Calm down, dear?

In her response to the criticism levelled at early years teachers, practitioners and researchers in the wake of their objections to some of the content of the OFSTED report Bold Beginnings, author Sue Cowley comments: 

The undercurrent of criticism seems to emanate from those who have not worked with the under 5’s and I’m sorry to say that the majority of it comes from male colleagues...lying just beneath the surface of the language being used on Twitter seems to be the idea that the women who make up 98% of the early years sector should just calm the hell down.

Examples of critical tweets she provides include ‘it’s the politicised “why oh why won’t someone think of the children” hyperbole that grates’. This evokes a recurring line from the popular cartoon The Simpsons, which is regularly used to parody a hysterical female response to a crisis.

This debate would be familiar to those who worked in early years education and care a century ago. In the early 20^th century, a ‘social maternalism’ (Brebony 2009) emerged from the ranks of middle class female charity workers, who, from the middle of the 19^th century, had been mobilised to work with families amongst the working class urban poverty that was emergent from industrialisation. Maternalism (Koven 1993) can be basically categorised as a focus on the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds, and interestingly, it underpinned initiatives that tended to bind women together across traditional social class and party political differences. For example, fiery socialist prophet Margaret McMillan (1860-1931), stiff, aristocratic Queen Mary (1867-1963) and the first two women to serve as MPs in the House of Commons, wealthy socialite Conservative Nancy (Lady) Astor (1879-1964) and serious, committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) worked diligently together over a long period of time in order to put the case for nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

The lesson from history that seems to emerge however, is that where the maternalist agenda conflicts with the view taken by the mainstream (or ‘malestream’) ruling culture (which may be espoused by both men and women), the route taken to slapping down those who take the maternalist position (who again may be of either gender) involves responses, most generally from men, that seek to construct the objections as irrational, emotional and even hysterical- a word that has its roots in the Greek word for womb, hysterika.  

Margaret McMillan herself faced a crisis when her work as an elected member of the Bradford School Board was curtailed by a national policy which moved the responsibility of school administration from school boards to local authorities- to which, at that time, women could not be elected. Despite McMillan’s success in achieving huge advances in the health and well-being of the children of Bradford, the male leadership of the Independent Labour Party, who had initially sponsored McMillan’s candidacy for the Bradford School Board dismissed her protestations as self-absorbed and unimportant; in fact ‘some of the leadership actively supported the rational administration that the Bill embodied’ (Steedman 1990, p.49).

Psychoanlayst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) took the position that very young children were not as emotionally unsophisticated as Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) had proposed, challenging the overwhelming dominance of the father’s disciplinary role in mainstream Freudian theory. Klein emphasised the huge psychological significance of the intense emotional bond between mothers and babies, meeting with much angry resistance from malestream Freudians. John Bowlby (1907-1990) who later became world famous for an infant attachment theory which similarly emphasised the mother-baby bond abruptly dismissed Klein’s theories as those of ‘a frightfully vain old woman who manipulated people’ (Issroff et al 2005, p.57).

Probably the most poignant example of all relates to Margaret McMillan’s ex-student, Miriam Lord, who was Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford in 1932, as the Great Depression began to take hold. When Bradford Education Authority told local nursery schools that children were to receive a maximum of one-third of a pint of milk a day, Lord unleashed a spirited protest against this decision; in her nursery, located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation, one pint per day was allocated to each child. She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put the ‘Bradford milk’ case directly to Parliament. As a staunch advocate of the nursery schools movement, Astor swiftly obliged, but when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee, incensed at challenges to his policy on the national stage, presented his arguments to the overwhelmingly male Conservative contingent in Parliament, Astor’s protests were swiftly dismissed as over-emotional maternalist ramblings at a time of national crisis. Indeed, Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) further comments ‘on reading through Hansard one can practically hear the groans of dismay ... whenever [Astor] raised the topic of nursery education’. Miriam Lord was subsequently left to the mercy of the Bradford politicians, who demoted her from superintendent of a nursery school to assistant mistress of a nursery class located within an infant school, a post in which she remained until her retirement in 1944 (Jarvis 2016; Murray 1993).

