LIMITATIONS OF STATE EDUCATION
One has to think both of the needs of Socialism and of the needs of children. Can there be any
doubt that the needs of children come first? Any political system can be justified only in so far as it meets people’s greatest needs. I do not think, however, that there is anything incompatible between meeting these two different needs, and I am going, therefore, to say something first about the needs of Socialism both as a political movement and a way of running the affairs of the country - needs that can be served by education.
The working of capitalism has depended upon the appeal to certain human motives: the impulse to compete, to achieve an accummulation (sic) of goods, money, power, the impulse to establish one’s independence. It should hardly need to be said that Socialism for its success will depend upon an appeal to human motives - perhaps of a different sort. Capitalism claimed that it had an automatic mechanism for eliminating the inefficient. In a rough sort of way perhaps it has. However much truth there may or may not be in this claim for capitalism, it must surely be admitted that the motives to beat your neighbour and fill your pocket are not difficult to appeal to; but what about the vigorous motives that will guarantee the success of socialism. Now we must know perfectly well that in the socialist movement, in socialist parties and governments, there are destructive forces always at work. Different people believe in socialism for widely different reasons, often quite incompatible ones. Sometimes the motive that drives a man towards Socialism is incompatible with the motives that will maintain Socialism once it is established. I need not elaborate the great complex pattern of conscious and unconscious reasons for people’s actions and beliefs in order to prove to you that we have a very serious and difficult task before us if we are encourage the development of a really large body of people who will be personally and politically dependable, who will have vigour, initiative and unlimited courage.
Need I emphasise that we need a Socialist state not just to make production and consumption of goods proceed smoothly in perfect adjustment to each other, but in order that human relationships shall be free from the restriction and fear and corruption that society has imposed in the past, and in order that love shall have a better change (sic) than hate to provide a reason for doing things?
Those of us are outside the day-to-day political struggle are perhaps apt to be too perfectionist in our criticisms, but are we always wrong when we feel appalled by the clash of personalities within, say, the Labour Movement, and we wonder how much this or that politician really cares about the real quality of a human community and the sort of human relationships that are possible within it.
Now when I think of the quality of human beings that education produces I cannot help feeling critical of certain tendencies in national - or nationalised - education and having some fear of an increased control over education. I am in an awkward position - I wish I were a teacher in a state school at this moment. It would be less embarrassing to criticise State education from within than from one’s outside observation post as the head of an independent school. But at least I can claim to have taught in state schools and to have been educated entirely at the cost of the L.C.C. For the last twenty years I have worked in coeducational boarding schools coming within the “progressive” category, for ten years at one of the best known and for ten years in my own school - which was set up in 1940. Schools in this category, I should add, generally lean leftwards in their political as in their educational thought, are patronised to some extent by socialists who have sufficient money to send their children to them, and have produced a number of socialist politicians among their pupils - including the most vigorous of (sic)
Now working in these schools I have been made conscious of the very great potential energy of teachers and adults generally. This potential energy becomes kinetic only if they find themselves in a situation where they feel that the venture is to some extent “their show” and that they are really responsible for it.
Although to many this may be an obvious principle, I ought to spare no effort to make it clear. People give of their best, and are at their best, when the group within which they work is small enough for them to feel responsible for its general quality, is small enough for them to be valued personally, and in which they have sufficient control to be able to feel that they are its creators or re-creators. On the other hand, people shrink, become inhibited and limit their output when they feel that they do not count personally, that no matter what they do it will not affect the pattern of things much; when they feel that they can contribute little or nothing to the major decisions that shape the future.
This, I think, will be true of every sort of employment in some degree. It may, however, matter relatively little in reference to the work of a girl at a conveyor belt or mechanics assembling cars by endlessly repeated operations. Provided they work steadily, no special devotion is asked for or needed. I nearly said the same thing about miners, but I realised immediately that impersonal treatment as mere units in a great scheme has provoked a great deal of trouble, and in that industry the understanding of men and their attitudes may be as important as the development of mechanisation. It is in education, however, that the full cooperation of men and women as persons is supremely important. Coal is coal whether it comes from the earth under good human conditions or bad, but the products of education - the boys and girls from the schools - are in their essential nature profoundly affected by the attitudes, feelings, motives of the adults who educate them. Education is something that happens between persons, that grows out of a direct human relationship. The circumstances in which it is carried out must be such that both adult and child are encouraged to express fully their essential humanity.
