But it is now hard to find unabashed progressives who maintain that Plowden got it just right.
Whether or not the changes in the classroom were what Plowden really intended, doubts about them quickly emerged.
Those, such as Mr Woodhead, who call for Plowden-era orthodoxies to be abandoned, are not short of critics.
Curiously, the Three Wise Men exonerated the Plowden report itself suggesting that it may have been misinterpreted and misquoted.
Before Plowden, whole-class teaching got a bad name because it often led to teachers droning on while their pupils dropped off.
Whereas Plowden's ideas filtered into schools without any pressure from government, the new orthodoxy is being promoted vigorously by ministers and their advisers.
After Plowden, some schools were so busy trying to foster their pupils' individuality that they neglected to teach them to read or do sums.
And in Plowden's day, there was nothing like the Third International Maths and Science Study, published in 1996, which compared the abilities of more than 500, 000 pupils in 26 countries.
The hope is that schools will instead find the elusive happy medium and that, in 30 years' time, the pendulum will not have swung so far back that they need another Plowden.
In 1974 a new head teacher, Terry Ellis, arrived at William Tyndale Junior School in Islington, north London, and set about wholeheartedly embracing progressive ideals indeed, he thought that even the Plowden report was too reactionary.
In this, Plowden was heavily influenced by Jean Piaget, a psychologist who argued that children's ability to assimilate knowledge progressed at its own pace and therefore teachers should guide pupils to discover things for themselves.
At least the methods being promoted through the schemes for daily literacy and numeracy hours in England's primary schools have the backing of more convincing research than was available to Lady Plowden and her committee in 1967.
What makes the promoters of the new orthodoxy so sure that they have succeeded where Plowden went astray is that there is now a far stronger body of evidence about which teaching methods seem to be most successful.
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