In 2011, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron was admonished for his retort to a female MP to ‘calm down, dear’. The comment was aimed at the then Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Angela Eagle, who retorted that ‘a modern man would not have expressed himself that way’. The line ‘calm down dear’ was quoted from a much satirised TV advertisement of the early 2000s, which depicted a famous film director telling a hysterical woman to ‘calm down dear’. In this skit, the scenario that played out ended with the woman succumbing to the man’s superior understanding of the situation, and subsequently fawning over his celebrity. The fact that Sue Cowley has in the past month experienced a male put-down that similarly draws from a highly sexist media meme suggests that David Cameron is far from the only ‘modern man’ who reveals his underlying contempt for female challenge in this way.

So how can we move on from such a construct, which over a century, can be demonstrated to regularly emerge to slap down maternalist arguments when they threaten to pose a challenge to the malestream? Davies (1999) suggests that we use a strategy to increase “visibility” by comparing the underlying cultural constructs to a clear pane of glass that can subsequently be metaphorically ‘broken’ to make it visible, and thence explored, deconstructed and challenged. This brief trip through a few apparently unconnected, but thematically similar events in the history of early years theory and practice is just one way to set the process in motion.

   

NB: Some parts of this blog use extracts from my previous articles

Jarvis, P. & Liebovich, B. (2015) British Nurseries, Head and Heart: McMillan, Owen and the genesis of the education/care dichotomy, Women's History Review, Vol 24, No. 6, pp.917-937, Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 

Jarvis, P. (2016) Critical Maternalism: a window on the 21^st century. Early Years Educator. Volume 18, No 2, pp.38-44. Available at: http://www.magonlinelibrary.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38

References

Bradburn, E. (1989) Margaret McMillan: Portrait of a Pioneer. London: Routledge.

Brebony, K. (2009) “Lady Astor’s Campaign for Nursery Schools in Britain 1930-1939: attempting to valorize cultural capital in a male-dominated field”, History of Education Quarterly 49:2 pp. 196-210, p.197.

Davies, B. (1999) A Body of Writing, Walnut Creek, AltaMira.

Issroff, J., Reeves, C. and Hauptman, B. (2005) Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby: personal and professional perspectives. London, Karnac.

Murray, R. (1993) The development of nursery schools and child welfare policies and practices in Bradford from the 1890s to the 1950s with particular reference to the work of Miriam Lord, Unpublished PhD thesis; University of Leeds.

Steedman, C. (1990) Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan 1860-1931 New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

My Shero: Margaret McMillan, Early Years Pioneer

The McMillan sisters, Margaret and Rachel, were born respectively in 1860 and 1859. They were activists within the English Socialist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the 1920s, Margaret gained national and international fame for introducing blended play-based learning and welfare within the purpose-designed environment of her open air nursery school, located in Deptford, South East London.

Margaret and Rachel did not start off in London, however. They were born in Westchester County, New York. Following the death of their father and youngest sister in 1865, the McMillans’ mother took them back to her family home in Inverness, to live with their stern, Gaelic speaking grandparents.  Margaret grew up to become forthright and fiery, Rachel, quiet, calm and contemplative.  By all accounts the McMillan sisters were devoted to each other, and formed a lifelong partnership, focused on social reform for children. By 1889, their mother and grandparents had died, and the sisters moved to London. 

Margaret began to build a reputation as an orator, losing her job as companion to a wealthy Park Lane aristocrat when she made a fiery speech on the Socialist platform at Hyde Park Corner on May Day 1892. In 1893 both sisters relocated to Bradford, following an offer of employment to Margaret as a speaker and lecturer for the new Independent Labour Party (the ILP). Margaret was to deliver a programme of Socialist lectures to a wide variety of audiences across Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Margaret was elected to the Bradford School Board as a representative of the ILP in 1894, and set to work with the forthright approach that had so irritated her grandmother. She quickly came to the firm conclusion that it was impossible to educate a tired, dirty, infested, diseased and hungry child, and the height of adult cruelty to insist that such children entered a public education system that did not concern itself with their holistic welfare. She introduced an impressive range of reforms to the schools in the area. 

With Rachel at her side to help with lobbying and fund-raising, Margaret was responsible for Bradford becoming the first education authority in the country to provide school baths and showers in 1897 and free school meals in 1902. Margaret was successfully re-elected to the Bradford School Board in 1900, but in 1902 a new Education Bill became law, resulting in the abolition of the School Boards, giving control and management of elementary schools to the District and County Councils- to which women could not be elected. Margaret publicly protested her demotion, complaining that reforming women had been ‘put on one side’, but the male leadership of the ILP refused to argue this case for her with the national government. 

The sisters therefore returned to London. Margaret was introduced to the South East London district of Deptford in1903 when she was appointed as the manager of a group of elementary schools in the area, finding conditions very much as she had found them in Bradford. So again, she and Rachel set to work and by 1906, in collaboration with other like-minded campaigners, they won the political support to lead a deputation to Parliament to lobby for the compulsory medical inspection of school children. This aim was subsequently realised in the Education (Administrative Procedures) Bill of 1907, and on the strength of this success the sisters secured a substantial bursary to open a school clinic in Deptford. But a chance comment from one of the clinic nurses soon led them to consider an ambitious extension of their initiative: 

 It’s all a waste of time. These children come here, are cured and go, but in two weeks- sometimes less, they are back again. All these ailments could be prevented; their cause is dirt, lack of light and sun, fresh air and good food. 

The McMillans subsequently determined that they would open an experimental overnight camp in the small yard of the privately donated house in which the clinic was located, for the use of local girls. The back yard was canvassed over and washing facilities were provided for the children, by means of connecting a friendly neighbour’s boiler to a shower head! A local welder donated his time to make beds for the children from some old gas pipes. Margaret and Rachel set up a standing order to a company in Scotland to send regular consignments of oatmeal, to provide the children with a cheap and nutritious breakfast.

One of the night camp girls begged to bring her little sister along, because the child was unwell, and the family hoped that the McMillans' regime would help her to get better. Sadly the child died not long afterwards, and Margaret then determined that she and Rachel should instead focus their attentions on the provision of daycare and education for the local under fives in order to provide good nourishment, sunshine, fresh air and healthy outdoor play activities before rickets and consumption took hold. The sisters subsequently received this opportunity in 1914, when, in the months before World War I, they were offered a house with grounds by Deptford Council in which to set up what was initially termed a ‘baby camp’.

The baby camp was a great success, but the hard physical work took its toll upon the sisters, by now both in their middle fifties.  Sadly, in 1917, the last full year of the war, Rachel died after developing a rapid ‘wasting’ illness. Following the war’s end, a national and international interest began to grow in what was now called the Rachel McMillan Open Air Nursery’s holistic play-based learning and welfare regime, principally due to its hugely positive results in terms of Deptford children’s greatly improved health, behaviour and academic achievements.  

Margaret McMillan went on to serve on the Education Committee of the London County Council and was subsequently elected first president of the Nursery Schools Association in 1923.  She gave a BBC radio broadcast about her work in 1927; in this she powerfully stated her rationale:

You may ask, why should we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. The educational system should grow out of the nursery schools system, not out of a neglected infancy. In the nursery school, everything is planned for life. The shelters are oblong in shape. The air is moving there always; healing light falls through the lowered gable and open doors. This world is full of colour and movement. If Great Britain will go forward with nursery schools she will sweep away the cause of untold suffering, ignorance, waste and failure.

 

Queen Mary opened The Rachel McMillan Teacher Training College in Deptford on 8^th May 1930. Margaret McMillan gave the inaugural speech, characteristically proposing: 

The real object of our work is nurture... we are trying to to make a place which shall be a training ground for the happier generations of the future.

She died less than a year later, on 29^th March 1931, but Deptford memories of her activities and their impacts remained. In 1960, the BBC interviewed local people about their memories of Margaret McMillan in her centenary year. One commented:

Margaret McMillan gave her whole life to us children. She was truly a wonderful person in so much that she never thought of herself one bit. I can see her now, a determined figure with a head of lovely silver hair…. Her whole life was centred around us children.... I can still hear her now saying ‘you may be poor now but if you want, there is nothing to stop you sitting in the Houses of Parliament.

Another said:

Miss McMillan came and opened new and wonderful doors for us... thank you Miss McMillan.

One of her colleagues commented: 

When I visited Deptford I had to ask my way through smelly streets, but all whom I asked became eager friends as soon as I mentioned Miss McMillan’s name. At last I came to a door in the paling and when this was opened I saw a garden full of delphiniums. In among the flowers were many little children, like flowers themselves, with gay overalls and coloured ribbons in their hair.

