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.
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 left-wing 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.
Rosen was born at Brockton, Massachusetts,[1] on 25 June 1919, only son and third child of Morris (Moshe) Rosen, a shoe worker and trade unionist and a Jewish emigrant from Eastern Europe, and his wife, Rose, a disabled garment worker and Communist activist born at Whitechapel in the East End of London.
His mother's father, Joseph Hyams,[2][3] was also a Jewish emigrant from Eastern Europe; he was a "sweatshop worker" in a boys' cap factory[4] and had joined the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first independent socialist party.
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.
There he met James Britton and Nancy Martin, who were closely concerned with the development of children's language, and who became his major inspiration and later collaborators.
[10] 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 worked first in the Borough Road Teacher Training College in Isleworth, Middlesex, and later in the London Institute of Education, where Britton and Martin were highly influential.
[11] A major product of this collaborative work was a report Language, the Learner and the School,[12] he wrote with Britton (by this time at Goldsmiths College) and Douglas Barnes of Leeds, and first issued in 1969.
It incorporated research across many local education authorities to present a detailed picture of how language was hammered out in social interactions.
Connie and Harold were strongly influenced in this work by their own critical reading of the sociolinguists Basil Bernstein and William Labov.