Preface
by Kenneth Barnes
This book is a record of talks given by Brian Hill and myself to the boys and girls of Wennington School during Sunday evening meetings of the last two or three years. Wennington School, now fifteen years old, is one of the most recent additions to the co-educational boarding schools. These schools include a few belonging to religious denominations and others, including Wennington, that are non-sectarian; but I would say that nearly all of them have arisen from an impulse that is in its nature essentially religious and Christian. Education for them is concerned with the whole human being, the person. The nurture and love of the boy or girl as a person, not as one who fulfils a function, comes before every specialised development or intention. The schools aim not to be institutions but communities, in which no special ability or position entitles one child to more care or regard than another and in which human relationships are the profoundly significant factor in education. This is fundamentally the expression of a Christian impulse. It stands over and against the other urges, essentially pagan though apparently reverencing the intellect, that endeavour to determine the shape of education today.
It is not sufficient, however, for religion to be implicit. It is well for every social movement to be aware of its roots if it is to retain its vigour and its purity of intention. The talks recorded in this book were given against a background of teaching, not of Divinity, so called, but of the History of Religion. This teaching is concerned with the objective study of religion as a historical phenomenon, not with proselytising and persuasion, and it is given in an atmosphere of intellectual and emotional freedom. Any study of humanity, however objective, requires the exercise of sympathetic imagination, and this is encouraged; but at the same time everything is open to be freely questioned. The result is that by the time our pupils reach the Sixth Form, though there are few sectarian believers among them and there are many doubters, religious questions are matters for the most vigorous and prolonged discussion; they are not matters to be ignored as irrelevant.
It is only when there is this atmosphere of spiritual freedom – which itself arises out of the nature of the personal relationships in the school - that a teacher can himself feel really free to state his faith with conviction and passion, in for instance a Sunday evening Meeting. Preaching to children is rightly to be condemned if it is part of a plan to condition them to the uncritical acceptance of our views before they are old enough to know what is happening to them. But this should does not mean that those who work with children should be without conviction and passion. Children need as much as anything else contact with adults who feel deeply and express sincere feelings clearly and vigorously. Deep calls unto deep, and the teacher who is lukewarm in his feelings or a persistent sitter-on-the-fence in his opinions, will not adequately meet the needs of children.
A very great deal of nonsense has been talked about freedom in education, as about freedom in every other aspect. It is difficult to use the word without being misunderstood, and is certainly true that no form of words will describe what we mean by it. Nevertheless we know that we speak of something real, something that in experience, when we say we want children to be free to think for themselves, to arrive at truth through thoughts that are essentially their own, to arrive at values and standards by the exercise of feelings that are their own. But no child exists as a person on his own. He exists in his relationships, and the search for freedom is therefore a search that can take place only in community; it is impossible in isolation. We cannot thrust a child on to his feet, take away all restrictions and then say “Be free”. The child is born into a complex pattern, subject to a variety of influences, some deliberate and conscious, others coming unconsciously and unobserved from society yet extremely strong. As soon as he can interpret language he becomes the focus of a babel of propaganda. Under these conditions freedom is a state that can be reached only by an exacting discipline of thought and feeling. This discipline is understood and accepted only if the right personal relationships are established with adults, if the child begins to feel in those relationships, not that he is being instructed , but that he is joining in a search undertaken by his teachers and himself in a common humility.
Our school community is not merely the application of a previously thought out principle nor just the expression of its founders’ ideas. In so far as it is a wholesome community it is so because it recognises that it can never have the whole truth about anything and also that life is a process of continual discovery and rediscovery through experience. When people genuinely care about each other and enjoy each other there comes every now and then an awareness of what is essentially true and good in their common experience. In so far as these talks seem to have been spoken with authority and conviction they are an attempt to put into words the thoughts that arose out of this awareness of truth and to express the strength of feeling that accompanies it.
x x x x x x x
The talks have been set down in a variety of ways. Some were fully written out in advance of delivery; others, including most of my own, were spoken from notes of given without preparation and quickly written down afterwards with the help of a shorthand report. Some are therefore wholly in the second person, others written impersonally.
Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/1 document 14