Nathan Isaacs

Nathan Isaacs continued to work as a metals merchant, and during World War II was a civil servant in the Ministry of Supply.^[16] Evelyn Lawrence left Malting House School in 1928. After some time outside London, she started to share a London flat in Primrose Hill with her sister Hilda, close to where Susan and Nathan Isaacs were living: her affair with Nathan was ongoing. In 1943 she became director of the National Froebel Foundation. Susan knew of this relationship, and continued to relate well to Nathan intellectually: she concentrated on writing her book based on observations at Malting House.^[17][18]

After the outbreak of World War II, Isaacs initially continued to work in London; while Susan was based in Cambridge. During The Blitz the Ministry of Supply was moved out of London, and Isaacs was posted to Ashow in the Midlands for most of the rest of the war. Susan travelled there at weekends. Nathan saw little of Evelyn during this time: she had been evacuated at Torquay.^[19]

In 1945 Isaacs returned to London, with a job at Derby & Co. He was awarded the OBE for his war work, in 1948.^[20][21] In 1946 Susan began to succumb to recurrent breast cancer, and she died in October 1948. She made clear her wish that Nathan, her carer, and Evelyn should support each other. They were married in April 1950.^[22]

While Piaget's early books met with criticisms formulated by Susan and Nathan Isaac, his later methodology was somewhat different. Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence promoted his work in the United Kingdom, in alliance with the National Froebel Foundation, who in 1955 published a booklet Some Aspect's of Piaget's Work.^[23] Isaacs gave evidence to the committee compiling the Plowden Report on education (commissioned 1963, published in 1967 after his death), as an authority on Piaget. The Report adopted a progressive line, reflecting much of Piaget's influence and the earlier work of Susan Isaacs.^[24]

Over a long period, Isaacs worked on an essay that would be a major statement of his views. It appeared after his wife Susan died, as The Foundations of Common Sense (1949), bearing the subtitle "A Psychological Preface to the Problems of Knowledge".^[25] It had a hostile review from J. J. C. Smart, stating that "nowhere does he describe an experiment".^[26] Another reviewer wrote "[...] to those who are willing to grant that certainty is achieved and not given, [...] the book will appear [...] a valuable contribution to philosophy."^[27]

In the educational field, Isaacs deprecated "empirical psychology". He admired both James Mark Baldwin and John Dewey for their approaches.^[28] Under Baldwin's influence, he considered that clarity of speech and thought should early be encouraged in children.^[29] Clifford Geertz, writing of a lecture given by the philosopher George Raymond Geiger (1903–1998) on "cultural foundations of common sense", called it a "fine Deweyian subject".^[30] But in The Foundations of Common Sense Isaacs expressed the view that those authors had not gone far enough.^[28] With Dewey, Isaacs is now cited as one of the founders of progressive education.^[31]

Isaacs wrote Children's Why Questions, as a response to, and criticism of, Jean Piaget's The Language and Thought of the Child (1924).^[32] The project was financed by Geoffrey Pyke, and resulted also in a 1927 anonymous editorial by Isaacs in Nature, under the title "Education and science", alluding to the curious child.^[33] He agreed with A. S. Neill that the assumption of curiosity in the education of children turned out in practice to be dependent on social class.^[34] The work was published in the form of an appendix to Susan's Intellectual Growth in Young Children (1930).^[33]

"Why" questions are a subclass of wh-questions: Isaacs proposed a sub-classification, as "informational", "epistemic", "justificatory" and "affective and expressional".^[35] In discussion of a lecture of Wolfe Mays, Isaacs commented, on young children's understanding of questions, and Piaget's use of them, that the understanding had to be seen as incremental, depending on the acquisition of concepts.^[36]

By the early 1930s, Isaacs had joined the Aristotelian Society: he gave a paper there in 1931 that influenced the Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) by Lionel Robbins.^[37] His interest in philosophy was continuing. But he was unsatisfied with typical philosophical discussion.^[38] It has been commented that when Isaacs tried to publish about philosophy proper, he met with continual rejection.^[39] His paper What do Linguistic Philosophers Assume? (1960) was published, when Oxford philosophy was topical.^[40]

Lydia Smith, biographer of Susan Isaacs, as a Professor of Education writing about the work of Susan and Nathan Isaacs on educational psychology and child development, stated that "Nathan Isaacs was primarily a philosopher; he was interested in the sources of knowledge, and especially in the relationship between language and thought."^[41] Isaacs published in 1960 A Brief Introduction to Piaget, in the USA. It contained his works Growth of Understanding in the Young Child, and New Light on Children's Idea of Number. A foreword to the 1972 edition, written by his widow Evelyn Lawrence, states that by this period Isaacs was mostly interested in philosophical topics: epistemology, ethics, logic.^[23][38]