A Progressive Education?

A Progressive Education? argues that concepts of childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools between 1918 and 1979. Tisdall contends that placing childhood at the centre of the history of education can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling has changed. 'Progressive' or 'child-centred' education began to emerge in the United States and Western Europe from the late-nineteenth century, reorganising curriculums to suit children and young people's needs, wants and abilities. Existing scholarship suggests that progressivism both rose and retreated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, when a right-wing backlash against permissive teaching and the deschooling movement led to the imposition of central state control over education; however, the child-centred pedagogies that became the mainstream in English and Welsh schools after 1945 rested on a fundamentally different vision of childhood. Unlike utopian deschoolers, post-war child-centred educationalists believed that the achievements of mass democracy and the welfare state ought to be carefully preserved. Children needed to be socialised by adult educators in order to develop the physical, intellectual, social and emotional maturity necessary to become full citizens. Far from enthusiastic, teachers perceived child-centred methods as a profound challenge to their authority in the classroom, and implemented them partially and reluctantly. Child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, thus promoted a more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood and youth as it came to dominate mainstream schooling after the Second World War. This book makes a valuable contribution to students and researchers working within British social and cultural history, the medical humanities, and on histories of childhood and education.