‘The Mother Made Conscious’: The Historical Development of a Primary School Pedagogy

Abstract

The dictum - that the ideal teacher of young children is like 'a mother made conscious' - is Friedrich Froebel's (1782-1852), the educational philosopher and founder of the kindergarten system, and it belongs to the 1840s. But as a piece of educational prescription it has much more recent echoes, particularly in educational advice offered to teachers since the last war, by Donald Winnicott and other members of the British psychoanalytic movement. This article sets out to deal with the development within primary schooling, of certain sets of ideas that have linked the teaching of young children with an understanding of mothering, and the contradictions that this largely inexplicit and unexamined notion spells out for women and children in classrooms, particularly working class children and their teachers. The starting point for this work was my own experience as a primary school teacher. I entered that enclosed place, the classroom by accident in 1973, quite unsocialised as a teacher. I think that had I been educated as a teacher I would have had access to ideas about deprivation and disadvantage that would have explained the children I encountered there in a particular way. It took me a very short time to discover, from reading as well as staffroom conversation, that the children of the semi- and unskilled working class that we taught were not like children ought to be, not 'real' children - though they represented a majority of children in this