The way schools and teachers practice today are shaped by competing ideas of children and learning. Some of these ideas have their roots in history and religion; others are more recent and come from psychology, sociology or increasingly the government. All impact on how teachers look at the child in front of them. In Philosophy for Children there is a clear commitment to the concept of a competent, rights-bearing child; the child as constructor of their own knowledge, as a powerful interpreter of their own lives and rich in potential. Philosopher Mary John who has written extensively on the rights of the child asks us to look at children and see: …not the children’s needs and deficits… but their hopes and aspirations, their dreams, their visions and their untrammelled imaginings – as if these things mattered. Doing so will treat children and represent them as if they are people, powerful people, not as people in the making (John, 2003: 19).
Too often today teachers are forced to adopt a deficit model of the child as they are measured against age-related attainment and found wanting.
A deficit model is in direct contrast to the model that is envisages by the UNCRC (United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989) that supports a view of the child as rights-bearing and competent to make decisions about their own lives. In this article I identify three overlapping models of the child that are commonly held in the world of education and work against those who want to value children as competent people and rights-bearing.
The developing child
The requirements of schooling in England and Wales today take as its model what we might call the developing child. At the heart of the model is the ‘normal’ child against which the development of all children can be compared. A developmental approach takes an ‘ages and stages’ view of learning and according to this model, teachers must judge children as achieving ‘at, below or above’ what is expected when measured against the ‘normal’ child. The concept of the developing child as a biologically driven and universal phenomenon is widely criticised by psychologists and sociologists for its lack of attention to the social and historical contexts of childhood and the diversity of contexts in which children grow up. The assumption seems to be that children enter education on the lowest rung of the educational ladder where progression consists of a sequence of predefined linear goals, each needing to be achieved before moving on to the next. As a consequence of this model, children are commonly described in terms of what they can’t rather than what they can do – a deficit model of the child. This means teachers must compare each child’s development with everyone else of their age and cohort and report to parents where in the hierarchy their child is located. At crucial stages this hierarchy is determined by narrow tests with a particular focus on predetermined outcomes in literacy and numeracy. This desire to assess each child’s performance against that of their peers has inscribed a developmental view of children in our schools.
The goal for teachers and schools in this model is to ensure children succeed in the standardised tests. The results of the tests are used to judge not only children but also their teachers and their schools as successful or unsuccessful. Inevitably teachers find themselves teaching to the test. Such an approach to learning and teaching is simple and linear, it assumes learning follows predetermined sequential and predictable stages; it is mainly monologic, with one-way communication from teacher to child. It is important to remember that many teachers teach to the test because they want to prepare children for the experience rather than just the outcome, especially for children who end up extremely upset when subjected to the test for the first time.
Proponents of P4C challenge this developmental model as failing to see the rich potential and diverse achievements of all children and their capacity to be social actors in their own right. A key problem with the model for P4C practitioners is that the child is seen as an ‘adult-in-waiting’, always in the process of becoming rather than being a ‘full’ human already.