Sunday Evening Meeting – June 11th 1950
(A lot missed) Not word for word.
GARDENING WEEDS
I am going to talk to you tonight about gardening, because it is one of the things I specially enjoy. It is a sort of relief from teaching children, to play about with plants and flowers. They can’t answer back, you see. But nevertheless, there is an awful lot to be said about the similarities of looking after plants and looking after a school – the thin problems you have to meet in getting flowers to grow properly, and the things you do to help children to achieve something are the same thing. In fact, we sometimes say that children are flowering, and this means that what was really there under the surface all the time has appeared and we can now see it.
Now, what does a gardener have to do? He has to plan all the flowers he is going to grow, and he has to make sure of the right conditions. He has to make sure they will grow and bloom by giving them the right soil and manure. He has to control the weeds and he occasionally has to prune. Now let’s see if there is any similarity between that and what we teachers have to do in the school.
Do I plan my pupils and arrange them as I would plants in a garden? In some ways I do. You might consider yourself rather privileged to be in this school in view of the hundreds of children I see who want to come to it. You were selected because I liked the look of you. But of course I can’t quite select children as I do a delphinium or a lupin, because I have catalogues and books to tell me all about them, but I cannot look you up in a book to see whether you are a purebred or a hybrid. So I do a certain amount of selection and planning too, though I like a variety in the school garden just as I like variety in the one out there. I should not like to have you all alike, just as I should not like to have a garden full of the same kind of flowers.
What other similarities are there between what we do in a garden and what we do in a school? One of the things you have to be careful about is to avoid overcrowding, and running a school like this is a little bit like the processes of thinning out. You have a very spacious life – far more spacious than most children experience. You have a wide expanse of country to explore and a big house to roam around in. When you go home you probably realise what a cramped existence most people lead. Nearly everyone wants more space that they have actually got.
Then just as I provide manure for the plants so we provide food for you. One of these days in my science class you will learn how they once thought that manure was good for human beings too! (For medical treatment) We also have to provide the mental and spiritual food on which your personalities grow. The things we do together, the feeling we express towards you and which you express towards each other – those are the food on which your personalities grow.
Now that makes a bit of a connection with compost. You know what compost is – the rotted remains of previous plants. We get hold of grass and cabbage leaves and orange peel, and make it into food for the new plants. We do it in the spiritual and mental sense; the material we talk about in class and discussions is the compost, so to speak, from the thought of many previous generations. Some of you listened to A.E.C.......about Plato. He is the compost with which many minds have been fed for the last two thousand years, and he has never failed to stimulate the minds of people, and he will go on stimulating for many thousands of years to come. There again, there is a very close similarity – the things that meet your need, the things on which your mind will grow, will be the compost of the countless generations gone before you.
Then another similarity is that you need different conditions for different plants. You cannot treat each plant like every other plant. I have tried to plant a rock plant in the crevice of a rock, but it won’t grow because it likes to be moist. Other plants prefer a dry place. You are a little bit like that, but fortunately you have some things in common. It would be very difficult if, for instance, we had to provide a different kind of food for each one of you. We wouldn’t be able to keep our cooks very long. But we have to recognise that there are differences. I speak to some people quite differently from the way in which I speak to others. Some people take criticism from me straight out, go and chew it over and think it is worth while taking notice. Other people I have to be very gentle with – otherwise I will make them miserable for about a week afterwards. So we have to think how you need different treatment from everybody else.
Now concerning weeds. I am not going to say that some children are flowers and others weeds – that would be rather hard and I should have you thinking “Well, I wonder whether he thinks I am a flower or a weed!” I know we sometimes call boys weeds when they get very long and thin, but we don’t really mean it. But you can be a flower at one moment and a weed the next, or you may be both at the same time, and they may be struggling to see who will come out top. I don’t mean they are there all the time: all of us pass through periods when we are weeds.
Now let us look at some of the weeds we see in a garden. You can’t move about in your garden without being pricked by a thistle. Now, some people get so that you feel you can’t go near them in case you get pricked. If a person is like this it is because today he is being a thistle. It is just as well if we get out of are in the habit of turning ourselves into thistles to get out of it, because people like to throw them away.
