Still no pedagogy? principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary education

Abstract

This article revisits Brian Simon's 1981 Simon B (1981) Why no pedagogy in England? in: B. Simon & W. Taylor (Eds) Education in the eighties: the central issues (London, Batsford) 124 145 [Google Scholar] judgement that for deep‐seated historical reasons English education lacks a coherent and principled pedagogy. Given that since 1997 the tide of educational centralisation has added teaching methods to those aspects of schooling which the UK government and/or its agencies seek to prescribe, it is appropriate to test the continuing validity of Simon's claim by reference to a major policy initiative in the pedagogical domain: the government's Primary Strategy, published in May 2003. This article defines pedagogy as both the act of teaching and its attendant discourse and postulates three domains of ideas, values and evidence by which both are necessarily framed. It then critically assesses the Primary Strategy's account of some of the components of pedagogy thus defined, notably learning, teaching, curriculum and culture, and the political assumptions which appear to have shaped them. On this basis, the Primary Strategy is found to be ambiguous and possibly dishonest, stylistically demeaning, conceptually weak, evidentially inadequate and culpably ignorant of recent educational history. The article is an extended version of the last in the 2002–2003 Research Lecture series at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, and preserves some of the style of its initial mode of presentation.