I grew up in South East London during the 1960s and 70s within walking distance of the McMillan Teacher Training College and Nursery. I later discovered that my own nursery teacher had trained in the McMillan teacher training college. As a developmental researcher myself, I am convinced that the innovative practices that the McMillans introduced, and which many of the locally trained nursery and primary school teachers still espoused in the 1960s played a large part in forming the inquisitive mind that eventually led me to study for a PhD. 

So from me, too, thank you, Miss McMillan. You steadfastly followed your vision even when the going got incredibly tough, including circumnavigating enormous barriers that were placed in your way, simply because you were female. By the end of your life, not only had you succeeded in your dreams to produce a blueprint for hugely optimising the prospects of socio-economically deprived children; your pioneering practice reached out to nurture the as yet unborn, including me. And for that reason, you are my Shero. 

You can read more about Margaret McMillan and other Early Years Pioneers in my co-edited book, Early Years Pioneers in Context

Child Development: the invisible man

In his thoughtful essay What is Education, Mark K. Smith proposes that education is ‘the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning’. However, before we are able to effectively pursue this goal, we have to acknowledge the fundamental and sometimes quite bitter debates that exist within the teaching and learning arena. At the heart of these we find that the very root of the word education is disputed, in terms of whether it descends from the Latin ‘educere’- to lead out, or ‘educare’- to train or to mould. The question of the delicate balance between direct instruction and mentored development is a debate that human beings have never been able to address within a cultural or political vacuum; however the political arena in which Anglo-American education is situated has become increasing polarised over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This blog will argue that the current over-arching political ideology of such neoliberal societies heavily infiltrates pedagogical debate, with the result that the human developmental process is ignored, creating dysfunction at the heart of state education.

While ‘traditionalists’ advocate an education system in which the principal pedagogy should favour direct instruction towards specific targets, ‘progressives’ favour a less directive style of teaching that fosters learner creativity and independence. The modern concept of ‘progressive’ education emerged from the practice of pioneers such as Johann Henrich Pestalozzi who, in the early 19th Century, attempted to model the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau in practical pedagogy. Early 20th Century American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey further proposed that education for societies rooted in fast technological change should not rely upon the rote transmission of ideas from a teacher to a pupil, but a more organic interaction between teacher and learners where both draw upon previous knowledge and experience in a process of ‘continuous construction’.

The ‘trad/prog’ debate has therefore been ongoing for centuries, but as Neoliberalism has risen over the past 35 years to become the principal Anglo-American political philosophy, it has become increasingly heated. The case made from the ‘prog’ side (which increasingly sees itself as ‘the defence’ to state-sanctioned policy) is that education practices have become too heavily skewed towards the narrowly traditional, driven by the neoliberal goal of producing compliant consumers and workers for the international marketplace; a situation dubbed ‘The Zombie Doctrine’ by George Monbiot. Parsimony is the key to neoliberal concepts of education, the impetus being towards quasi-privatised state education and the relentless statutory assessment of the competence of both pupils and teachers, utilising assessment results not only to test learners against artificially created ‘norms’, but also to impose ‘accountability’ measures upon teachers and schools.

Where education practice is dominated by this neoliberal premise, the driving impetus inevitably becomes programming learners towards assessment performance via the most economically parsimonious practices. And, given that such a practice has its roots in a philosophy of ‘dehumanisation’ it should not be a surprise that the subtleties of child development begin to become invisible. I have argued in many publications that the ways in which human beings most effectively learn to make meaning in the early years of life have been increasingly ignored within contemporary education policy and practice, even in the face of psycho-biological research findings that clearly highlight physical evidence of the ‘under construction’ synaptic patterns present within the living brains of young children. Such findings support some aspects of earlier models of cognitive development created by researchers such as Jean Piaget, in particular the incomplete nature of neural connection that makes it difficult for children under seven to deal with information that cannot be processed through existing concepts within memory. In my article Is baseline missing the bigger picture? I use the analogy of an attempt to store clothes in a wardrobe with insufficient hangers: unfamiliar ideas, like excess clothes cannot be placed into memory in an organised fashion, and therefore tend to fall to the bottom and become jumbled together.

