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The Progressive Coeducational Boarding School.

I sometimes think it would be an Interesting project to write an article called "The Progressive School in Fact and Fiction”.  It occurs to me specially at this moment because I have Just read “Flowers on the Grass” by Monica Dickens.  In it a girl is suddenly transferred from an outd orthodox girl’s school to a progressive school.  At the former she comes to love the daily supporting routine, the little formalities that seem to ease social life, the smell of the grass on the hockey field and of the oil on cricket bats.  Then we read how she Is taken away and at the beginning of the next term takes a train for York, on arrival at York she observes nostalgically how a group of girls neatly dressed in uniform is being met by a very normal type of school mistress (one suspects that Monica Dickens knows something about the Mount School!)  But this girl has to change for her more distant destination.  One wonders whether she is going to take the train to Wetherby, but the author spares me that humiliation.  She eventually reaches a school where everything is slack and formless, where no one plays games, or works with any vigour or zest, where there is an unrestricted clash of personality against another.  No one  is expected to do anything unless he or she wants to.  Everyone, including staff, talks loosely and slangily, and gives way to petulant and wayward feelings.  The teachers come casually and leave casually; they have no qualifications, only a lot of queer interests and fads.  In short the school is a jungle in which only the toughest, the most insensitive or the most cynical survive.  The young heroine very soon runs away with a male member of the staff, also a disillusioned newcomer, and one feels that it is only by a supreme act of self-denial that the author refrains from putting them in bed together.  Instead the man directs her to go home and nobly saves her from death under the wheels of a bus at the expense of considerable injury to himself.

There are some more sober works of fiction that are concerned with progressive schools.  One by Dicken Moore "The Maze of Schools" is sensitive and thoughtful, and the school he deals with is only very thinly veiled.  But even in this very genuine attempt to assess the value of the school the author cannot resist the temptation to describe an occasion when, on his goodnight rounds, he is invited into the bedroom of a sixteen year old girl.

Quote:[There is no reference to a quote at this point in the manuscript and there is no appearance of a quotation in the text.]

Now it is just possible that such an incident could happen in one or two of the more unconventional schools.  But even so, the inclusion of it thoroughly distorts the picture when the book is read by the general public for which such an incident would assume wholly exaggerated importance relative to the rest of the facts.

          I know that in speaking to any audience not intimately connected with the coeducational boarding schools I have to contend with the unfortunate effects of this sort of publicity.  I must therefore assure my listeners that there is a substantial group of schools in which they would find nothing outlandish of the sort described above.  They would find much that is unusual and unconventional but nothing that has this sophisticated flouting of decency and sincerity that nauseates us in those descriptions.

            I am not a salesman, and I think it will be found that most of the Heads and teachers in the schools that I am claiming for the moment to represent do try to be objective, and to look at their own and other schools from a detached point of view, trying genuinely to assess what they contribute to educational success and understanding.  When I look round the whole pattern of independent boarding schools I realise that there are some types that I have vigorously criticised and perhaps condemned.  But I have to admit that sometimes out of what may seem to the outsider a school whose organisation and aims are all wrong there comes people who are sound and wholesome in their personality and outlook.  From schools that are not so obviously "wrong” but are at least deeply traditional and conventional there may come a large number of admirable people surprisingly free from snobbery, class prejudice and the faults that we have in the past to some extent rightly associated with the Public School building type.  Why is this?  It is because in education we have to recognise an unponderable (sic) but verypowerful factor that cuts right across organisation, convention, consciously expressed aims and objectives.  That factor is in the personal relationship that is established between a teacher and his pupils.  If it were not for the fact that I am at the moment concerned with school life only I would go further back to and consider the personal relations between parent and child in [families]

One sound wholesome adult who allows a direct and fearless relationship to grow up between himself and a pupil may thus redeem all the evil in the rest of school life.  Equally, bad personal relationships and relationships that are sophisticated or that make subjective demands - may in a coeducational school that has all the "right "aims" turn children into unwholesome adults.