If you think of the relationship as being just functional alone - a relationship in which one person has to do something to or for a group of others, then you will have little use for what I advocate. But if you do think of it in this way you will limit ever they proper [a marginal note appears in the right margin by the first part of this paragraph reading “Enlarge on This” a footnote also appears under this part of the paragraph reading “Personal not Individual”.] discharge of the function. A human being cannot perform a duty or fulfil a function at his best unless he thinks of himself and is thought of as more than functional. The man who thinks of his work only as a duty, does his duty less well than he might.
Further, a very large proportion of the tasks we have to face in life - personal, social, political - and the most important ones - are not repetitive tasks to which an established formula can be applied. They are new problems, emergencies, crises for which mere precedent or even previous experience is inadequate. To meet them adequately, you must have people who enjoy them, who enjoy the unexpected, who accept the problems and crises as a challenge to their energy - not as unwelcome disturbances to their routine. Obviously this concerns the whole personal development of people - not just their training as specialists.
I’m going to break of now to throw up a contrast - a contrast between what I have seen happen to people in an independent school and what I have heard and seen in state schools. I am deliberately making the contrast a stark one, and I need not be reminded that what I say is not true of all independent schools or all state schools.
The independent school is my own - founded in 1940 with hardly any money, but built into a firm structure by the hard work of the many people who have passed through it in the ten years of its existence. It was built up by people who never counted their hours of work, who hardly made any distinction between work and leisure, for whom there was very little pay - but whatever there was was shared equally. For years no one got more than 12/6d. a week, yet the energy put into the school was prodigious. Whatever we hadn’t got or couldn’t afford we made. if we didn’t know how to make things we learnt, and there was nothing that could be regarded as beneath us. It was not until two years ago that we could afford to adopt Burnham Scale, but it was before that date that the real tough pioneer work was done. The tradition of doing things ourselves still remains. If we want a new building and find that it will cost £500 – well, we buy the materials for £100 and build it ourselves. A craft master and a group of boys spend most of the weekends of a summer term on it. They borrow a petrol-driven cement mixer and get to work with great zest. They find that bricklaying is not so terribly hard to learn. They plan the arrangement of the machinery that is to be moved in, fix and glaze the window frames and finally are able to look upon the completed job as in a very intimate way, theirs.
I want to emphasise that I am not describing this achievement as something unique or as a matter for special pride. Far from this unsparing output of interest and energy being abnormal, it is essential, natural and normal: it is the way human beings like to live; it is the life they are made for. I hardly need to remind you that all over the country during the war time people were living in that way, that they got a great deal of satisfaction from it.
Now let us compare this with conditions in many state schools. Meeting a good many headmasters I find them in a condition of what I might call knowledgeable defeatism: a confident assumption of knowledge but all of it used to prove that nothing can be done. “I know what the parents want. I know what the employers expect. I've got to think of my staff. You cant do this, you can't do that ...” and so on. Headmasters when they meet, meet in an atmosphere of pessimism and passive discontent.
They regard me as a privileged person. They put on one side the fact that schools such as mine have a precarious existence, that the loss of a few pupils endangers our very existence, that one has to throw one's own security to the winds and face the prospect of retiring on the old age pension, that one has to be a jack-of-all trades and face with equal readiness the clearing of a sewer and teaching philosophy to the Sixth Form. In spite of this, I am privileged – because I can act on my own initiative.
This is the sort of thing they grumble about. They want to appoint a science teacher. They have to arrange for an advertisement by putting it through the Director's office or the local divisional office. This may mean a delay of a week or a fortnight. They receive a few application (sic) – perhaps. But the Governors must be got together for the interviews. This takes time to arrange – and during that time all the candidates have been appointed elsewhere.
