Progressive Theories Since the 1920s

Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 8 – Progressive Theories Since the 1920s

This chapter discusses the burden placed upon English teachers by progressive educationalists. The responsibility for reviving a genuine folk culture was added to the Newbolt Committee’s demands for a liberal education for all. Acceptance of progressive theories – which emphasised children as artists – was added to the developing ideology of English.

• Educational innovators were few in Britain and identified with small eccentric schools or low-status infant and junior stages.
• R.J.W. Selleck in English Primary Education and the Progressives 1914-1939 (1972).
• Progressives’ were hostile to old system of class learning and promotion of cognitive skills.
• There was a gradual acceptance of progressive theories in 1920s (caused by reaction to WW1, unemployment, distaste for urban conditions).
• Social and economic conditions plus anti-industrialism strengthened progressives’ beliefs in the value of personal responses, personal participation and personal creativity;
• Caldwell Cook‘s recommendations about play, delight in school work and spontaneity. Quotes Caldwell (from The Play Way): “Our people will continue to live as a race of petty and exploited town­ dwellers, having their homes in tenements, slums and villas, seeking their amusement in the music hall, and the cinema palace and the gramophone, their sport in the vicarious football of hirelings, their food in tins and packets, and their literature and politics in halfpenny newspapers bribed by the advertising manufacturers of soap, drink, tobacco, underwear and patent medicines.”
• Perceived evils: war, unemployment, squalid urban housing, mechanised work and leisure.
• Focus shifted to emotions and the instincts of childhood: hearts not heads (A.S. Neill).
• Selleck says Sir Percy Nunn “gave the progressives a textbook”. Nunn argued that feelings are “the real springs of educational progress whether in learning or conduct”.
• Progressives presented a romantic, optimistic view of the child who, in a loving relationship with his teacher who encouraged him to develop his uniqueness through involvement in the arts, would grow best without adult interference.
• Margaret McMillian from 1923 preface to Education through the Imagination: “The child has what many grown­ up folk have lost, the sense of beauty, which is, as it were, a short cut to the kingdom.”
• 1920s saw development of child study as a field of research and experimental schools established.
• The Handbook of Suggestions (1927) said Literature was “not merely a means of escaping from practical life, but… a means of coping with it”.
• Teachers of the traditional type were criticised by Finch and Kimmins in The Teaching of English and Handwriting (1923), for neglecting children’s “creative activities and expression”.
• Contributors to the Spens Report (1939) reminded readers that in 1931 they had recom­mended that the curriculum “should be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored“.
• Spens Report: “It has been said that a man who has learnt to love either a poem or a person he at first dis­ liked has gone far on the road to salvation.”
• Spens Report: “this love can, like religion, be ‘caught’ but not taught… not by easy raptures or didactic exhortation, but by a kind of inward glow which warms all those who come in contact with it.”
• Margaret Phillips The Education of the Emotions (1937).
• Sir Herbert Read (1946): “… the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to the suppression of spontaneous creative ability in the individual.”
• Marjorie Hourd – Education of the Poetic Spirit (1949)
• Marion Richardson – Art and the Child (1948)
• In Peter Abbs – English for Diversity (1969) – “the teacher must accept what the children write. There should be no marking, no assessing…. This is essential if the teacher is to create an atmosphere in which imagination thrives.”
• Brian Way – consideration of the value of drama in every child’s development: “They [the arts] are concerned with the development of intuition, which is no less important than intellect, and is part of the essence of full enrichment of life both for those who have intellectual gifts and those who have not…”
• Quotes Herbert Read (1949): “Drama is absolutely essential in all stages of education. Indeed I re­gard it as that form of activity which best co-ordinates all other forms of education through art. Since, in my view, education through art should be the basic method in all education whatsoever, it can be seen that too high a value cannot be placed upon Child Drama.”
• Mathieson suggests that drama has had the “most extravagent claims made for it”.
• Mathieson: “Progressive educators have added to the growing burdens of English teachers by making some extraordinary assertions about the redemptive powers of drama. Because of drama’s emotional, physical and social potential, its ap­parent reflection of real life, it has tended to become equated with the quality of life itself. Recently, as anxiety has deepened about the school experiences of the less-able pupil, supporters of drama (like those writers nostalgic for past ages whose superior art suggested, to them, superior ways of life) assume that good drama teaching is the direct equivalent of admirable living.”
• An important result of progressive theories has been the redefinition of the teacher’s role. New hopes for the child’s vision to create a better world entailed need for teachers capable of fostering a child’s development, ideally through the arts.
• Both Herbert Read and Marjorie Hourd were influenced by Martin Buber’s work (Between Man and Man) on the relationship between teacher and pupil. They placed an “almost religious” responsibility on teachers.
• Quotes Marjorie Hourd: “The aim of the literature lesson is… to provide a means towards a fuller development of personality”.
• Mathieson: “During the 1920s, however, widespread acceptance of progressive theories produced new versions of the ideal teachers. This acceptance involved embracing the romantic view of childhood, a high valuation of individuality, and hostility to conformity and standardisation. In wider society, moreover, developments in art, music and literature which challenged established traditions were reinforcing progressive educators’ emphasis on spontaneity, the personal and the unconscious. Thus, the somewhat muscular notion of missionaries propounded in 1921 gave way, during the 1930s, to the elusive image of the ‘whisperers’. This in no way, however, meant a decline in the English teacher’s importance; accom­panying the developing notion of the validity of the child’s vision are different but weightier definitions of the good teacher’s responsibility. For the child to fulfil his visionary creative potential, thus playing a vital part in our achievement of a brighter future, his teacher needed special spiritual qualities.”
• David Holbrook – The Exploring Word – argues for the need for personal maturity of teachers.
• Quotes Holbrook: “Education, especially the education of literacy, creativity and response to works of the imagination, is a natural subjective process, largely intuitive. It is also a process to do with love, with giving and receiving, and with sympathy and insight… as teachers, we must up­ hold the significance of intuition and “touch”, and resist ignorance, misunderstanding and such impulses of intellectual hostility as threaten the great creative movement in English teaching…”
• Holbrook believed that teaching is a “creative process” which, to be effective, depends heavily upon “intuition”. His discussion of English teaching is largely in terms of personal relationships: “the meeting place between the imperfect struggling personality of the English teacher, and the incomplete and wrestling personality of the child”.
• Fred Inglis – The Englishness of English Teaching – claims there is an indefinable personal quality, an arresting life-style that characterises an outstanding English teacher.
• Mathieson: “Writers like David Holbrook and Fred Inglis are continuing to ask for a special sort of person to teach English, to inspire enthusiasm for literature and, more importantly, to reach the child’s inner being and draw out his creativity. The contemporary missionary is seen as a complex, intense, introspective personality who, in the classroom, has the charismatic power to stimulate his pupils’ sincere self-expression.”
• Quotes Fred Inglis (about English teachers): “His responsibility is to the experience of his children, their minds, emotions and spirits, and to the value of his age, his history and the moral sense of his race. He needs a peculiar responsiveness to his children—almost, one is tempted to say, the responsiveness of the artist to his art—and they need to know this in him. It is a matter of knowing the right sort of magic to lead one child from a closed alley of experience into an open one.”
• Mathieson: “A number of progressive notions inform these recommendations: reverence for childhood’s activities; a sense of need for adult responsibility; the supremacy of the inner, the im­plicit, private and intuitive over the public and explicit.”
• Progressive notion introduced that a teacher who fails to stimulate artistic creations is a failure (in terms of failing the child and the betterment of society through education).