Primary Education (1959)

(page numbers in brackets)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages (i-xiii)
Foreword, Preface, Contents

Part 1 Historical
Chapter I (1-11)
Recent History of Primary Education

Part 2 The Primary Schools
Chapter II (15-26)
Introduction
Chapter III (27-36)
Nursery Schools and Classes
Chapter IV (37-55)
Infant schools
Chapter V (56-77)
Junior Schools
Chapter VI (78-105)
The Working of the School
Chapter VII (106-110)
Special Educational Treatment

Part 3 The Fields of Learning
Chapter VIII (113-116)
The Curriculum
Chapter IX (117-129)
Religion
Chapter X (130-134)
Physical Education
Chapter XI (135-178)
Language
Chapter XII (179-212)
Mathematics
Chapter XIII (213-246)
Art and Craft and Needlework
Chapter XIV (247-259)
Handwriting
Chapter XV (260-274)
Music
Chapter XVI (275-288)
History
Chapter XVII (289-313)
Geography and Natural History

Part 4 The Special Problems of Wales
Chapter XVIII (317-329)
Wales

Index (331-334)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1959
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

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(a) Their importance

Primary schools provide education for all children between the ages of five and eleven, and for some, comparatively few, also between two and five. The great and obvious physical changes in the children during that time are matched by mental and emotional changes of at least equal magnitude, complexity and importance. Children's growth is continuous from birth, and there is normally no abrupt change at any time.

In nursery and infant schools for some forty or fifty years, and in junior schools for at least twenty-five years, the principles and practice of education have been more and more based on knowledge of children and their needs. Every teacher in a primary school, therefore, must know children as the foundation of his work; his knowledge cannot be limited to the children of the age of those in his particular school. Teachers in nursery and infant schools must obviously know the relevant characteristics of children's development in the years before they come to school, while teachers of juniors are better able to understand the seven to eleven year olds if they know something of their growth from their earliest years. Some of a child's most fundamental needs and characteristic ways of learning persist, with gradual changes, throughout his childhood, though the manner of their expression, their relative importance in a child's life, and the ways in which an adult responds to or satisfies them, are different at different stages.

This Introduction draws attention to those aspects of children's development which are most significant for education. It is not in any sense a full or systematic account of young children, and needs at every point to be amplified and supplemented from experience and further reading.

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(b) Some aspects of children's characteristics and needs before five

(i) Emotional and social attitudes

The attitudes which children form in early years are mainly emotional and concerned with their relationship with other people. A child, for proper development, must feel safe and be sure of affection. During the earliest months of his life these needs are best satisfied by his mother or someone who can as nearly as possible take her place. From experiencing this love and care a young child is much more likely to develop the confidence necessary when, in due course, he has to leave the family circle and meet the wider world. If he is deprived of it, he may feel the effects through many later years. It is as though some sense of deprivation persists in him, and, not having established himself securely at the centre, he seems unwilling to venture outwards or to offer and receive affection, and he is not in a state of mind when he can use his abilities to the full.

The exclusive relationship with his mother lasts only a short time, and then a child becomes part of the family group. The same principles hold, but affect a greater number of people. It is now not only how people treat him, but how his mother and father, brothers and sisters treat each other that makes a lasting impression. The quality of the home, not only of what is said and done there, but even more of what is taken for granted, is a pervasive influence. It is the earliest and perhaps most forceful pattern that children perceive of what is to be accepted or refused, of what is good or bad in their world. But cutting through the need for care and protection is a child's need to achieve independence. He must be active and adventurous, though without security he does not venture far. From about the age of two he is willing to be away from his mother for increasingly long periods provided always that he has the safe retreat to her and to his home. As each new power grows, it is used to enlarge experience, from crawling to climbing and jumping, from the jerky, uncertain movements of the baby's limbs to the comparative competence of the older child. He enjoys these growing powers and is eager to exercise them. If he is fortunate he has space in which to roam and finds all kinds of materials to play with. Good parents, little by little, relax control as their child shows he can be independent; all through babyhood and

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childhood, and on to adolescence, understanding parents and teachers are continually, and indeed proudly, surrendering fresh territory to a child's autonomy.

