Maieutic strategies convey  widwifery roles to teachers and the strategies towards the right-hand end of the continuum imply that a child’s natural desire to learn is helped to manifest itself as the child develops. Learnacy is part of a child’s psyche from birth and its development is the real business of a midwife-teacher. The pupilling processes accelerate the development. As one moves to the right along the continuum, towards  ultimate Emile-type activities, the methods become more inter-active, more pupil centred.  The pupil starts to take centre-stage.  Since there has to be close one-to-one contact as much as possible, this style of interaction requires intense effort.  It is a physically demanding and mentally challenging .  The smaller the class, the greater the interaction and more purposeful the learning and sharing of effort.  Smaller does not mean easier. The closer one gets to one-on-one pupilling the greater the learning outcomes. Q.E.D.

While pupils seldom select topics that they want to learn about during the course of the day, there are schools that try to operate on this premise. It’s a version of confidence trickery.  When pupils feel that they are learning what they want to learn, the world is their oyster, so the classroom becomes learning-attractive in every sense.  I only ever visited one school that verged on the extreme right-hand maieutic strategy.  It was a splendid infant school in a suburb of Bristol, England where quality teachers performed extraordinary confidence tricks.  The children really believed that they were doing what they wanted to do. The learning atmosphere was thick and it felt good.

Some people used to think that the term ‘open education’ referred to these child-centred activities to the right and, because some classrooms appeared as if there was chaos and too much freedom, they did not like it.  The term ‘open’ however applied only to school architecture , in places where teachers shared large spaces.  The use of ‘open’ as an learning description was a monumental blunder of the time, and its connection with  ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ teaching styles became a sterile discussion.  Critics meant ‘didactic’ versus ‘maieutic’ and did not appreciate the distinction nor the use of the terms nor what was happening in the schools that they seldom visited.