Let it be understood then, that we are not primarily dependent on the rightness of organisation or professed ideals.  The primary factor is the inherent quality of personal relationships.    Education is through and through a personal task in which what you are in your whole personality is all the time affecting the development of your pupils.  You can never be impersonal in teaching.  When a teacher thinks he is Impersonal he is probably being personal in a negative sense, injuring or inhibiting the development of his pupils.

Having thus emphasised that almost anywhere a wholesome personal relationship can bring good results, I want now to claim that in the coeducational boarding schools we have tried to establish conditions in which these relationships can flourish, instead of having to establish themselves, as is so often the case, only sporadically and in an unfavourable atmosphere.  To establish these conditions we have had to examine what happens between teachers and children - what can go wrong, what checks a child's development, what makes him unsure and afraid, what deprives him of originality and initiative, what makes him shrink into his skin, makes him suspicious or resentful or inferior.  I cannot too strongly emphasise that one cannot achieve good relationships or good education just by having noble ideals and fine aspirations.  This is true of all personal relationships.  No marriage was ever made good by a glorious ideal of love.  It is the sensitive awareness of what actually happens from day to day, especially the awareness of the point at which things go wrong,  that enables us to build something fine out of our otherwise verymoderate natures.

Some people, from their very nature, cannot help creating good relationships.    We have all of us perhaps met such people here and there.  But in general it is necessary to lift the weight of convention and habit from teachers, so that they can "become themselves" instead of remaining merely the representatives of a system, I think the co-educational boarding school have rather specially achieved this.

Let me look at the historical development for a moment.  I haven't time to research deeply into all the factors that were operative in the developemtn of the movement, but there seem to me to be two that are specially important:

Ithink first of the establishment of Abbotsholme in 1890.  This was not a coed school, but Bedales began in 1893 after a break away of J.H.Badly and others of the Abbotsholme staff.  Even Bedales was not coeducational until some years later.  What these schools seemed to express was a reaction away from the ill-balanced daily life and curriculum of the boys' Public Schools, from their cult of althleticlsm which co-existed with bad conditions for physical and mental health.  It was a reaction towards a more whole life, in which the hand and eye and the skill of the craftsman became as significant as the work of the brain, in which science and the arts become as significant as the classics.  It expressed some of the spirit of the Christian Socialists, or William Morris and Edward Carpenter, a reaction from the evils of 19th century industrialism.  It expresses a socialism that was not so much concerned with active politics as with a defiance of what ruthless industrialism tried to do to people.  Its red shirt was, so to speak, not a banner of political attack, but was open at the neck to the fresh air of the countryside.

The movement was not at first much enlightened  by an understanding of the inner life of children.  Psychology in the modern practical sense was hardly known at that time.  Freud had yet to make his impact.  So life continued to be tough and relationships perhaps insensitive.

I would suggest that the second important factor was the influence of Homer Lane,  whose work and methods became known just before the first world war.  In his “Little Commonwealth” established to re-educate young delinquents of both sexes, Homer Lane, perhaps for the first time in an institution, studied the inner life and needs of children, challenged as he was by the gravity of their delinquency and the desperate nature of their needs, and he sought so to arrange the organisation of the community that there was freedom for self-knowledge to develop.  He saw that attitudes and rigid control stood right in the way of the personal developemtn (sic) that his young people needed.  H.L.  was perhaps the first person to make it clear that the adult could he "on the side of the child” and not a person who is necessarily over and against him, that it was desperately important for the child to feel that the adult was with him in his struggles and not a hostile being to whom he must give in or against whom he must develop a strategy.

The concepts of the teacher as one who is with the child in a cooperative endeavour was one that quickly began to prevail in the school I am speaking of, and to some extent it has affected all education,gaining more and more support from the impact of child psychology as time has gone on.  But I would say that education as a whole is still seriously hindered by the hostility, mild as it may be, that exists between teacher and children.  It is still widely felt among children that teachers  are people whose job it is to make them do something that they do not want to do and still far too much the pupils are forced into a position in which they must develop a strategy to defend themselves and sometimes to attack.