Children who have not been allowed or encouraged to achieve the independence of which they are capable may become apathetic or unduly timid; or, on the other hand, they may become unpleasantly belligerent because they feel they cannot achieve anything without a struggle against authority. Similarly the much spoilt child who has not been allowed to have any independent life may take refuge later in laziness, boasting or even in assuming ill-health in an attempt to cover up his disappointment at finding that others will not accept him at the valuation to which he has been accustomed.

From a very early age a child experiments with personal relationships. He tries out various kinds of behaviour to see what happens. What adults call disobedience, for example, is often quite free from ill-intent, and it generally ceases as a child grows older and has satisfied himself of his powers and accepted his relations with other people.

It is not until they are about four or five years of age that children play much together, though many like being in each other's company, show a deep interest in each other's appearance and activity and may even choose one or two of their companions as personal friends. Some children are not yet capable of any but casual and short-lived cooperation; yet they need the experience of being with their peers and are emotionally handicapped if they are deprived of it.

Some ways of living with others are learnt early. For example, any group of little children finds it hard to share a coveted toy or to be aware that others want a part of something which each one greatly enjoys. But, if an understanding adult intervenes gently and shows them how to take turns, they quickly learn, and they learn too to accept less of something in order that others may have a share. This sort of experience is one of the roots of our later ideas of justice.

(ii) Intellectual growth

Intellectually, also, the years before five are of outstanding importance. The first of man's great achievements is learning to use his senses. They are powers that he has to spend years in developing, and few of us have developed all our senses as fully

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as we might. A small child of two or three with normal vision cannot judge distance and rate of movement and he probably cannot distinguish, as we do, colours, shapes or sizes. All these things are learnt by experience, in some cases after a child reaches school age. In hearing, a very young child does not know what various sounds mean; he seems unable to distinguish musical notes or to repeat in tune a note sung to him.

Young children therefore need plenty of opportunities to use and develop their senses. They need things to handle of different textures, shapes and weights, and things to pull to pieces; they need objects of all sorts and colours to see, things that they can bang and shake to make a noise, as well as to hear songs and music and other sounds. Touch, taste and smell they enjoy, and they depend on these senses perhaps more than they ever will again. Through this variety of sensory experience, both their knowledge and their powers of discrimination grow, and become at once the foundations and the means of their further learning.

The urge to do what develops his senses comes from within a child's own nature, and with it goes what may be called intellectual curiosity, an urge to understand his environment, which makes him start exploring it very early. His brief observations, with so many quick changes of attention, and the apparently random ceaseless activity, may not seem to the adult to have much value; yet without them a child could not get to know his world and his own powers. It is important, therefore, that he should have all reasonable freedom of movement in a safe environment where he can learn from the activities and the explorations to which his curiosity drives him.

(iii) Language

A child makes an appreciable step forward in the specifically human world as he develops the power of language. He attends to speech from a very early age, and instinctively responds to tones of voice. From his early months until he is some four years old he is engaged in the task of learning a spoken language. He learns it by imitation, prompted by need and by the satisfaction his achievements in it can bring him. Gradually words are sorted out, and he begins to use language to communicate what he experiences. Gradually questions are understood and answered, and, especially from about three onwards, a child himself begins to ask questions.

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At five, a child in a fortunate home has usually mastered language adequate for a very wide range of needs, and is rapidly learning more. He has lost his babyish articulation, and for a year or more has been using sentences and speaking grammatically, though entirely unaware of any grammatical rules. He can understand and give simple instructions. Few phenomena of learning are more remarkable than this achievement, yet it is rare that any adult with a young child thinks of himself as consciously teaching him language. In fact most children from three or four onwards provoke the teaching they need, demanding repetition of words, of rhymes, or stories - asking questions often for the sole purpose, it seems, of hearing the answer in another form. They can be heard practising - speaking, singing, repeating words, rhymes and rhythms, finding pleasure in the making of noises and increasing satisfaction in what the growing powers of speech can command. A child with whom no one talks, or to whom no one listens, or with whom no one shares the delights of speech, is deprived indeed.

Language is not only something learnt - it is a way of learning. From the beginning it helps to distinguish, discriminate and formulate experience and is an important medium of remembering, imagining and thinking. It is not surprising that, if a child is backward in talking or in understanding language, in comparison with his development in other ways, he may feel frustrated and may suffer many kinds of difficulties in behaviour. But it should not be assumed that a child's slowness in developing speech is a sign of general backwardness or of dull wits. These may be the cause, but are by no means always so. Children develop in various ways and sometimes their abilities show themselves in an unusual order. A child learns his mother tongue in the context of experience, and what he experiences gives to language its meaning and feeling.

(iv) The ability to make things

The power to use things and materials constructively often comes somewhat later than talking. At two years old most children may still seem to have no idea of it, and, for example, appear to be throwing their bricks about, either without the idea of building with them or without the ability to do so. Gradually, out of all this apparently aimless, desultory activity, there emerges the power to make something, especially if the child is working

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alongside older children. But children still show little dexterity or forethought. They try out and experiment, and, until they are four or five, and often beyond that age, what they make is what the material and their manipulation of it suggest. It may be said by them to be three or four different things in turn. They seldom plan ahead, and part of their excitement and satisfaction lies in their interest in what may emerge from the work of their hands.

In the course of this constructive activity a child faces hazards and comes to grips with increasingly complex situations. As he grows he achieves new satisfactions. As more knowledge comes and more powers ripen, he leaves old ways as he finds better ones, and old satisfactions as these are overtaken or absorbed by others more interesting, though from time to time he will go back for a while to the things and the ways he has outgrown, especially when he is tired or perplexed.

(v) Quick changes of attention, absorption in the present, and the freshness of experience

Another characteristic of young children which is educationally important is their comparative lack of any continuous purpose and their frequently rapid changes of attention. Because of this, their activities cannot be directed by someone else for more than a very short time. In a healthy child this frequent instability of attention is accompanied by continuous physical activity. A young child's attention is all the more easily distracted from one thing to another because so much around him is to him fresh and new.

A child of three or four has little or no sense of time as we understand it. He does not look forward any more than he plans his activities ahead. He lives in the present; his memories are short and often confused, and the future is no more than a vague tomorrow which has but little power to influence his today. But even a very young child becomes aware of a regular rhythm associated with his needs - of eating, sleeping and playing - and comes to expect these things to happen more or less at the same intervals.

Yet, now and then, a small child will become engrossed in something he is doing, and his attention and effort may, on occasion, last a surprisingly long time. This is generally when he has found something absorbing because it is exactly at his own

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growing point, as it were - the very thing that extends his powers just sufficiently for his satisfaction.

(vi) Reality and fantasy

Another characteristic of young children is their scant grasp of what adults call reality combined with an increasing desire to sort out the 'real' from what is 'not true'. They do not yet know what sort of things 'really' happen, or what kind of creatures 'really' exist in the world; and the adult is not always helpful. Stories about talking pigs are not meant to deceive, but a little child who has never seen a pig may not quite understand the creature portrayed, and many an anxious and puzzled child has interrupted a story to ask if it is 'really true'. He does not enjoy it any the less if he knows it is fabrication, but already he feels it to be important to know which realm he is in.

This same uncertainty makes it difficult for him to keep the product of his own imagination distinct from reality. A child gradually begins to appreciate the difference between truth and make-believe but he should not for a long time be expected to be as accurate in his statements as an older child.

