Child-centred, Gender-centred: a criticism of progressive ...

[Pages:10]Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1986

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Child-centred, Gender-centred: a criticism of progressive curriculum theory from Rousseau to Plowden

JOHN DARLING

ABSTRACT The child-centred theme of natural development in Rousseau's Emile has exercised a powerful and benign influence on education. Rousseau's proposed curriculum for girls, however, seems extraordinarily illiberal, requiring as it does a rigorous preparation for playing the traditional female role in a male-dominated society.

It is argued here that such a conservative policy on the education of girls is inevitable in an educational theory which makes a virtue of its empirical foundations. Observational studies of the female's nature and of her needs and interests portray her as society permits or requires her to be rather than as she could or should be. This is a dangerous weakness in influential twentieth-century versions of child-centred theory which have embraced a scientific approach in the hope of enhancing their credibility. The full educational development of girls, however, requires a distinctive vision of how things ought to be, a willingness to defend such value judgments, and a determination to intervene positively in the classroom.

INTRODUCTION

The 'progressive' theory of child-centred education constitutes a broad platform on which a great diversity of liberal reformers have spoken about schools. Over the last 200 years this educational philosophy has captivated the imagination of the enlightened while its critics have been made to look increasingly churlish and uncaring. Where a theory is so seductively attractive, it is particularly important to be sensitive to any possible defects or dangers.

This paper is written in the belief that the rhetoric of reform associated with childcentred education disguises the way in which this philosophy reinforces an essentially conservative conception of education. In itself, this is not a novel claim. Progressivism has been portrayed as offering more subtle classroom techniques for exercising wideranging powers over pupils [1]; it is said to provide "greater effectiveness for social control and structuring aspirations" [2]. One writer alleges that its critique of bookbased education lends support to those who want to prevent the educational advance of working class pupils [3]. And another declares that

what starts out as an assertion of human liberation becomes turned back on itself as a means of further repression or accommodation. [4]

Where this paper may be breaking new ground is in highlighting the tension between

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this kind of educational philosophy and the feminist objective of changing school and society along non-sexist lines. This point is important in its own right; but it is also important for the way it underlines the inherent conservatism of child-centred education, and because it shows how this is attributable to the nature of progressivism's theoretical basis.

ROUSSEAU ON THE DETERMINANTS OF A GIRL'S CURRICULUM

A prima facie case can be established by looking in the first instance at that great source of all child-centred writing, Rousseau's Emile. Froebel was inspired by this work, and A. S. Neill felt in hindsight that he had been unwittingly practising its principles. Two modern classics of child-centred education, England's Plowden Report and Scotland's Primary Memorandum, both bear witness to Rousseau's influence and can be understood as attempts to cash out some of his principles in modern classroom terms.

Among the principles governing Emile's curriculum are three which have been especially admired. First, Emile should have unlimited scope for play. This is advocated partly on humanitarian grounds, and partly because of the learning potential of such activity. Secondly, Emile is not to be pressurised into studying: learning will be acquired when the child develops the appropriate interests and capacities. Thirdly, Emile is not to be directly taught: instead he should be encouraged to think things out for himself and to draw conclusions from his own experience.

As well as giving this well-known account of the education of Emile, Rousseau's treatise also describes the ideal curriculum for a girl. (This programme is proposed for another fictitious character called Sophie.) Rousseau's curriculum for girls has not been widely discussed, and it is symptomatic of our times that one writer has recently tried to explain this in terms of sex bias. Historians of educational thought are declared to

have neglected Sophie because they have implicitly defined their subject matter as the education of male human beings, rather than the education of all human beings. [5]

There are, however, other possible explanations for the neglect of Sophie's education which are more plausible and less strained. Emile is a long book to study, and Sophie does not appear until the second half of the narrative. The account of her education is pedestrian compared with Rousseau's proposals for Emile: why should educationalists spend time on the former when the latter offer stimulation and illumination? Finally, the principles of Sophie's education are too far out of tune with our thinking in the last quarter of the twentieth century for them to be seen as relevant, assimilable or worthy of consideration. It is hoped, however, that this paper will show that Rousseau's views on girls' education are significant and enlightening, though not in the way Rousseau intended.