We must recognise that there will always be a certain amount of - what shall Icall it?  Tension? - between adults and children, teachers and pupils.  But I think we can get rid of the feeling that they belong to opposite camps.  There has been a big change in this direction in family life in, say, the last fifty years, and the same change can take place in schools.    It is not only friendliness and kind treatment that is needed, but an atmosphere that makes it possible for the adults and children to feel that they are together in the venture of school life, and that in spite of the tension that may arise over laziness and waywardness they are united in their common humanity and their willingness to be known each to the other.  To secure this, we, the teachers must put aside all claims to omniscience and infallible wisdom, and must allow ourselves to be known to the children as people who, though perhaps a little farther ahead than they, are still searching with humility for knowledge and truth.  I wonder how many people saw that deeply moving film "The Bicycle Thieves'', and remember the tenderness shown by the little boy for his father after his father had been humiliated -  after his father, in the despair of poverty and unemployment, had been caught stealing a bicycle?  That is the true unity of adult and child, the unity that is felt when each knows the other both in strength and weakness facing a world that is almost too such for us.

Perhaps I can claim with some justice that in our school we have moved some way towards realising this unity.  Most discerning visitors comment on the fearlessness and ease of manner with which children speak to them, a directness that has no cheek or "familiarity” in it.  Our pupils are, so to speak, "at home” with adults, and for this reason they never fail to make a good impression at interviews, for instance the interviews for university entrance, where, we are told, they are quite outstanding.  There is no recipe for achieving this relationship in a school, but at least one can say this, that an important factor is the adults willingness to get rid progressively of the defensiveness with which they usually enter on a career of teaching - their fear of the children and what they may do or say, the thought of them, as having to be coped with rather than enjoyed.

 This "coming off the pedestal'  as it might be called does not mean a complete giving up of authority.  There [are] times when I can use authority firmly and even grimly,  when a situation has got out of hand I can bark out a command like a seargeant-major on a drill ground and bring everything to order.  There is nothing necessarily inconsistent or injurious about this.  Nearly all children know quite well that their excitability leads them as a group into situations that are bad and even dangerous.  They know that someone has to deal with this and there is no inner resentment when we use our authority for this purpose, and use it firmly and effectively.  They tend to despise a teacher who hasn't the self-confidence to do this.  They can sense the difference between a teacher who uses authority fiercely because he is himself afraid or because he has a desire for power over them or for any other subjective reason and the teacher who uses authority solely because there is an objective situation to be dealt with.  This latter use of authority  has no general ill-effect upon personal relationships[1].

Most of the time in school life we need not be in any obvious position of authroity (sic) at all; we can converse with our pupils, work and play with them, drink the inevitable cup of tea with then, in an atmosphere as free from restraint as if they were our adult friends.  Yet inevitably we shall have an authority that they will at least unconsciously recognise.  What is the nature of that authority?   You will remember that it was said of Jesus: “This man speaks as one having authority"   One hesitates to claim an exact knowledge of what was meant by any statement about Jesus, but what this statement conveys to at me is this.  He spoke as one who indisputably knew what he was talking about, as one who was not concerned with himself but with the truth.  No subjective need or demand determined his words.  The truth shone through himand had to be recognised even by those who hated the truth.  To use an expression of Virginia Woolf’s he was incandescent.  This is utterly different from the authroity (sic) of one who is seeking power and "putting It across”, and ultimately it is the only authority that is worth having, in a school or anywhere else.  The man whose authority is concerned not with himself but with truth is a man of humility; he knows his inadequacy and his limitations and he seeks cooperation rather than domination.  Certainly in community life, where there is always a certain challenge to look below the surface, children are ultimately more deeply moved by humility than by almost any other quality in the adult, certainly more than by pretentiousness and outward show of competence.  They become aware that the adult who has humility is the one who is most likely to know the truth and to know how to act effectively in situations that demand action.  Moreover children do not need adults who “have all the answers”.  To think that there is ever a complete answer to life's problems is a dangerous illusion.  The adult who is of most use to children is the one who is facing his own life honestly and is willing to let them know some of his difficulties and how he makes use of the little light he can get.  This is the sort of adult whom the children know to be "on their side” because they see that they share with him a common nature.  And this is the adult who has authority.  They will accept the occasions when he has to take command, even if for a while he seems to ride rough-shod over them or to make a mistake; and he is the sort of teacher who, having made a mistake, can apologise to a pupil without loss of respect or true dignity.