(vii) Play

Nearly all the waking hours of young children are spent in play, and most of their experiences which have been described are to them part of it. Spontaneous play is so natural to them that, if they do not play, we think with good cause that something must be wrong. If they are deprived of it they are unhappy and their growth is warped. It is their way at once of finding out about the world they live in and of establishing themselves in it. To play is intrinsically satisfying to them; and when any particular play ceases to be so they change to another which is. Short though each span may be, it engages for the time being their whole attention and provokes great energy and concentration. 'Children's plays are not sports', said Montaigne, 'truly they should be noted as their most serious actions'.

Children from babyhood play with people as well as with things. When children and adults play together, children take their part spontaneously and willingly as long as the adult does not dominate them. They enjoy some play of this kind, though they play a great deal alone; yet even so, they like to be within earshot of a sympathetic and responsive adult.

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Young children also play at being other people, and from the age of about three heighten their imaginings by dressing up and using properties of all kinds. Their imitation is of adults in the life around them, though already in these early years, too, imagination roves far. Already, too, their interests and attitudes are being influenced by what they imitate of what they see and hear, and they seem to show a penetrating insight into the ways of those they know.

Besides being an important source and means of learning, play for children is also remedial. When the impact of their surroundings becomes too difficult children seek refuge in play as a relief from their anxiety. Through it they often find their own way of dealing with what is unmanageable or intolerable, putting their perplexities into acceptable proportions and forms. For example, they may play at being the thing or person that scares them and so overcome their fears, seeking some outlet for what they cannot manage within reality. All this is quite normal arid natural. In cases when children are emotionally disturbed their play may reveal to an understanding adult what their problems at that time are and suggest where they need help.

Sometimes a child's play may seem to us unenterprising and repetitive. It may be that he needs the stimulus of an adult's help to discover the next interest - but sometimes he is simply finding rest and relief by doing over and over again something that is comforting because it is so familiar.

Some of a child's play is imitative of adult work, and while we say 'he works hard at his play', he plays at 'doing work'. But already his notions about work are being fashioned by what he sees around him. It is therefore important that he should see people enjoying what they have to do, or at least doing it with good will and cheerfulness. He himself is eager to share in jobs in the house or garden and can undertake and carry out in his own fashion tasks which are within his power to do; his efforts add greatly to his sense of importance, satisfaction and self-respect.

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The pre-school years of a child's life are important to the teacher because in them lie the roots of the growth that will be nurtured during schooldays. In that growth many of the needs and characteristics of the youngest children persist throughout the primary school period, though with changed emphasis and proportion, and expressing themselves in different forms.

By eleven, boys and girls will usually have achieved a relatively high degree of independence, self-reliance and competence; but they still need, as they have needed all their lives, the security and support of a home and the affectionate care of adults whom they trust. Throughout schooldays the teacher shares with parents this place of importance in a child's life. On the quality of the relation between teacher and pupil, and on the degree of mutual respect and confidence which it engenders, depends the effectiveness of what is taught and learnt.

All through the primary school period, ways of learning which were noticeable in children's early years still persist, increasingly supported and strengthened by knowledge and by many new skills, especially those of language and greatly developed dexterity of limbs and control of body. Children still learn through exploring and investigating; they are still driven by curiosity and seem often possessed of a tireless energy. Memory and imagination are active, and the children's physical endurance and competence are matched by their capacity to invent things and schemes in which to use them.

Just as in his early years a child's behaviour towards other people was largely determined by the way he himself was treated and by the ways in which he saw people behaving to each other in his home, so in school the manners and personal relationships of the teachers with each other and the children, and the general sense of what is expected of each, are the sources and support of all social and of much moral education.

The children's apprehension of time - coherent recollection of their own past, comprehension of historical time and the power to regard the future as having compelling power for the present - remains immature until nearly the end of the primary period, though far ahead of what it was when they first entered

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school; and much of their experience still may have the vividness and importance of something completely novel.

Language, of course, remains enormously important, and it is now not only speaking and listening (though these retain their priority) but reading and writing also, which add countless opportunities for vicarious experience of all kinds, and for expression and communication. Literature gradually comes into its own. And as in babyhood, so throughout childhood, the richest sources of language are in experience, often shared and talked about with other people, and of a kind which gives both the stimulus and the words with which to express it.

