What is a progressive education?

The BBC School Broadcasting Council and the Education System 1935–1971

“…As Armfelt found; … few HM Inspectors and fewer experts ever found time to listen to the broadcasts … Moreover, the experts had a tendency to be guided more by their interests as experts than as members of a sub-Committee concerned with broadcasts. The sub-committees could not themselves be regarded as focal points of educational opinion … 33 Therefore the subject sub-committees were abolished and replaced by sub-committees based on age group; primary sub-committees I (5-7) and II (7)(8)(9)(10)(11), and secondary sub-committees I (11-13), II (13)(14)(15), and III (15 and older). This has generally been linked to both the 1944 Education Act, and the growing popularity of progressive, child-centred pedagogy.…”

“…8 The history of progressivism in education and its influence on broader ideas of childhood has been contested (Tisdall), as has the relationship between the media and elite ideas about education (Collini). 9 The Foundation of School Broadcasting…”

‘What a Difference it was to be a Woman and not a Teenager’: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain

“…Developmental psychological conceptions of childhood and adolescence exercised fundamental influence on teaching practice in post-war British state schools and on parenting advice manuals, as well as in other contexts such as child welfare services, as has been established by recent historiography. 30 In short, as the work of researchers such as Jean Piaget became more widely diffused and established in Britain than it had been in the interwar period, both childhood and adolescence were re-envisaged as segmented into discontinuous maturational stages. While Piaget himself had stressed that these age-linked expectations were related to the child's developmental rather than chronological age -so, in theory, a thirteen-yearold could operate with the intellectual capacity of an adult -in popular practice, these stages were taken as shorthand for how children and adolescents behaved, thought and understood.…”

“…And as Piaget developed his work, in collaboration with Bärbel Inhelder, into the 1950s and 1960s, he increasingly promoted a more rigid conception of developmental stages, especially as he became interested in how early neuroscientific findings might link the structural development of the brain to the sequence he had identified. 31 Far from being abstract intellectual debates, these ideas were eagerly taken up in discussions about childhood and adolescence in British educational institutions -for example, in the influential and widely read Plowden Report on Children and Their Primary Schools (1967). 32 They were also expressed in the practical provision of separate secondary schools for English and Welsh adolescents after the 1944 Education Act, and in the acceleration of provision of free separate secondary education in Scotland after 1936, before which about two-thirds of students remained in allage elementaries.…”

“…32 They were also expressed in the practical provision of separate secondary schools for English and Welsh adolescents after the 1944 Education Act, and in the acceleration of provision of free separate secondary education in Scotland after 1936, before which about two-thirds of students remained in allage elementaries. 33 This reframing of the teenage years made post-war adolescence very different from interwar adolescence. Both interwar and post-war adolescents developed distinctive youth cultures, enjoyed individual spending power -especially if they were young men -and were envisaged as experiencing a period of 'storm and stress'.…”