In Rousseau's account of Sophie's education all the principles outlined above are reversed. Sophie is to have little freedom [6]. Her play, says Rousseau, ought to be frequently interrupted so that she learns to put up with life's irritations. Instead of learning being pursued in accordance with the learner's own pace and inclinations, Sophie's lack of application in arithmetic lessons is to be combated by rewarding good work with cherries [7]. Instead of exercising her own judgment on religious questions, she is to learn religious doctrines without going into the reasons for holding them [8].

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Rousseau's underlying reason for this difference in strategy is that girls' education cannot be the same as boys' education because girls are not the same as-boys. In positive terms Rousseau sees the female as more modest, more cunning, more understanding of the opposite sex and more skilled in personal relationships. The things women lack are concentration, accuracy, moderation in both religious faith and sexual desire, skill in abstract disciplines and good judgment in literary matters. Rousseau's explanation of these differences between the sexes is that they are complementary and that male and female are intended to pool their native resources:

Woman has more wit, man more genius; woman observes, man reasons; together they provide the clearest light and the profoundest knowledge which is possible to the unaided mind. [9]

But this division of talents hardly suggests a partnership between equals, and Rousseau in fact maintains that the law of nature bids the woman obey the man. In procedural terms it is significant that Emile's development is explained in its own terms while Sophie's nature is explained in terms of how it differs from Emile's.

Perhaps the most important difference in his curricular proposals for girls and boys is that while Rousseau explicitly rules out the preparation of boys for any specific future role, a girl's education is to be conducted in the light of the destiny which her nature determines. Men, he says, are only sometimes men, but women are always women [10]. Females should play the role of compliant wife, mother and home-maker, and girls should be educated with this future in mind.

Why does Rousseau believe in the importance and Tightness of the woman's traditional role? In the first place he suggests that it has always been like this. The traditional role is more generally accepted the further back you go in history; and, for Rousseau, earlier times were closer to a state of nature and therefore morally superior. Further, the nature of the sex act shows that the male is intended to dominate and the female is meant to please. Physiologically, the female is made for child-care; her domestic role is essential for the prospering of family life; and any subsequent change of role is supposedly injurious to her health. Finally, a woman will not flourish in male occupations ("a woman is worth less as a man") [11]; so she should stick to what she excels in instead of rebelling against nature's intentions.

These intentions are manifest at an early age; every young girl actually likes sewing, says Rousseau, and loves playing with dolls. This, he concludes, "shows her instinctive bent towards her life's work" [12]. Today we might be able to think of alternative explanations for these interests. It is certainly curious that while in other contexts Rousseau is very much alive to the power of environmental influence and the likelihood of children acquiring ideas which are prevalent in society, his explanation of girls' interest in sewing is given in terms of instinct and a 'grand design'.

The design of nature means that the future role of every girl is laid down in advance. This role determines what every female needs--essentially, male admiration and respect. This need in turn dictates the curriculum for girls. "They should learn many things, but only such things as are appropriate" [13]. These include learning to be pleasing, learning to submit to male authority and acquiring useful accomplishments. One such accomplishment is the art of conversing agreeably with their husbands: for this girls require an education that transcends the more menial domestic arts. They may, for example, be introduced to logic and metaphysics but they "should only skim the surface" [14]. A girl's curriculum must from start to finish be designed for the

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benefit of men; but since women need men's good-will, this kind of instruction will also be to the benefit of the female pupils.

Rousseau's views on the nature of girls' education are directly related to his views on the proper place of women: indeed he treats the two questions as a single issue. We can tell that his stance here is conservative even by the standards of his times; first, because he presents it as a call to return to the ways of nature; and secondly because he criticises contemporary loss of respect for the traditional sexual division of labour. He complains that men are working in shops and in the tailoring trade while women set themselves up as literary critics. Before the eighteenth century was out, Rousseau was being powerfully castigated by Mary Wollstonecraft on behalf of 50% of the population [15].

How did the founder of progressive educational theory come to propagate such a view of females and their education? It is tempting to try to excuse this as an idiosyncratic aberration explicable in terms of Rousseau's troubled experiences with the opposite sex. Like most men, he found difficulty in getting his women to be exactly as he wanted them to be. Unlike most, however, he seems to have been unable to come to terms with this. It may be that writing Emile was his response: a fantasy curriculum was designed which would produce women in an unblemished form, prepared to play their proper role.

