A Progressive Education?: How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Hardback)

'Laura Tisdall’s recent book is an alternative, perhaps revolutionary, history of progressive education. Progressive education is usually associated with the left, social justice, and social progress. This book argues instead that progressive education in English and Welsh schools was only ever half-implemented, with dismal consequences for the groups for whom it was deemed most suitable. […] A Progressive Education? is bitter tale of the unintended consequences of when theory and policy migrate into experience and practice. It’s also one of the best histories of education I have read in a long time.'Laura Carter, University of Cambridge'This book provides a clear indication of both the competing elements of education in this period and the changes that took place in educational settings. Alongside this, Tisdall notes the challenges facing both students and staff – class, race, disability, and gender – and places the school, and the children and teachers, at the heart of the community, and children’s lives. This work will be an excellent source for historians of education and childhood in England and Wales in the post-war period, and adds a unique perspective to these histories during the twentieth century.'Family and community history'Laura Tisdall’s engaging monograph offers a detailed account of the emergence and decline of a particular vocabulary of ‘progressive’, ‘child-centred’ educational theory and practice in the long middle years of the twentieth century. Placing the theoretical frameworks through which children and adolescents were understood at the centre of her work, she is able to draw conclusions about the class and gender relations of teachers to their children.' Twentieth Century British History - .