The fact that young children’s brains are under development in this way during the first six years of life means that teaching and learning interactions during this developmental stage are far more successful if the child has a role in choosing an activity to act as a pedagogical anchor within existing cognition, and adults then engage in this agenda to teach towards ‘next steps’, a process known as ‘Sustained Shared Thinking’ (SST). Where children entering early education settings come from homes where English is not the principal language, or they have been diagnosed as non-neurotypical, SST can also be flexibly utilised to effectively address such individual needs.

However, the recent OFSTED document Bold Beginnings makes no mention of SST at all, despite the fact that standard 2.4 of Early Years Teacher Status (which was created by the DFE, and is also not mentioned in Bold Beginnings) states that EYTs must demonstrate the ability to ‘lead and model effective strategies to develop and extend children’s learning and thinking, including sustained shared thinking’. The content of Bold Beginnings gives further indications that the concept of SST has not been considered by the authors; for example the comment that ‘most learning could not be discovered or left to chance through each child’s own choices’ (p.17) fails to recognise the role of the adult in the learning through play process. The proposal that there should be ‘the same learning...expectations at the start of school as... at the end’ (p.13) also indicates a lack of consideration of the role of SST within early years pedagogy, and is moreover a worrying indication of a lack of consideration of the vast difference between the stage of construction of an average 4 and 11 year old brain. There is additionally a reference in Bold Beginnings to ‘start(ing) teaching quickly’ (p.16), which appears to indicate that ‘teaching’ is constructed as synonymous with 'direct instruction'. This point is introduced in a paragraph reflecting upon what ‘body of knowledge to pursue... what ideas to link together, what resources to draw on, how to teach and how to make sure all pupils benefit’ (p.12) in which there is no mention of the fact that effective early years teachers routinely engage in SST to address these requirements, utilising young children’s self-chosen activities to strengthen and extend pathways within their existing neural network.

SST is especially essential for working with young children whose development has been negatively impacted by environmental circumstances. The UK has some of the highest child financial insecurity levels in Europe; nationwide, approximately one third of the child population have to cope with the considerable social, emotional and intellectual challenges of living within a financially unstable household. Such experience is likely to create a neuronal effect known as cognitive lag, one of the results of which is that children from socio-economically deprived households most typically start school with a less well developed vocabulary than classmates from more privileged homes. As such the SST process is crucial in creating an environment in which language development takes place in context, mirroring the niche in which human beings evolved: building linguistic competence through spontaneous interactions.  

Whilst it might seem most logical to deal with child poverty at source, in their recent policy document Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential, the DFE talk instead of ‘strengthening literacy and numeracy’ (p.15) as the key measure to prevent disadvantaged pupils ‘falling behind’ and ‘underperforming’ (p.17). This highlights one of the key reasons for the invisibility of the human developmental process within current DFE and OFSTED policy: it is not immediately compatible with parsimonious neoliberal demands which require children to swiftly absorb nuggets of information to regurgitate to hit specific assessment targets. From a psychobiological perspective it can however be argued that this a dangerously false economy, which puts the performance cart before the developmental horse. An early years pedagogy that does not effectively communicate with young children in ways that are appropriate to their early stage of neural development will not provide them with the foundation to grasp how human beings build what minister Nick Gibb refers to as 'domains of knowledge'. For example, the curiosity ignited by the mud kitchen in the four year old, alongside the investigative thinking carefully developed through SST creates the spark that ignites the fire of exploration that burns within the adult scientist.

In conclusion, the pivotal role of SST in the early years environment is to introduce young children to school as a place in which teaching and learning is, above all, a meaningful process. As such its omission from a document that ‘aims to provide fresh insight’ (Bold Beginnings, p.2) into early years education is extremely worrying. SST’s focus on meeting the child where s/he is ‘at’ is inclusive to all, guarding against children’s first experiences of school being tainted by the toxic cascade of bafflement, boredom and failure. Disillusionment at this early stage leads to later resistance to traditional adult-directed pedagogy that is most efficient in communicating the contents of a body of knowledge to learners over seven, and to a lack of confidence to engage in the independence and creativity that is required for progressive pedagogy to be fully effective. In this sense both the ‘trad’ and the ‘prog’ would benefit from the appearance of the developmental ‘invisible man’ to guide ‘the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning’ within education provision for children under seven.