Instead of this easy, dismissive interpretation, however, it seems more fruitful to try to see why the kind of liberal educational philosophy for which Rousseau is justly reputed could accommodate or even entail such an impoverished curriculum for girls. His unabashed espousal of what we now call 'sexism' provides a conveniently dramatic prompt for the question: Is there something in child-centred education which lends support to such a conservative position and which obstructs the development of more radical views? To explore this question effectively we must move beyond Rousseau to more modern, and widely accepted, statements of child-centred thinking.

THE APPEAL TO SCIENCE

The essence of the child-centred critique of traditional schooling is that its methods are 'ill-matched to' or 'not in harmony with' the nature of those whom it purports to educate. So progressive writers from Rousseau onwards have spent much time and space explaining to readers what children are really like, how they develop, and how they learn.

The picture of the child presented in typical child-centred writing is one of a natural learner who is keen to find things out and anxious to make sense of his world. The objection that this view is at odds with the experience of many teachers is brilliantly deflected in a way that confirms the progressive's perception of both child and school. Pupils may in practice seem reluctant to learn, but this, it is argued, is due to their original disposition being thwarted and perverted by a repressive and unintelligent process of schooling. The devastation caused by educational traditionalism can be demonstrated by observing that five-year-olds enter school keen, interested, eager to learn and noting that after 15,000 hours of schooling they emerge cynical and indifferent. This loss of interest is seen not as a natural development, but as something pathological which requires diagnosis.

One important part of the answer has been to say that while each child is an instinctive researcher, the form that his enquiries would naturally take bears little resemblance to the subject-based divisions of knowledge that make up the traditional

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curriculum. To replace this the child-centred educationist advocates a curriculum which is based on the child's needs and interests, and which takes proper account of the nature of the child and the way he develops. Hence the Plowden Report's famous declaration:

At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy... have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the nature of the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him. [16]

But what is the nature of a child, or indeed the nature of a human being? And how is it to be known? A reading of Rousseau's Emile is useful here if it serves to alert the unwary to the problems of characterising this kind of foundation objectively. What is transparent in Emile is the extent to which Rousseau's account of woman's needs and nature was influenced by his view of the ideal society. Perhaps the only thing that can be said in Rousseau's defence is that he was at least open in his claim that women were designed for a specific and subordinate role, and that this traditional social/sexual arrangement was one which he saw as desirable.

Where the social premise is suppressed, however, it is harder to challenge what is presented as 'fact'. In 1944 the Norwood Report claimed that there were three kinds of pupil, each needing a different kind of education. Some children were said to be "interested in learning for its own sake" and "able to grasp an argument". There were others whose "interests and abilities lie markedly in the field of applied science or applied art" for whom "subtleties of language are too delicate". And there was a third type whose mind "must turn its knowledge or its curiosity to immediate (practical) test" [17]. One cannot resist the conclusion that such perceptions are determined by the desirability of having children enter a stratified adult society at one of three levels. Similarly, racist governments which argue about the difference in nature between whites and blacks and the consequent differences in their respective needs are inevitably influenced by what they see as the proper role of blacks in society. Wherever a subordinate role is envisaged, a limited and limiting curriculum is deemed appropriate. So the concept of 'education according to nature' can be a reactionary dictum as well as a reforming one depending on the political perspectives of the user.

Today child-centred theory tries to avoid these quicksands of subjectivism by basing itself on the rock of science. Modern statements of progressivism are pre-occupied with demonstrating that their preferred approach is derived from empirical research. The Primary Memorandum was seen by its authors as being "built round Piaget" [18], and the Plowden Report parades the names of a number of psychologists in sections headed 'The Children: their growth and development' and 'Children learning in school'. Accounts of the child's nature which could once be dismissed as the spurious views of armchair philosophers could now be presented as established scientific fact [19]. The progressives' belief that they have science on their side is the modern educational equivalent of an army's belief that it has God on its side--and it is equally good for morale. Teachers who adhere to traditionalist ways come to be seen as simply ill-informed about relevant scientific findings.

