Revisiting Susan Isaacs – a modern educator for the twenty‐first century

Abstract

Susan Sutherland Isaacs (1885–1948) was arguably the most influential child psychologist and educator of her British generation. Her work was studied by eminent contemporary academics, psychologists, philosophers and politicians. Her influence was international. She reached across the world to a generation of teacher educators who passed on her ideas to succeeding generations of primary teachers throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. She was a thoughtful and immensely erudite woman whose deep understanding of children’s thinking has been admired and discussed for nearly one hundred years. Her advice, under the pseudonym Ursula Wise, was much sought after by parents and nannies in the advice columns of the British magazine Nursery World. Susan Isaacs synthesised the work of earlier European and American educators into a particularly English package, suited to the practical bent of the English educator. Her work pre‐figures that of Piaget (whose early work she reviewed) and Vygotsky (whose work was translated from the Russian after her death). And always, at the heart of her work, lay the belief that deep observation was the key to understanding the complex and unique realities of individual children.

Keywords:

• Susan Isaacs
• early education
• history of education
• early education pioneers

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the University of Plymouth Faculty of Education for providing funding to support this research.