Science, Nature, and Hatred: ‘Finding Out’ at the Malting House Garden School, 1924–29

Abstract

In reconfigurations of the ‘nature’ of the English child and childhood in the early 20th century a key role was played by the Malting House Garden School in Cambridge, England, founded by the unorthodox trader and inventor Geoffrey Pyke and codirected by pioneer educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs. Known scurrilously in the town of Cambridge as ‘a pregenital brothel’, the Malting House School was supported by ecologist A G Tansley and psychologist Jean Piaget amongst others for its ‘copious and careful record of phenomena’. Though short lived, the Malting House School experiment became widely known through popular and influential books, written by Isaacs on early childhood development and education, based largely on data collected at the school. Less is known concerning Pyke's applications of psychoanalytic knowledge, his powerful scientific networks, and his grand vision for a new form of education. With recently recovered records and other archival documents, I seek to contribute to a historical geography of localized psychoanalytic knowledge by exploring the tangle of disciplinary relations in the mutual and imaginative constitution of two pillars of the Malting House School: natural science and psychoanalysis. In particular, I examine what Isaacs referred to as ‘the ecological point of view’ as well as the place of hatred in relation to the nursery school's attempted manufacture of infant scientists eager to ‘find out’. For Pyke, the main threat to the “vigorous survival of an intelligent bourgeoisie” was the Oedipus situation, as described by Sigmund Freud. Through new educational techniques that recognized powerful emotion between generations, Pyke sought to help mould a race that would be able to survive the great changes which he expected science to create in our environment.