The word "freedom” is bandied about a great deal in connection with progressive schools and it is appropriate that I should say something about it following these thoughts on authority.  All too often it is said of these schools that they are places where children "do what they like”.  There are certainly a few people in the progressive movement who seems to think that you can give freedom to children as you would throw a bone to a dog.  Monica Dickens picture of a progressive school seems to belong to that conception of freedom in school life.  Now we have to admit that fundamentally freedom must mean freedom to do what we want to do; otherwise It is meaningless.  We have had quite enough examples in politics and national life all over the world of freedom being offered to people that is in fact “freedom” to do only what some other person or clique insist that they shall do.  If, however, freedom is to be real freedom in the sense that I have defined, it leave us with a tremendous problem - that of discovering what we want to do.  Until we have made that discovery we are not free.  It is a problem because in the first place we have so many wants that conflict with each other, and we have to try to discover what we want most and then to find what there Is left of our other wants that is not incompatible with the major want.  We have to find out whether our wants are really ours, not things that have been imposed on us, wants that we have accepted because we think we “ought”.  We have to struggle through a jungle of social sentiments and clichés, noble aspirations and ideals - all second-hand, not in any real sense our own.

When we have found what it is that we supremely want to do, we have then to accept the discipline, the "workshop technique" which will make it possible for as to do it.  But that is not the greatest difficulty; it often comes very willingly and relatively easily once we have the clear and authoritative want.  I say authoritative because it means that we now know what is true for us.

This should give us a clue as to what we have to do for children.  What we do by way of giving them self-government, giving or withholding punishment, allowing them to choose what subjects they will learn - all this Is secondary.  Certain outward forms of freedom may be necessary for the development of the inward freedom and certainty; but too often it is assumed that the givingof outward freedom will necessarily be followed by the inner discovery.  This is the giving-a-bone-to-the-dog concept of freedom in schools.  No, the development of true freedom in the child’s personality is a matter that demands all our educational wisdom and a great deal of adjustment to the actual condition of individual children.  The condition of a child orthe condition of his group is something that is revealed to us in the relative intimacy of personal relationship.  We teachers cannot know what we are doing or what is happening unless our relationship with children to sufficiently Intimate and fearless for these things to be revealed.  It can truly be said therefore that, freedom grows out of friendship.

Except for one mistaken attempt at self-government in the first year of the school’s existence (1940) we have not plunged into all the "freedoms” often associated with progressive schools.  The freedom of contact between adult and child has existed from the beginning, but self-government - now sound and effective and covering a great deal of school life — has grown slowly out of felt needs and in proportion to the confidence of the boys and girls.  Classes remain compulsory and disciplined behaviour is expected in them.

The nature of discipline is naturally closely related to a school's concept of authority.  Discipline is what is necessary to get any job done efficiently and well; that is its sole purpose in our view.  One has to discipline oneself  if one want a to do good cabinet-making, to play cricket well, to think clearly and discover truth.  On the other hand the view of discipline that would be associated with that type of authority that seeks power over others is that discipline is good in itself that a "disciplined character" is necessarily more admirable than an undisciplined one.  To the person holding this view there is something specially satisfying is seeing human beings massed in ranks performing actions to numbers - that is in being rather less than human and more like machines.  There is something specially dangerous In a person accepting and imposing a self-discipline because he thinks it is good to be a disciplined character.  Such a man is apt to [be] injured and inhibited and is apt in moments of serious personal crisis to break out into dangerously irrational behaviour.  There is in my view one thing we must always do to make sure that discipline is wholesome in its results - that is to relate it definitely to its objective purpose, the practical purpose it is to serve.  Here again, children are sensitive to the difference; they are aware of the difference between the discipline demanded by a teacher who seeks power or who has ideas about discipline as a virtue (often a disguise for the desire for power) and the teacher whose eye is solely on the job that he with, his class is out to perform.  Time after time one finds that children will be emphatic in their approval of the teacher who keeps good order, yet will hate the teacher who lords it over them or treats them as less than human.

