Sunday Jan 22nd 1949
WHAT HAS GONE WRONG (Autumn 1949)
Sometimes when I give these Sunday evening talks I have reason to praise the school - to say how good I feel much of its life can be. But always such a picture is bound to be partial. When I spoke to you at the end of last term, perhaps if I had known all that was going on I should not have been able to give such a good picture of it. The things I said then were true, even if they were not all the truth. My consciousness of what is going on in the School is bound to vary from time to time - at other times I may be aware of things going wrong.
Tonight I feel I should speak about some of the things that we have got to correct. If we find that in the school there is a good life it is our duty to safeguard it. The price of freedom is eternal diligence vigilance. The freedom in a democracy has to be guarded: it is equally true of a school. When I talked about the good life I’m talking about freedom also. You know when things go well with you, when the group of people with which you spend most of your time feel good towards each other, when you are doing something creative, you feel free. When on the other hand you feel at sixes and sevens with each other and you do your work badly, you feel chained and fettered. Sometimes you may blame the restrictions of school life, but you have to admit that the feelings of being fettered come from yourself and can be dealt with by yourself rather than an outer environment. There are instances when we can blame things outside ourselves. That would have been the case had you been at a girls' school 100 years ago. Such conditions exist in some e schools today, but it is not so here.
Let’s try to examine some of the things we should improve, some of the things which have gone wrong. We should all do so early in the term, because if we don't we shall not be able to get to ther (sic) end of the term and feel it has been a good term in the sense that last term was.
To begin with, housework has been extremely bad this term. It has got steadily worse since the term began and it reached a climax this morning, when I found hardly a staircase that looked as if a brush had been on it, a bathroom in a state of chaos left dirty last night and only half-heartedly tackled this morning. All that sort of thing - sweet papers left about from yesterday - it gave one a pretty ghastly picture of what had been done. If the work is degenerating in that way it must be because people are not conscious enough of the way in which this work should be done. I feel I must explain, to those especially to those of you who have recently come to the school, why we do it. Some schools do it because they are not able to get enough domestic help and they have to tackle some of the jobs themselves. We do it here partly for that reason, certainly, but we did it in the first place because we felt it was right for us to take on a large part of that sort of work ourselves. I had seen schools where all that sort of work was done by other people, people who were not in any other way connected with the school. So you could make as such mess as you liked, knowing that some non-descript servant would come alons (sic) and sweep it up. In many schools before the war, girls of fourteen [a]nd fifteen were hired as soon as they left an elementary school and paid perhaps 10/ - or 15/- a week while they lived [in] backwaters in the school (the ordinary boys and girls had good living, quarters) and often they were kept quite apart for t from the children in the school, not even being allowed to talk to them. You can well imagine that I could not bear the thought of such conditions existing, and we felt when we started this school that we should do some of the work ourselves so that we did not think the work was in any way beneath us or not fit for us, as well as to get over the fact that we could not afford to get others to do it. When Constantine came here to talk about how coloured people were treated all over the world I [1]could feel the sympathy that welled up when he talked about his wife and daughter on the train and how badly they were treated. If you think of it for a moment you must feel equally strongly about any -------- or attitudes of mind. There are in this country people whose jobs mark them as an in inferior group. I told you the story about the shunter because in those jobs which we never hear about are men with great willingness to serve a community. In a sense the fact that we do our own cleaning work means that we accept men like these for the work they do in the world as our personal equals. I am a little inclined to feel at this moment that the fact that we try to ease the burden for you makes the work seem undesirable - something we should relieve you of. I hope that feeling will rapidly vanish. If there ever came in this school a time when we thought that this work should be done by someone else and not by ourselves, then this school would cease to be Wennington in all but name and I should certainly cease to be its Headmaster.
