I See a Child is an extraordinary piece of radical educational publishing from the early 1970s.

Its subject is the manufacture of a socially acceptable person. Parents, school, class, gender and the demand to succeed appear not as abstract institutions but as voices lodged inside the child: expectations create roles; parents don’t know how you hurt; a man must live up to his responsibilities. Against these commands are apology, shame, resistance and the child’s effort to identify what they actually feel beneath what they have been told to become.

Herbert constructs this quite intense book through photographs, enlarged fragments of speech and sharply arranged typography, allowing a child’s fear, anger, confusion and self-consciousness to occupy the page at full scale.The design makes this conflict physical—language crowds, repeats, changes size and breaks across images, turning the page into a psychological environment rather than a neutral container.

Published as the first volume in the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation series, this is both a period artefact and a striking precursor to later work on childhood, institutional power and alternative education. It belongs near radical pedagogy, photobooks and artist publications more than conventional educational theory: strange, confrontational and formally alive.

First edition, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974. Large-format paperback with substantial edge and spine wear, rubbing and surface marks; binding intact and interior clean.