The Primary Memorandum neatly summarised this outlook:

The pattern of education in the primary school years must.. . above all have regard for the nature of the child and for the way he grows and develops during this period. In recent years research has yielded a considerable amount of information on these very points, and if education at the primary

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level is to meet the child's needs and interests, this body of knowledge must exercise a decisive influence on the attitude and practice of teachers. [20]

Two years later, the Plowden Report echoed the central idea:

Knowledge of the manner in which children develop... is of prime importance, both in avoiding educationally harmful practices and in introducing effective ones. In the last 50 years much work has been done on the physical, emotional and intellectual growth of children. There is a vast array of facts... [21]

In their enthusiastic embrace of developmental psychology, both documents fail to show any critical awareness of the limitations of this kind of empirical investigation. There seems to be a naive supposition (or perhaps a hope) that the child-centred approach to education can be justified without introducing evaluative non-scientific considerations. This paper now raises the question of how far one can legitimately get on the basis of observational studies, and examines the danger of being guided by existing patterns of child development.

NEEDS AND INTERESTS REVISITED

R. F. Dearden has drawn attention to the fact that careful observation of children is sometimes seen as capable of revealing their 'needs'. As Dearden points out, a need is not a characteristic that can be observed or noted simply by empirical methods: to identify a child's needs one must go beyond Plowden's 'vast array of facts'. Someone's having a need involves an assumed purpose or desired end which can be achieved by fulfilling the 'need'. Now there may in practice be no difficulty in establishing what is needed where the relevant purpose or desired end is beyond dispute. That a starving man needs food is obvious because it is clearly better that people should live rather than die. Equally a steeplejack needs a good head for heights because his job is defined in terms of working at a great distance from the ground. We may make a logically similar claim about inanimate objects. If a television set shows a pictureless screen then it needs to be repaired. This claim seems beyond argument not because everyone attaches a positive value to television programmes, but because showing a moving picture is what television sets are for. The purpose of a television set is built into its design. But the purpose of a human being (beyond such basic objectives as keeping alive) is not self-evident. Consequently the goals to be realised by education are subject to debate of a kind that cannot be settled by empirical research. As Dearden puts it:

One has to look behind statements of need to the values that are guiding them, for it is here that the issue substantially lies. [22]

Dearden is less satisfactory when he goes on to suggest "giving up talk about a curriculum based on children's needs" on the grounds that "every curriculum is a needs-curriculum". While it may be true that all educational programmes could be characterised in such terms, child-centred educationists are not making a wholly vacuous point. They are surely advocating attending to the needs of the child, rather than to the needs of government or the needs of industry. Yet it will be argued later that their inability to deal adequately with these broader social considerations constitutes a significant weakness which requires analysis. Dearden himself, however, seems here to be falling in too readily with the assumption that 'needs' must be not the needs

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of society but the individualistic kind which studies of children purport to reveal. Nevertheless, Dearden's basic point holds good: what we judge children to need will depend on how we think they ought to develop. This question is not rigorously pursued by the Plowden Report which instead contents itself with the different question of how children actually do develop.

We have noted that in child-centred education 'interests' are often linked with 'needs' to provide a dual organising principle for the curriculum. However, the notion of 'interests' is a straightforward one, and there is no logical difficulty in establishing empirically who has what interests when. Following Rousseau's report that girls like sewing and playing with dolls, it will now be useful to go on to examine some other observations made by progressives about female interests.

The idea of education which caters for each child's interests suggests designing a curriculum which allows choice between different activities according to the child's actual preferences. The school which developed this principle as far as it would go was A. S. Neill's Summerhill. Neill is generally seen as the most radical of child-centred educationists, and he consistently argued that a child should spend his time pursuing whatever interested him. Despite some critical remarks about our patriarchal society, Neill's brief discussions of the differences between male and female remain at an alarmingly superficial level. He notes, for example, that girls are more concerned with their appearance and are less active in school management; and that boys do more damage because, unlike girls, their fantasy life requires pirate ships and gangster holdups. Yet he offers no account of why the sexes differ in these ways. However, when he goes on to suggest that boys may be more creative than girls he becomes more reflective and conjectures that he may have acquired this impression because at Summerhill there is a lot of material which boys are interested in but girls are not--radios, engines, and a workshop with iron and wood [23]. But he does not take the next step of asking why these different patterns of interest have arisen: he merely accepts them. Such a casual noting of these differences is hard to defend where every pupil's learning programme is directly determined by his or her actual interests.

