32 pages
A5
ISBN-10: 0 948080 78 7
ISBN-13: 978 0 948080 78 4

Primary education today is the product of its past. Precisely because this is a truism it tends to blind us to just how deeply ingrained in current thinking and practice, and how impervious to challenge and change, some of the established ideas and structures have become.

The paper explores the emergence and impact of two most influential traditions in primary education, the elementary and progressive. It shows how current policy, as indeed much problematic legacies of these two more influential traditions in primary education, the elementary and progressive. It shows how current policy, as indeed much of the more general debate, fails to escape from the more problematic legacies of these two traditions and thus perpetuates recipes for this vital stage of education which, in terms of important matters like curriculum, pedagogy, funding and staffing, may be inadequate to the needs of the late 20th and early 21st century.

The paper is both a study of where primary education has come from and a stimulus to the debate about where it should be going. That debate, the author guesses, has been largely pre-empted by the recent policy process.