TO THE SCHOOL

1. This really is a crisis in the life of the school; and it must be felt and understood by all, not just by the twenty or so more thoughtful people who came to us on Sunday evening. We intend to withdraw ourselves from the school until there is evidence that the whole school – including those who took no interest on Sunday evening – is taking the matter really seriously.

2. This crisis is not merely concerned with singing or hymns. The difficulty of getting cooperation in this is only the latest example of our failure to achieve by voluntary effort what other schools achieve by compulsion.

3. What other schools achieve, even by compulsion is good. We often feel ashamed of our failures and sometimes wonder whether our belief in freedom is a mistake. Perhaps we should compel you to do everything that we believe to be good for you. Should we?

4. Some things that we demand you should do, because the school could not go on without them, or because your parents naturally expect them – going to lessons, for instance. But in some other things we have tried to get you to understand the need and to get you to discipline yourselves. How far have we succeeded?

Here are some examples:

a) Physical Training. Early in the term, at the time of the Inspection, when I was aware of the fact that owing to lack of special P.T. instructors on the staff we could not provide enough instruction for you, I appealed to you to take the matter in hand yourselves. I asked you to discipline and train “Brother Ass” yourselves, telling you what you know to be true – that your body would fully repay you in enjoyment for the training you gave it. This appeal made not the slightest difference. Some of you spoilt its effect by taking it in a petty and personal way.

When it came to the question of the Y.H. tour there were many who were loth to commit themselves to real exertion – yet you all enjoyed it when it happened.

I believe that everyone ought to learn to swim well, to train himself to stand cold and to swim long distances. You never know when you may have to save someone else – or yourself – from drowning. There aren’t more than half-a-dozen people in the school who are bothering to improve their diving or their speed, and none at all who are attempting any endurance test. Like hot-house plants, most of you shrivel up at the first breath of cold wind and stop bathing for weeks, even in the afternoon.

With a few exceptions the girls are neglecting tennis and getting no regular exercise other than the two P.T. classes. Girls at conventional girls boarding schools get at least four times as much exercise as you get here.

How can we possibly defend these conditions to people who criticise them? Can we say that freedom works? Can we say that without compulsion we can do as well as other schools? In some things yes – but in far too many things the answer is NO.

b) For three years we have urged you to take some responsibility for your common room, but no committee has ever done its job. You have been content every night to leave the room looking like a junk-store, and if it were not for morning squad work, it would always be in that condition.

c) No club or society ever keeps going on your own efforts. Always staff have to take the initiative and urge you to keep it going. Although you have plenty of time at week-ends, David can never get all the Photo club to meet – and it is in danger of collapse. In this sort of thing we fall very far short of other schools.

5. Are you satisfied with these conditions? Are you content to become people who are “bright and interesting” but have no physical stamina, who are “nice to know” but have no moral “guts”

Are you getting anything from your experience of the school that would enable you to keep up your faith and morals – as did the Sewell family in the account I have been reading – in the demoralising conditions of a Japanese Internment camp?

6. There is another respect in which you fail to achieve what other schools of a more conventional or traditional type do achieve: in leadership. You are slow to exercise leadership and slower still to respect it in others. Our counsellors, aides, dormitory leaders, have been afraid to exercise authority or to appeal for what they know to be good. The other boys and girls – the ones who should obey them – are still more to blame. Right from the beginning we have had to struggle against the mistaken idea that “equality” means that you can flout and laugh at the boys and girls who are given authority. You must have the courage to use authority when you are given it and the loyalty to help others who are trying to make the school run smoothly.

7. Many of you are devoted to the school and would be fiercely loyal if any outsider dared to criticise it to you. But what are you doing in your school life to show your loyalty, to build up something that is worthy of your pride?

8. Some of you stayed behind on Sunday evening to try to work out some constructive suggestions for Sunday Evening Meeting. It is much to your credit that you did so, but it would be dishonest of me if I said that your suggestions really met the needs of the meeting, or were even moving in the right direction.

The Sunday meeting is not like any of our other activities; it is not like a concert, a cultural performance, not something that is about Art, Music, Literature, or even about ideas. Every one of these can help the meeting, but cannot provide its centre.

9. We haven’t asked you to provide an alternative meeting or to relieve us of the responsibility for guiding the meeting. What we want is your cooperation in an experiment that may make it of greater value to all of us.

10. What is the meeting to be about? Many of you are old enough to know that life for you can no longer be just fun and games. You know that there are other things stirring deeply within you. Some of them, though sobering, are good and wholesome, things you try to hold on to, that make life seem a noble thing. Other things that stir in you are disturbing; impulses that you do not understand or cannot control and that you know may destroy or weaken your personality. The meeting must be a time that brings these things up into your conscious thoughts, that helps you to consider them carefully in connection with your own development and the good life of the whole school community. It should be a time when you find out what is good, when you begin to choose your aims and standards and strengthen your determination to hold on to what is good and refreshing.

11. I know that music, poetry, literature, art mean a great deal to many of you, but life is more than all of them put together. Life will not consist merely of going to symphony concerts and art galleries; it is much bigger than this. The Evening Meeting is – more definitely than any other gathering during the week – the time when you prepare for life as a whole. The music, the reading, the singing, must all be of such a character that they make us feel and think deeply. That is why, so often, we cannot help but turn to Beethoven when choosing records.

12. As to singing, you must think carefully why many of you are reluctant to try hymns. Is it that you associate them with sentimental Sunday School stuff or with dreary morning “prayers” in the elementary school? What is the difference between hymns and songs? Songs are about limited parts of life or experiences – about Nature, events, beauty, love. The best hymns differ from the best songs only in this – that they are about life as a whole, about the purpose of life, the joy of life and the feeling of its goodness, the desire to praise the source from which the goodness and the joy seem to come. Some songs are so deep in their meaning that they become hymns, and the best hymns take their music from the most treasured traditional melodies or from the composers who cared most deeply – such as Bach. Do you realise that the choral part of Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony is a hymn?

13. Finally we want to remind you of this chief point in this crisis. We are “fed up” – fed up with urging and persuading and getting no response except when we use compulsion. If you want us to resume our responsibilities in the school, you must prove that in future we shall get a quicker response and more good- hearted cooperation.

Kenneth & Frances
June 28th 1948