The constraints of a more conventional classroom may impose limits on the scope for pursuing individual interests. Nevertheless, in its discussion of art and craft, the Primary Memorandum states: "There is no reason other than that of expediency why all the members of the class should be occupied on similar tasks." And it declares: "Railway and aeroplane modelling has a strong appeal for many boys, as does doll's house furnishing for girls" [24]. This line of thought is taken a step further when it is suggested that sewing techniques should be imparted to girls, but apparently not to boys. While the girls are learning sewing, the boys are no doubt learning sawing. This, after all, seems to be the logic of an interest-based curriculum. The question is whether educators should accept such one-sided patterns of interest as 'natural', or view them as an undesirable kind of development which ought to be corrected.

It is clearly not enough to establish what children's interests are. We must also ask ourselves such questions as: What kind of interests would we like children to have? And how ought their interests to develop? From these evaluative questions there is no escape, whatever may be urged to the contrary by those progressives who adhere to Neill's non-interventionist principles. Surely it is a mistake to think that if the teacher deliberately refrains from implanting or cultivating interests in pupils, these pupils will grow up in a kind of vacuum which will permit self-determination? Even within ' specially designed environments like Summerhill wider society brings its own pressures

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to bear. These need to be evaluated by the teacher so that he or she can decide whether they should be welcomed, or resisted, or provided with a counter-balance.

It is noteworthy that feminists do not shrink from making their evaluations openly by demanding a curriculum which encourages boys to develop an interest in cooking, and girls to develop an interest in metalwork. This proposal reflects a distinctive view of the kind of people feminists would like to have emerging at the end of the schooling process, and the kind of society that should be aimed for. Feminists have a vision of alternative social arrangements and relationships which are seen as morally superior to existing ones.

Moral and political ideals, however, are shunned by both the Plowden Report and the Primary Memorandum. How do they see the connection between today's pupils and tomorrow's society? We have seen in what they say about children the assumption that the way to proceed is to study what children are like and then design a curriculum which will reflect this. Similarly, in so far as it is deemed necessary to take society into account, it seems one should study the nature of the social environment and then ensure a good match between this and schooling's end-product. Thus the Primary Memorandum:

Education m u s t . .. have due regard... for the attainments, qualities and attitudes which society will expect of him as an adult. [25]

But what if society puts a premium on people who are grasping, competitive, selfcentred and uncaring? And what if society expects males to be dominant and females to underachieve? Such questions are simply not considered.

The Plowden Report underlines the need to predict what society will be like when primary school pupils leave schooling behind [26]. The perceived rate of social change, however, creates a difficulty which is ingeniously circumvented in both documents by arguing that education should make children adaptable. An unpredictable social order is to be matched by a curriculum for flexibility. As might be expected, there is no serious attempt to tackle the questions of how society ought to develop, and what contribution schooling could make to promoting such development.

CONCLUSION

Earlier in this paper it was claimed that the most basic charge levelled by progressives against educational traditionalism is that traditionalists are not adequately informed about the nature of children. The consequence of this is that the traditional curriculum is incorrectly designed and cannot succeed: the way to produce a soundly designed curriculum is to pay due heed to the scientific findings of developmental psychology.

This suggests that modern child-centred education is a technically superior version of the same thing: it does not involve a new and different view of what education is for. Despite expressions of egalitarian sentiment and vague talk of valuing the individual, it tries to avoid seeing education as a tool for changing society (or indeed for conserving it). From Rousseau to Plowden it has been anxious to demonstrate its own empirical foundations, but a science of childhood cannot see beyond what is. Psychologists may give us increasingly sophisticated accounts of how children actually do develop, but this is no substitute for asking 'How do we want them to develop?' Today's pupils constitute tomorrow's society; but questions about preferred social orders cannot even be considered in a scientific theory of education. It is a mark of the captivating power of child-centred educational theory that many liberals are only now

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