The right thing to do, then, if we are dissatisfied with the results of the old-fashioned discipline, is not to throw discipline overboard or to expect children of themselves to secure the order that we cannot, but to be aware of what we are ourselves doing in our classes and to purge ourselves of the impulses that destroy a truly human relationship with our pupils.

We find that punishment is only rarely necessary - rarely that is In comparison with its frequency in more conventional schools.  There are hardly any "routine punishments”; such as are given are usually thought out on the spot in relation to the offence committed.  Serious offences are rarely punished; the only cure is through understanding and wise treatment.  It is the trivial offences that are most exasperating to a teacher, and I do not think it matters a much what one does about these provided one does something to make it clear to the child that he cannot “get away with it” and provided it is not vindictive and does not injure fundamentally one's good relationship with him.  To many outsiders our system of punishment - or lack of system - must seem extremely haphazard.  But after comparison with many other schools I think I can say that it is certainly as effective as, or - dare I say it? - no more ineffective than.- any more rigorous system.  Children are far more reasonable than we often suppose and will often respond to the thoughtful appeal if that appeal is not an evidence of weakness on the part of the teacher.       

It must be evident in what I have said about freedom and authority, discipline and punishment, that what is profoundly necessary is some sort of philosophy or personal orientation that holds all one's actions together in a coherent pattern and sets one free from the irrational domination of one's own primitive impulses.  I have never felt satisfied, however, that a purely rational philosophy of education is adequate.  Working it all out rationally will never, so it seems to me, bring one's mind and heart and body into the wholesome condition that is required.  There is so much in oneself and in ones pupils that is still a mystery and that cannot be understood or expressed in rational terms.  What is necessary therefore is a philosophy that arises from - or is checked by – religious experience.  I am not concerned with anything institutional necessarily when I mention religion, but I am concerned with those depths and expanses in human personality that remain essentially mysterious, that cannot be neatly confined within reasonable statements, yet which profoundly affect our behaviour.  Moreover, I think that only an attitude that is essentially religious will preserve in us the humility that will enable us to understand and check our impulses and behaviour and will enable us to sense, at a deeper level than reason can reach, what the community and the individual needs.  However much we may rack our brains over the problems and emergencies that arise in a school, for a great part of the time we have to act without adequate knowledge or reason.  Anyone with a modicum of honesty must admit that.  A human community is vastly different in this respect from a laboratory.  Yet this non-rational, intuitive part of our lives need not be without its discipline, and it is with this discipline and the illumination that it brings, that religion at its best has been concerned.

Does it seem that this respect for religion brings the school back well and truly into the ranks of the conventional?  No doubt for some people it will and they will not think otherwise until they have penetrated more deeply into the truths of Christianity and realised what profoundly unconventional and disturbing truths are still to be found in the words of Jesus.

Sometimes  when students walk round our school during a visit of a few hours they will complain that they don't see anything very startling.  They see a number of boys and girls happily and vigorously at work.  How very disappointing.  What did they expect to a see?  Languid sophisticates in slacks and painted finger nails listening to gramophones instead of going to chemistry classes.  Unwashed boys with cigarettes drooping from their lips busily insulting the staff.  I think they do expect to see something that is in the nature of a defiance.  But defiance, this thumbing of the nose to society, is no escape from convention.  It is just as much subjection to convention as is positive assent to convention.  One can make progress in education only in so far as one is not interested in convention either positively or negatively but is concerned with what is honest and true and wholesome, and the result of this does not necessarily involve hanging our banners on the outward walls.

Archive reference  PP/KCB document 08