When we started this school the work was badly done. I had little experience of organising: it - the children had no experience of doing it. We spent along (sic) time finding out how jobs could best be done, and when we did find out we got satisfaction out of knowing that they were well done. Housework requires intelligence just the same as other jobs do. Only if you regard it as work to do well will you accept it as a reasonable part of your life. The trouble is that the school is so big - you feel you are only one of many engaged in a task. You feel that if you do your job badly it will hardly matter in such a crowd. But this is the sort of feeling that spreads from one to another rapidly - it is far more catching than measles, because it may spread in twenty-four hours, so that the school grows in dinginess and discontent. It spreads to people's minds as well as to their…
Now probably just telling you about this will be enough to make you re-think your attitude to it and try to improve it. I want to bring in to it one or two other things that seem to go with it in the school at the moment. - something that concerns your whole attitude and something that affects the school in general.
There are other things happening in the school that make me think we have started the term rather badly. Over minor rules there is a good deal of slackness - about such things as going out during break, order during tea, getting up from tea at a reasonable time in order to allow the orderlies to get on with their job, taking notice of the bell when it rings to call you to something, creeping up to dormitories hoping you won't be noticed instead of simply asking for permission from whoever is in the sewing room. These things seem trivial in themselves, and so often people have excuses that are nearly good enough. Taken alone, we think 'why bother?' take them together and them (sic) make a portion of something that is rather unhappy - something that will spoil our life for the term. If something big happens - somebody does something appalling - it immediately springs to one's notice and it is dealt with, and over and done with. But a lot of petty things can cause more trouble.
With this goes something more serious - your attitude to people like counsellors and staff. In the ordinary human situations of school life there is more friendship here than in any other school I, have known. But when it comes to having to accept authority from people who are your friends it is as though you feel you cannot accept authority from someone who is your friend, or, conversely, he cannot be your friend if he wants to exercise authority over you. Surely this cannot, be true. We cannot have the idea that if a person has authority over us he cannot be our friend. Counsellors hardly say anything about it, but I know that their feeling is, “I do want to be friends with these people; I don't want to say anything to spoil that friendship”. The counsellors who have not had much experience of this kind of thing, do let things pass because they don't want to risk upsetting their relations with other people. I have sometimes watched children when a counsellor has had to tell them to do something or not to do something, and I have seen a look of what I can only describe as insolence on their faces - as if to say "Huh - he things (sic) he knows he can't do anything - let's just stand around and see what happens" If you do that - if you trade on the fact that this is a school where we rely on mutual cooperation - where no violent punishments are inflicted - you are betraying friendship. I mean that it is the same sort of things as can happen on a much larger scale in home relations….. What could be a good situation becomes a bad one. Counsellors and staff have got to use authority: you cannot have a group of people living together without authority of some sort or another. What you should so (sic) is try and make their lives easier, instead of harder. When staff and counsellors pull you up for some failure, try to accept the criticism cheerfully. It was commented by one of the staff that if he criticised a boy here there is as much resentment as if he had told him to go to the H.M.’s study for caning.- - - - could be in a school of a very restrictive type, where violent punishments are still being meted out to boys. What we want is not subservience but intelligent cooperation. As I have said, perhaps now I have talked about it to you there will be an improvement, but I sometimes wish we could get a bit more stability - something that would stop us sinking down and then having to pull ourselves up again.
The school has to go a very long way yet. We have a Sixth Form that has to go a long way before it understands what a Sixth Form has got to be. If we can solve our problems permanently we should set free the older people for getting on with that. What we expect is loyalty. I have always been hesitant to use that because it can mean the wrong kind of loyalty - rather like the Charge of the Light Brigade when they knew some idiot had made a mistake. I mean something quite different - I mean the sort of effort on the part of the older people in a school to try to - - - - - where it is leading. For me this job of running a school is not a matter of handing out things which I am certain you will adjust. It is for me to find out what it can achieve. I am sure if the older people in the [s]chool and the staff and myself can get together and decide it will be a lot clearer to us and to you. I still feel that the Sunday morning meeting is the occasion when we can draw together. I want all of you who are capable of serious thinking to try to find out what the school means. - you older people who think of the school not merely as a place in which you can be happy, but a place in which you can make discoveries about your future and the school's future - a place in which you can discover things which will give you a sense of direction not only here but in your life afterwards.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 12