised and politicised social-media fuelled contest between progressivists and neo-traditionalists––evident everywhere from eg models of reading instruction to systems of behaviour management––the paper urges the shared pursuit of a fresh and inclusive vision of childhood in society and culture, intended to reduce astringent ideological conflict and extend the resources from which we co-construct resilient and convincing educational engagements with young people in schools

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