Pioneer Work with Maladjusted Children
- Author:
Maurice Bridgeland
Staples Press, ?3.95
Residential schools - their strengths, their weaknesses and, above all, the methods of their founders - are described in this book. In this field there have been a larger number of founders than permanent educational foundations.
Dealing with maladjusted children has been a particularly personal matter, undertaken by people with their own therapeutic methods; they have attracted a group of followers, not infrequently exploited them crassly in terms of financial return and hours of work, and evolved methods so unique that they could be transplanted or adapted into other settings only with great difficulty.
In the short biographies of these pioneers, Maurice Bridgeland often draws our attention to an unhappy childhood or adolescence. He does this not to suggest that the whole of their activity is a compensation for such experiences, but as a clue to their ability to understand the difficult behaviour of their charges. Officialdom does not appear in a very good light; often it is seen as pulling down the precarious edifice of delicately balanced relationships which is a school, without a sensitive appreciation of what is being attempted; but the Home Office and the Ministry of Education had a heavy responsibility in holding the balance between therapy and exploitation, and in ensuring that the one did not pass over into the other. It is notoriously difficult to appraise the work of contemporaries and a number of those whose work is described - such as Otto Shaw and A. S. Neill-are alive and working in their own ‘schools’ and some - such as Richard Balburnie - are working in what must be more difficult, a Community Home within a more ‘public’ framework.
Perhaps it would have been better if Maurice Bridgeland had confined himself to an appraisal of pioneer work which has been attempted and completed. The closing chapters are really a second book-or pamphlet-in which he argues the case for a new approach to the treatment of the maladjusted child; in the process he seems to feel that he must pass judgment on the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, on the Seebohm Report and on the legislation that has followed it. No easy task when the measures have not yet had time to work themselves out in practical terms.
This is a book well worth reading although it inevitably suffers from such a dual approach. The author is also somewhat handicapped by the attempt to find a way forward in the midst of an enormous legislative program whose effects on severely or slightly maladjusted children are by no means yet clear.
John Gibbs
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