Sometimes we are troubled by weeds known as cleavers there are human cleavers too – they stick all over you. I believe some people call them ‘sweethearts’ for that reason. Well, all of us go through a period of being cleavers. When we are very young we cleave to our mothers and hate being anywhere else. Later on we stand on our own feet to some extent but run back to mother when things are difficult. The best sort of mother is not the sort of mother who wants her child always hanging on to her, but the sort of mother who is glad to see him living his own life, standing on his own feet, and treating her as a friend. This clinging to other people can happen in your friendships, too: jealousies arise between you about friendships – [1]whether such-and-such a person has stolen your friend. Then you are being a cleaver – a weed in the community.
Now another weed that annoys me terribly is the ground elder. The ground elder is a particularly bad sort of weed that grows along under the surface without anybody knowing anything about it, until it suddenly appears. Sometimes weeds grow in human beings like that. They think they are all right, but deep down, strong tendencies are growing which sometimes burst forth into something destructive. A number of murderers are like that. They are not habitual criminals, but something bursts forth that has been growing for some time. This is not the sort of weed one expects to find in a school, but it happens in a large community when some powerful tendency grows. There is nothing showing until it suddenly comes to the surface and causes a great deal of unhappiness. This sort of thing may happen in a mild form in a school – things may be occuring growing under the surface, and it is only their appearance that might indicate something within us that we must get rid of.
There is another weed I have been pulling up today – chickweed. That grows on the surface – it is something like the triviality that some people have – the trivial, chattering people who don’t give themselves a chance to think deeply. It prevents a strong plant from growing up properly.
I could go on for a long time describing different types of weeds and how in human beings there is a tendency for weeds to grow. Now let us turn to pruning. Roses and fruit trees are the chief things a gardener has to prune. Sometimes he prunes flowers to make them flower better later on. He tries to prevent the flower blooming in a precocious fashion, because then it won’t provide him with flowers later in the year. Not everyone realises that that can happen with children. Children in school can be very precocious and start learning things very quickly. Then the teachers push the child ahead for a University Scholarship – they think he is a credit to the school if he is a success in exams. He does this remarkably well – and then quite often in the early twenties everything seems to go out of him and he is not heard of any more. What we prefer to do with you is to try to develop a lot of side shoots in you - a lot of interests – so that the people who meet you will say “Here is somebody who knows a lot about the world and who can do more than most people”. Gardeners have to prune the side shoots so that a plant grows up in an orderly way. You will find that sometimes when your activities become particularly wild – in other words, - if you start sending shoots off in all directions – we prune your shoots. But a good gardener does not merely cut off pieces of a plant – he prunes to the bud. He thinks, “Now there is a good bud – if I cut back to there I might do something with it”. We try to do the same sort of thing with you. Sometimes we try to stop your wild and crazy activities and help you to develop some activity in which you might be good – send you to the workshop a bit more, for instance, or suggest things for you to read. If you browse about among comics - that is like being an unpruned tree.
There are some differences between being a gardener and being a school master. One of the differences is this – that plants are not responsive as human beings are. There is a sort of responsiveness in that they respond to if it is given the right sort of food and the right sort of conditions a plant will respond by doing all you want it to do. But people can do more than that. They can not only develop in the right sort of way, but they can give you something back in a much more equal fashion than a plant does. When you have taught somebody and that person becomes your friend it is more satisfying than gardening. I have never found a flower that cared for me!
But I should like to finish up on that point of understanding what we are doing. It is no use to try to treat a plant as if it were another. When you know of the different needs it produces good results. A good gardener does not feel possessive – he doesn’t feel “It is all my work”. The gardener, however, good, is amazed and delighted and surprised by his own work – he makes his experiments and something comes. It is a complete mystery. It is no use trying to get it tied up with chemistry and biology. It is not sufficient to be a scientist. You have to be an artist – you have to have feeling of the mystery of life. When you see the lovely shape and colour of a plant, you think “What is the point of it? It seems it came only to delight us”. That is the result we get from our efforts. That is what we hope to get and I know we shall get from our efforts as school teachers.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 24