All through their childhood children play, often vigorously and increasingly with a definite purpose, both in school and out of it, and continue through play to learn and to express their thoughts and feelings. All kinds of play - the play of physical activity, of exploration and construction, of imitative or imaginative make-believe, of compensation and relaxation - persist, and they persist in some measure throughout life. But as a child grows up, play becomes more sharply differentiated from 'work', which is the activity controlled by another, or geared to certain external aims. During childhood there is a gradual transition from the baby's egocentric life of play towards the adult's occasional hours of freedom. Yet work well done, and for a purpose which the children appreciate, can be found to bring satisfaction in achievement and absorption as great as that of play, and the play of the junior child can command concentration, thought and energy as great as that needed for work. The attitude of children to tasks which they must undertake, whether they want to do so or not, very largely depends on what has come to be expected of them and on the attitude they see expressed in the behaviour of other people.

The schools expect the children to show an increasing awareness of what needs to be done, growing initiative in undertaking it and sturdier persistence in carrying it out; in short, an ability, according to their age and capacity, to play a responsible part in their world.

(i) The 'Normal'

As children grow up, the differences between them increase in every way. Even the youngest differ widely in their natural endowments, their upbringing and their experience, and these

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are influences which produce a great diversity of talents and temperaments among individuals and make each child a unique person. These differences and the diversity to which they give rise are not always obvious; they can only be discovered through patient study of individual children. Yet their discovery is supremely important for the teacher since they show how wide are the limits of normal development and how varied its forms. An understanding of the variety of individual differences among the pupils in his class is the teacher's starting point. Normal development, whether, for example, physical or intellectual, covers a whole range of variations and is no longer thought of as a single average height or weight or test score at particular ages. It is quite normal for children of the same age to develop at different rates and for some children to develop quickly in certain respects and more slowly in others. A child may be more gifted in art or music than in other fields, slow in learning to talk and to read but precocious in learning to walk and in making friends. Moreover, it is normal for a child to develop not at a steady rate from year to year, or even from month to month, but at an uneven pace. An education which attempts to provide fully for such a diversity of aptitudes and abilities must develop practices to deal with these diversities.

The norm - for example the average score - of a given age-group or class in tests of school work provides the teacher with a point from which he can readily assess the individual differences between individual pupils. It does not provide an arbitrary goal which all children should reach. Both a child's achievement and the standard which he can be expected to reach must be judged by what is appropriate to his stage of development and to what he can do when well taught.

In Chapters III to V the work of the nursery, infant and junior schools is described, with some indication of the setting in which it takes place. Some matters which are relevant to all primary schools are discussed in Chapters VI and VII, while the content and planning of each field of study - the curriculum in each of its different aspects - is dealt with in Part 3. Little is said, therefore, in Chapters III, IV and V about individual subjects of

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the curriculum, except as each appears piecemeal in the daily life of the children in school.

Further, education is discussed as though all children between five and eleven were in schools separately provided for those between five to seven years of age and for those between seven and eleven, and as though all children below five attending school were in separate nursery schools or classes; but in fact, as was shown in Part 1, this is by no means the case, and it is only for convenience in description that the discussion is so arranged. It is important for the reader to realise that what is said about the education of children in a separate infant school applies equally to the education of children of infant school age wherever they may be; similarly the principles and practices described in nursery schools and classes, and in junior schools, are relevant to the education of children of under five, or of seven to eleven, whether in separate schools or not. In any case there is a healthily wide variety of practice among schools in similar circumstances. Where a school caters for more than one section of the primary age range, and especially, as in rural schools, where it provides for comparatively few children between five, or even under, and eleven years of age, and does so with only one or two teachers, arrangements and procedures may have to be considerably modified to meet the varying circumstances. Some reference is made to these modifications in the following chapters. But the basic educational principles hold throughout, and, where the teachers understand the needs of children at different stages, the resulting practices are not fundamentally different, whatever the type of school.