British primary schools: A model for change?

Abstract

Just as in the nineteenth century United States was greatly influenced by European educators, today, once again, educators are looking to British primary schools as a possible model for change in our schools. The direction of change in British primary schools is toward a more in both primary (ages 5-7) and junior schools (ages 7-11). It is estimated that 25 percent of the British primary schools fit the pattern of and that another third are in one or more stages of moving in that direction. The junior schools have been somewhat slower in following suit. Informal primary in England is not a sudden departure from the past. Primary schools throughout the western world have been greatly influenced by the work of such educational innovators as Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and others. However, the report by England's Central Advisory Council for Education, Children and Their Primary Schools, 1967, has been a force in making primary a national movement. This report of the Central Advisory Council is better known as the Plowden Report, after the chairwoman of the council, Lady Bridget Plowden. The Plowden Report was in one sense a study of the schools that were already in operation and a report that helped formulate the rationale and point the direction for primary in England. The debate over informal education and more formal approaches to instruction is more a difference of basic values than a question of method or technique. The differences between how individuals look at organization of schools, teaching techniques, and curriculum spring from differences in their conceptions of education; behind the technique and methods lies the image of man. Silberman emphasized the point in his text, Crisis in the Classroom: Indeed, the 'free day,' or 'informal education' to use a more inclusive term, is less an approach or method than a set of shared attitudes and convictions about the nature of childhood, learning, and schooling. Advocates of begin with the conception of childhood as something to be cherished, a conception that leads in turn to a concern with the quality of the school experience in its own right, not merely as preparation for later life.1 In education, educational theorists and practitioners see as an emerging process, where children are placed in a stimulating environment in which the individual develops at his own rate. This developmental process follows the individual's unique interests