They complain too that a great deal of their time is occupied in filling up forms or with other sorts of office work that takes them away from their assistants and away from their pupils. I sometimes get reports about old colleagues of mine who have become headmasters – reports coming perhaps through their assistant staff. From there I get a picture of men submerged in work that is largely impersonal, having little energy left for all that personal contact that provides the vigour and faith of an institution. It very often happens that the true educators are to be found among the assistant staff of a school, and it often happens too that such men are not appointed to headships because their interests do not lead them towards positions of power and administrative responsibility.
I cannot help feeling that headmasters of state schools as a whole constitute a submerged class. This does not seem to be true, however, of independent boarding schools – and I think it is because in such schools headmasters have an inescapable social responsibility which is recognised and are usually provided with highly competent bursars who relieve them of a great deal of administrative work. The heads of such schools, in spite of the fact that they are on duty for the whole 24 hours, seem more able to sit back and ask themselves what they are doing and why they are doing it and thus to provide a philosophy and a faith for their schools.
A friend of mine who was for a long time headmaster of a state school, later became head of a Public School on the Headmasters' Conference. He was then able to attend the local meetings of both the Headmasters' Conference and the Headmasters' Association. He is a man of humble origins and far from being a snob; but he found himself dropping the Headmasters' Association and attending the Headmasters' Conference. The reason was that in the Headmasters' Association discussion was preoccupied with organisation and salaries, while in the Headmasters' Conference it was about education. This difference surely is not characteristic of men as men, but is a product of conditions. Further, it cannot be said that it is merely characteristic of a phase in the development or decline of capitalism where everyone is trade-union minded. No – it seems characteristic of a state in which men find themselves employees in vast organisations – in organisations of a size that will be familiar in a socialist state.
Consider now the attitude to difficulties and emergencies that is apt to appear in the state school. A dingy room needs to be decorated, electrical extensions are urgently required for new apparatus, a hobby club needs a shed that can be wholly its own. What happens? Application is made to the local authority. There may be considerable delay; the project may be put off indefinitely. If it is building that is required it may be firmly squashed. Now I think that a school ought to be a place where, if a job needs doing, materials can be got to do it and someone knows sufficient about it to organise a group to tackle it, the job should be done without delay or hesitation. But the authorities will object to the uncontrolled spending of money, to work being done by unskilled men, to anything so unorthodox, so rash. Staff will say – Great heavens – come back in the evening to do a job that the authority ought to do! I'm not paid to do that. It's bad enough having to look after school milk and dinners; I'm damned if I'm going to turn plumber and bricklayer too. I'm paid to be a teacher. If we do that sort of thing the authority will begin to trade on it – they'll economise by expecting more and more from us: Not on your life! [A marginal note appears in the left hand margin this paragraph that reads “Enlarge on this.”]
Now I admit the force of all that – it's too terribly true. But think what it cuts out, what it denies – it cuts out so much that is of tremendous value to the growing personalities of children, it denies them the opportunity to fling themselves into an absorbing constructive task that is of social value, of immediate significance, that unlike so much that is done in schools, has an obvious measurable practical result. The very force and truth of many of the objections to it are a measure of the limitations that large-scale organisation and administration seem inevitably to bring.
May I bring this point home more clearly by referring to the fuel crisis as it appeared in the winter of 1947. How could the ordinary boy or girl do anything that would make him feel that he was really helping? It is immensly important that when we appeal to people's feelings and get some sort of response that immediately there should be available a satisfying way of putting that response into vigorous constructive action. Otherwise the response turns back on itself and goes bad. Next time it cannot be evoked and we shall see nothing but a shrug of the shoulders. The ordinary boy or girl in a city could do little more than keep his coat on and be prepared to do homework in the kitchen.
