The document discusses the history and principles of progressive primary education, using the Eynsham County Primary School in Oxfordshire from 1965-1979 as a case study. Eynsham implemented open-plan classrooms, integrated learning days, family-style student groupings, and team teaching without a set curriculum. The school emphasized experiential learning, collaboration, and developing students' well-being over standardized testing.

1. Well-being and learning: what legal educators
and regulators can learn from progressive
primary education
Professor Paul Maharg
paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
1. Radical school education: a potted history
2. English primary school education post-WWII
3. A case study: Eynsham County Primary School, Oxfordshire,
1965-1979
4. Regulatory relationships in primary education
5. Comparison with Australian & UK HE legal education and
wellness research

3. John Dewey (1859-1952)
‘A democracy is more
than a form of government;
it is primarily a mode of
associated living, of conjoint
communicated activity.’
Democracy and Education
(1916)

4. Standard classroom c.1908. Would you like
to learn about measurement and volume this way?
Thanks to Mike Sharples,
http://tinyurl.com/6bzdgx

5. …or this way?
(Dewey’s Laboratory School, U. of Chicago, 1901)

6. Would you like to learn about history and
town planning this way?

7. … or by building a table-top town for a social life
history project? (Dewey’s Lab School)
http://tinyurl.com/59c93q

8. two origins of
contemporary learning theory
‘One cannot understand the history of education in the United States in
the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike
won and John Dewey lost.’
Lageman, E.C. (1989) The plural worlds of educational research, History of Education Quarterly, 29(2)
E.L.
Thorndike
John Dewey

9. E.L. Thorndike John Dewey
1. Educational psychologist Philosopher & educationalist
2. Theoretician & experimentalist Theoretician and practical implementer
3. Explored the dyadic relationship
between mind & the world
Interested in the arc between
experience & the world
4. Adopted as precursor of a behaviourist
approach to learning: assessment-led;
laws of effect, recency, repetition
Pragmatist approach to learning: prior
experience, ways of contextual
knowing; democracy & education
5. Emphasised teaching strategies Emphasised learning ecologies
6. Followed by: Watson, Skinner, Gagné;
outcomes, competence & instructional
design (ID) movements.
Followed by: Bruner, Kilpatrick,
standards movement, Constructivist
tradition.

10. • First kindergarten – opened 1837, Friedrich Fröbel
• Children played freely with blocks, bricks, tiles, shapes:
his school was designed for designers
• Developed the idea of freiarbeit and the educational value
of games.
Other approaches
• Montessori method
• Waldorf education
• Sudbury school
• High/Scope method
further back… kindergarten approaches

12. • Open-plan education
where spaces supported
activity & thinking
• School as teacher
• Vertical groupings, 5-11,
instead of classes
• Articulated a pedagogy
of six selves & three I’s…
‘I am sure that teaching is an art and that teachers are artists. The
teacher teaches what he is, more than what he knows, and as an artist,
involved and giving of himself with love.’ George Baines
distributed learning: the case study of Eynsham

13. 1. Open-plan building (the ‘articulate school’)
2. Integrated day
3. Family groupings of 40 children, aged 5-9
4. Team/co-operative teaching
Characteristics of the Eynsham school

14. All learning areas divided into bays:
Library Office Laboratory
Studio Kitchen House
Needleroom Music room Workshop
Theatre Withdrawing room
open-plan building

16. • No national curriculum, no LEA curriculum, no school curriculum
• Periods are blocks of time that are flexible if required. Breaks are
flexible: play and work are intertwined.
• Setting out and clearing up were part of the day’s activities for both
children & staff.
‘There is every effort made for the school to be a real community group
and to develop skills and abilities of individuals and help them develop
attitudes to enable them to be individuals yet concerned with the other
individuals in their community.’
Eynsham teacher
integrated day

17. • Family groupings of 40 children, aged 5-9.
• Vertically organised (so that children could take mentoring
roles) + parental conferencing & teacher observation.
Children from same families included in the group (unless
requested out) and the group became a family that moved
through time.
• Teachers facilitated, helped organise future work, gave
feedback to individuals & small groups, reviewed progress
with children.
family groupings

18. • Teachers formed a co-operative:
– helping each other teach
– meeting regularly to plan & discuss activities and
resources
• All teachers recorded their practice in daily diaries, which
for some became a record that fed into writing about
school activities.
• Teacher practice exemplified Dewey’s democratic
practices: ‘associated living’ & ‘associated thinking’
team teaching

19. curriculum objectives

20. Curriculum methods
& techniques

22. Six
selves
Three I’s
six selves, three i’s

23. ‘Curriculum is everything that happens to a child’

24. • HMI’s were central
• Power and authority was distributed between players
• Teachers were listened to.
• Politicians fairly distant:
‘First and most obviously the teachers gain from having their work seen by,
and bing able to discuss it with, someone who is a teacher himself, who
has seen the work of many other teachers and schools and who is not an
employee of the LEA. […] [The Inspectorate] is very proud of its traditions
of independent professional judgement and of its high standards. […]
[The HMI] does not go round preaching a doctrine […] He works by
influence not by authority.’ Blackie, J (1967). Inside the Primary School.
regulatory relationships?

25. ‘In all this activity [in the US], the dominant figures appear to be the
politicians, the professors, the research and curriculum specialists, the
engineers, and the publishers, rather than the teachers. The forces working
towards change come from the most part from outside schools.’
Bassett, G.W. (1970). Innovation in Primary Education. London, Wiley Interscience, 3.

26. 5.94 While almost all the classes undertook some practical work in art
and some crafts, there is a need for children to be taught to observe more
carefully and to record faithfully what they see and know. The emphasis
which has been placed on children using a wide variety of materials has in
some cases resulted in children working in a superficial way. Children need
time to familiarise themselves with the characteristics of particular materials
and to acquire some degree of mastery over essential skills and techniques. A
more carefully selected range of art and craft activities, worked at more
thoroughly, would enable children to reach higher standards in the execution
of their word and obtain more satisfaction from it. [Sentence in italics is
underlined; the whole passage has vertical marginal line and crosses.]
(Primary Education in England. A Survey by HM Inspectors of Schools (HMSO, Dept of Education & Science,
1978 , 65); copy in George & Judith Baines archive, IoE, UL.

27. ‘Vertical grouping offers many advantages to staff members. The infant-
school teacher does not face the terrible strain of coping with thirty-six or
even forty children who have never been to school before and who arrive,
frightened and uneasy, on the same day in September. More important,
vertical grouping establishes continuity in learning. The teacher who can
follow each child through two or more years of school is able to watch his
progress. She knows his interests, his likes and dislikes. In addition, she
knows the stages of development he has achieved and is sure of the next
steps he should take. […] She can establish deep and understanding
friendships with the children and maintain them over a period of time’.
Murrow, C., Murrow, L. (1971). Children Come First. The Inspired Work of English Primary Schools. American
Heritage Press, New York

28. Robin Tanner’s work

30. • Contrast:
• Class & curriculum methods, then and now?
• The concern for wellness and wholeness then in
Eynsham, and current legal education in all common
law jurisdictions?
• Regulatory structures, duties and relationships, then
and now?

31. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides