Teaching and Social Reform: The Odd Couple?

When I started my studies nearly 30 years ago, and realised that the subject that most interested me was the development and learning process undertaken by human beings, I hoped that, in my future, I would be able to forge a career teaching and researching in this area. In my mind’s eye, I saw classrooms, lecture theatres and libraries, practical research and contributing to a steady progression from what we knew in the last quarter of the twentieth century to what we would know in the first quarter of the twenty first. I did not imagine myself in my late 50s engaging in various campaigns to prevent early years education heading back to the days where tiny children were expected to sit at desks and learn by rote, and I am still surprised to find myself in such a society.

I recently read a speech made by veteran American child development expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige, and found her echoing my own feelings:

I have loved my life’s work – teaching teachers about how young children think, how they learn, how they develop socially, emotionally, morally. I’ve been fascinated with the theories and science of my field and seeing it expressed in the actions and the play of children. So never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today. Where education policies that do not reflect what we know about how young children learn could be mandated and followed.... In this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction”... never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that we would have to defend children’s right to play.

In England, the latter half of 2017 has been a particularly difficult period in this respect. First of all, the DFE announced that they wished to instigate ‘baseline’testing for four year olds, a topic that I considered from a child development perspective in the TES article ‘Is Baseline missing the bigger picture?’. OFSTED then published a document entitled ‘Bold Beginnings’, which communicated an intention to introduce guidelines for the Reception year at school to become more closely aligned to Key Stage 1 in the National Curriculum. This is a particularly frustrating development for those of us who remember the introduction of the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage for Reception in 2000 as a response to the ‘too much too soon’ problems that arose from the incompatibility of the National Curriculum with 49 month old children, amongst the world’s earliest school entrants, arriving the month after their fourth birthday.

My latest blog on the LTU blog site considers the additional problems that Baseline testing will pose for the 30% of British children who are exposed to the additional stress of living in families whose income places them below the official poverty line. Famously, Nelson Mandela commented that 'The true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children'. When I started my studies all those years ago, I thought that as a nation, we had steadily progressed along this pathway over the previous few centuries; however over the years, my studies and most recently, the research I undertook for my chapters in Everyday Social Justice and most particularly, Early Years Pioneers and made me think rather more deeply about this prospect. 

In reading about social reformers Johann Henrich Pestalozzi and Margaret McMillan who became teachers, industrialist Robert Owen who became an educationalist and social reformer, pioneering female physician Maria Montessori who became a teacher and social reformer and teacher Loris Malaguzzi who became a psychologist and social reformer, I realised that perhaps history is not quite as linear as my younger self had perceived it to be, and that in negotiating the mixture of roles in which Carlsson-Paige and I find ourselves, we are actually in very good company.

Perhaps that indefinable line between teaching, researching and campaigning is something that all who engage or aspire to engage in education should more explicitly contemplate prior to and throughout their time in practice, particularly how these different but intertwined identities might eventually fuse together in the more mature stage of an individual’s career. As poet Robert Frost comments:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  

But I have promises to keep,  

And miles to go before I sleep,  

And miles to go before I sleep.

Merry Christmas everyone; and here’s to defending UNCRC article 31* in 2018.

*UN Children’s Rights on Leisure, Play and Culture