Now it happened that in my school we were in a very different position. We could hardly get any coal or coke at all. Had we no other resources we should have had to close down. But on part of the estate there were great quantities of lop and top-branches left after the felling of several hundred trees. For two months boys and girls worked in squads at all hours of the day up to their kneed or even thighs in snow pulling out and cutting up timber, loading it on to a lorry or towing it on improvised sledges. Altogether they brought in over 100 tons and they succeeded in keeping the furnaces fully supplied to [keep] the school warm. What was for so many people a miserable two months is looked upon by our pupils as one of the most enjoyable terms in their school career. They worked often in clothes and boots still wet from the previous shift, the job was strenuous in the extreme, but they didn't grumble and didn't catch cold. The school health was excellent throughout. Now this is not necessarily a matter for pride on the part of a particular school. This was a special experience possible only in a special situation. But it points to the tragedy of the more general situation. The experience I have described is one of the most formative in education. It need not come in the dramatic form I have described but it can come in less startling forms in everyday life. Few children will ever have the chance to deal with a fuel shortage in this way, but life is constantly throwing up emergencies of some sort. Are we to deprive children of the fun of dealing with them by an ever-increasing organization of specialist technicians? Are we going to be afraid to let them in on constructive tasks because they won't do them perfectly?
We must face the fact that our towns, and cities are not communities in any real sense: they are mere aggregations of houses and people. Children are dwarfed into insignificance by them. When great emergencies come it is only the very unusual child who will recognise the meaning of social and political responsibility; the rest carry on much as before, vaguely trusting that “They” will get us out of the difficulty. Who are “They”? The people in power I suppose.
If children are to grow into responsible citizens they must have the experience of responsible constructive tasks within groups small enough for them to understand, to hold within the scope of their vision. It is in this experience – in the family or school – that vigour and initiative an political vision are created. I often think that people whose life is devoted to politics become two-dimensional: their personalities lose substance. I think it is because they become too much occupied by the battle of personalities and wits: one man pitted against another, group against group – altogether too far removed from life of cooperative or structive action that draws people together instead of driving them into mutual criticism and distrust.
Now I know that in certain state-maintained day schools some extremely valuable constructive work has been carried out and I have been greatly cheered by reports of the most lively developments in some of the secondary modern schools in London. But I fear that these are very much the exceptions, and that the Grammar schools are largely untouched.
Even if in general we cannot provide in the state-maintained day schools anything like the practical opportunities that may exist in an independent boarding school, something surely can be done to make the schools feel that they are the masters of their own life. Every school has a right to feel that it is unique, in the same sense that a family feels it is unique. It cannot feel this if it knows that the essential things are out of its control, if it cannot have some part in choosing the newcomers to its staff, in planning its material development. I would say that there is a very definite need for a new recognition of th autonomy of the individual school. I used to think that when a state school tried to give itself a distinctive name instead of being just called the “so-and-so county secondary school” it was being wholly snobbish. Now I am inclined to think that while there is sometime a snobbish component in the desire it is not the whole truth about it. It may express a justifiable desire of the school to express its distinctive character – as though to say: we have built up a life in the school that is distinctively its own, that comes from a common understanding and experience. We have arrived at principles that we now stand for: and those principles are the outcome of our own thought and action. We are not merely a department of a large organisation, doing its dictated will, rather we are doing the work and making the discoveries that give life to the otherwise lifeless organisation.
Schools must, I feel (think), be given much more reason to feel that they are in control of their own life and development.
In some state schools valuable work is being done (eg certain Sec. Mod. Schools under LCC)
What needs to be done
Establish the principles of the autonomy of the school.
Be more careful about the appointment of Heads - and then trust them.
Withhold interference with the essential life of the school (example of Nottingham's interference with the Mundelea [? spelling] school) merely to make them conform to a tidy plan.
Danger that administrators may become the masters instead of the servants of education.
Stop the process by which, as soon as a man justifies himself as an educator he is taken out of the classroom and put on an office stool.
Heads must be free to be in the middle of the active educational work – in a boiler suit or on the stage!
Stop paying Heads according to the numbers in their schools – thus encouraging the best men to move more towards the administrative job.
Pupils – the effects on them.
Criticism of the university scholarship system.
Anxiety – no relaxation for wider thinking.
Necessary to keep some back doors open.
Modern poets, 60% from a small number of public schools, very few from state schools. Why?
The importance to socialism of avoiding the unbalanced intellectual.
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/2 document 15