Harold Rosen (educationalist)

Rosen became a founder member of the Society for Storytelling. His passion for narrative remained compelled him to pass on his own story. Partly this was embodied in his memoir Are You Still Circumcised?: East End Memories. For most of his life, he wrote poetry. A small selection was published in 2003 called Choose Your Frog. He remained a passionate critic of US and UK foreign policy and a supporter of the Palestinian cause. In 2004 and 2005, Rosen was interviewed as part of the Social Change and English, 1945–1965 Archived 27 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine project, an oral history study of developments in English teaching in post-war secondary schools. Sections of these interviews have now been published.

Rosen remained engaged and interested in every aspect of education and politics to the end of his life. After Connie died in 1976, he married Betty, an English teacher, in 1978, and it was she who cared for him in his last years. He lived to see his son Michael become Children's Laureate in 2007, while his son Brian has worked most of his life at the Natural History Museum in London and has made major contributions to research and exhibitions there, particularly in the field of marine palaeontology and ecology.[1]

A major product of this collaborative work was a report Language, the Learner and the School, he wrote with Britton (by this time at Goldsmiths College) and Douglas Barnes of Leeds, and first issued in 1969. While Barnes contributed a penetrating study of actual language use in the classroom, and Britton a paper on the importance of oral language development, Rosen wrote on behalf of LATE, opening up the question of policy. He called for schools to develop a "language policy across the curriculum" that would embed a collaborative and language-focussed model in all subjects and affect every aspect of school life. The Language of Primary School Children (1973) was a collaborative project between Harold and Connie, his wife, under the auspices of the Schools Council. It incorporated research across many local education authorities to present a detailed picture of how language was hammered out in social interactions. This time a special focus was placed on the potential of educational drama. The rise in the number of students from minority ethnic groups brought new challenges, which he welcomed, encouraging teachers to develop new tactics within the general strategy of getting into students' lives and culture. Connie and Harold were strongly influenced in this work by their own critical reading of the sociolinguists Basil Bernstein and William Labov.

When the London County Council launched its great initiative in comprehensive education, Rosen moved to Walworth School in south-east London, a pilot comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road. He was Head of English from 1956 to 1958, where he put the teaching of English on fresh basis, moving from merely studying language to using it. This period coincided with his final disenchantment with the CPGB, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and his disagreements with the Party over structure and organisation. He left the party in 1957, adopting many of the perspectives (without actually joining any particular group) of the New Left, associated with E. P. Thompson, who were strongly interested in problems of class consciousness and working class self-activity, dialectics and praxis.

Rosen studied English at University College London, gaining his degree in 1940. Being an American citizen, he was not subject to UK conscription, and went into teaching, working in a number of schools. In 1945 he was drafted into the US Army and served in the education corps in Germany.

Together Rosen and his wife took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, defending the East End against a march by the British Union of Fascists.

In 1935, Rosen joined the Young Communist League, youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he met Connie Isakofsky. Their emotional, political and professional relationship, and later marriage, were to last until her death from cancer in 1976. They had three sons, Brian (b. 1942), Alan (1944–1945), who died from whooping cough as a baby, and the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen (b. 1946).

He was a communist activist in the 1930s; after World War II, he became an English teacher and later a teacher trainer; he became a major figure in leftwing thinking in education after leaving the Communist Party in 1957; and he played an important part in debates and developments in the fields of language teaching and primary education, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

Harold Rosen (25 June 1919 – 31 July 2008) was an American-born British educationalist who lived in the UK for most of his life. His particular field was teaching English, and he eventually became an academic at the Institute of Education, part of London University.

Rosen was born at Brockton, Massachusetts, on 25 June 1919. His mother, Rose, was a Communist activist from the East End of London. Her mother's father and his own father, Morris (Moshe) Rosen, were Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe, and his mother's father had joined the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first independent socialist party. When Rosen was two years old, his parents separated, and he was taken to the East End by his mother. He was brought up in a mainly observant Jewish environment but in a strongly secular and Communist home. He recalled: "The whole family were atheists. But my grandfather had a very sophisticated approach to how to relate to the majority of people who were religious. He was very hard on religion but did not make futile gestures to offend religious people." Rosen was educated at the local state elementary and grammar schools.