This book provides an engaging account of the histories and philosophies of early childhood education as developed by four pioneering female educators: Rachel and Margaret McMillan, Marian Montessori, and Susan Isaacs. It discusses their views that education can combat poverty and transform society by empowering children. The educators believed that children should be observed to understand their needs, and that play, outdoor activities, and child-centered learning are important. Their philosophies still influence modern early education practices around outdoor learning, child-centered pedagogy, play-based learning, and empowering children in their education.

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Book Review
Pioneers in Early Childhood Education (Routledge 2014) Dr.Patricia Giardiello
Reviewed by Dr David Evans, Fellow in Education, Liverpool Hope University
This book is an extremely engaging critical account of the history of early years’ pedagogy
from the perspectives of four pioneering female educators and their respective philosophies
of child development. They are Rachel and Margaret McMillan, Marian Montessori and
Susan Isaacs.
Dr Giardiello locates their pedagogical philosophies within a line of development stretching
back to Classical philosophers of Plato and Aristotle and Enlightenment philosophers of
Rousseau and Locke via more recent thinkers and practitioners such as Pestalozzi, Froebel
and Robert Owen.
Part 1 of the book focuses on the Enlightenment views of childhood where, on the one hand
Rousseau conceptualized the child as naturally and intrinsically good and able to develop if
left alone and, on the other hand, Locke regarded the child as a blank slate to be moulded into
the culture values of society. Two views of the child around which pedagogies could be
shaped. Consequently, Dr Giardiello is able to contrast the free developmental approach
favoured by Pestalozzi with the more corrective approach of Wilderspin which was
authoritarian and teacher centred. Having laid down early philosophical and pedagogical
foundations in Part 1, the second part of the book concentrates on the four female pioneers
themselves, highlighting their similarities and their different emphases in pedagogy.
The chapter on the McMillan’s depicts the lives of two remarkable sisters and early years’
educators who campaigned for social justice through the organization and practice of
education. This was because they held passionate convictions that education could liberate
children from the poverty and squalor of industrial Britain and provide them with social
capital for their future. Early years’ education was therefore deemed to be transformative for
later life. They established outdoor nursery education as an antidote to the pollution and
oppression of the industrial cities with free medical checks and free meals. They believed that
a healthy body could lead to a healthy mind and stand as a bulwark against social and
material deprivation through fresh air and good nutrition.

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Chapter 3 shows how their Italian contemporary Maria Montessori pursued a very similar
campaign against poverty and disadvantage in Italy. Montessori believed that education could
not only combat poverty and disadvantage but furthermore transform society. I sense that Dr
Giardiello’s depiction of Maria Montessori is more than just that of a socio-educational
campaigner against a contemporary situation of disadvantage and deprivation but also a
visionary wanting to create peace for the future by overcoming the malign values of
‘conquest, power and profit’ (page 81) which give rise to injustice. She wanted to create a
new ethical order of social morality to transform the society of the future. I feel that
Montessori’s debate regarding ethical values in education has contemporary echoes in our
time regarding the purpose of an education system in which schools are often seen as exam
factories.
Montessori’s view was also that the child had full democratic rights to participate in her/his
own education and was right at the centre of the process. The child could therefore decide
what and when to learn. Dr Giardiello shows how this philosophy can be traced forward to
the modern day with a current pedagogy of autonomous and independent learning and pupil
voice. Summerhill, it can be argued, is the apogee of this approach to pedagogy.
Chapter 4 focuses on Susan Isaacs with her emphasis on play as integral to learning. Like
Montessori, Isaacs believed that knowledge of the child was based on observation of
behaviours of the child rather than any pre-conceived opinions:- ‘---------everything educators
need to know about children is learned from children themselves, particularly through the use
of careful observations’ (page 93)
For Isaacs children revealed themselves completely in play and in play they develop their
emotions, their identity and their intellect by expanding the boundaries of their own situated
knowledge. Dr Giardiello here presents Isaacs, of all her female pioneers, as the eminent
intellectual debating and differing on an equal footing with Jean Piaget. She possessed an
immense intellectual baggage, first as a philosopher, then an educator and finally a qualified
psychoanalyst. She was able to critique Piaget’s stages of development from her own
professional experience based on real world observation rather than Piaget’s controlled test
conditions. As a result of this she took a position similar to Vygotsky where children learn
from their social context in collaboration with others rather than from fixed internal
mechanisms pre-determining development.

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The final chapter sums up the lasting legacies left by these pioneering educators: - the
McMillan’s outdoor education shaping current policies exemplified by EYFS emphasis on
outdoor play and the emergence of the Forest School movement; Montessori’s child centred
pedagogy and participatory rights exemplified in autonomous learning, parental involvement
and pupil voice; and Isaacs emphasis on play as integral to learning, at the time controversial
but now conventional in early education.
Finally Dr Giardiello concludes by concurring with Foucault’s ‘regime of truth’ which holds
that ‘Truth’ is shaped in the social world by practice and discourse rather than objectively
preceding them. This analysis comes at the end of the book rather than at the beginning but
nevertheless demonstrates that the ‘Truths’ constructed by our female pioneers of early
education were shaped by practice against a prevailing backdrop of oppression and
exploitation. We now know that it is unacceptable to send children down the mines or to
work in factories or to armed conflict. So in Foucault’s terms truth discourses have moved on
from the industrial revolution of the 19th century where these practices were totally
acceptable to today where they are not. Foucault views truth as a ‘moveable feast’ shaped by
discursive practice rather than by the objective and the transcendent. Therefore we can see by
this how the controversial and scandalous of one era can become the convention of another
and so the Foucauldian analysis is better placed at the end rather than the beginning. In this
way it does not detract from the deeply moral convictions of these four women, not based on
any Foucauldian transient relativity but on profoundly held beliefs and desires to campaign
for the good of humanity through education.
Dr Giardiello has written a very readable account and critique of early childhood education as
shaped by four influential female educators. She shows how their philosophies were
remarkably similar despite different emphases and demonstrates how they have shaped
current practice. This book is an essential guide to early childhood studies for both
undergraduates and trainee teachers, particularly as it links concepts and theories to practice
through systematic reflective questions and activities in each chapter. Furthermore the book
shows that educational practice does not somehow exist in a socio-historical vacuum but
emerges from history, often struggling against prevailing poverty, deprivation and social
disadvantage.
Dr David Evans September 2015