All Change!
by Kenneth Barnes
Sunday, January 19th, 1954
A few days ago a student was discussing with me the special problems of a modern university, a university quite different from Oxford or Cambridge in that it had no long-standing traditions or pervasive atmosphere, a university that drew very many of its students from houses with no intellectual or cultural standard and which had so far done very little to develop among its students a satisfactory standard of social behaviour. He described to me a student who often sat opposite him at table, who chewed his food with his mouth open and who held his knife and fork as one holds the handlebars of a motorcycle. The fact that other people ate their food more graciouly had no effect whatever upon this student. He was satisfied with the way he lived, with the habits he had developed and saw no reason for change. There were many students in the college who in other ways showed a lack of awareness of what we call good standards, who were ungracious, insensitive and coarse in most of their behaviour.
Now this was not told me in order to prove that people brought up in poor houses are necessarily like this, It has nothing to do with whether a person is poor or rich. I remember when for a few days I had meals in a Cambridge college - I was an eighteen-year old scholarship candidate then - I was staggered by the coarse and filthy talk delivered across the table in the highly cultured accents of the well-to-do, No - I was told about this phenomenon for this reason. This bad social behaviour went with self-satisfaction and complacence. "My behaviour's different? Well what of it? It's good enough for me." Not only was the attitude self-satisfaction satisfied,, there was a sort of defiance and hostility about it, a refusal to change or to admit the need for any change.
Now this refusal to admit that any change is necessary in us is thoroughly bad. No matter what it is concerned with - whether with the way we eat; the way we talk, the way we treat each other, the way we feel about things, the way we think and form opinions, the way we fall in and out of love; - to be self-satisfied with what we are is bad. It is to be half-dead. What is the opposite to this. attitude? It is to be sensitive to our own inadequacies, to the way we fall, short, to the need for delicacy and discrimination in the way we think and feel, it is to be aware of the effect of our actions on other people and on the quality of the groups of people in which we live. It is to know where and when we need to change our habits. and to be able to enjoy the experience changing ourselves, becoming different from what we were.
I have often said that teaching, which for me means working with boys and girls, not just doing things to them, can be more encouraging than working with adults because, generally speaking, young people do change, often at certain periods in their growth very rapidly, whereas adults become quickly set and often harden into a mould that remains unchanged for the rest of their lives.
Change of any sort is apt to be exciting, A sudden thunder storm or a fall of snow, or a brilliant sunny day after weeks of dull weather - these experiences excite us and give us a lift of the spirit. So does most experience that thrusts us into a new and unfamiliar scene of activity.
A few days ago at a few moments notice I was smuggled into the French Television Studios in Paris and was able to watch an old farmer from a small French farm, who had never been away from his farm for a single day before, being rehearsed for an interview about the value of mechanised, farming. He had never had a tractor and had stodd (sic) out against such things. It was exceedingly interesting to see for the first time, some of the back-stage problems of television. It gave me something to think about and talk about for days afterwards.
It is, however, possible to go through exciting experiments without changing at all inside oneself. Thus the experience that in the Iong run gives us most of all the feeling of having lived truly is the experience of changing within - not just a haphazard series of changes - but a development or series of changes that we can look back upon as having made life steadily more worth while, richer, deeper, more truly satisfying. It is one of the paradoxes of life that in order to get more satisfaction from life we have to be dissatisfied with ourselves, because by being dissatisfied with ourselves we become ready to change. Now how many of you are dissatisfied with yourselves? How many of you are content to go on just being, what you, with nothing new happening, inside yourselves?
Now it would be true to say that most of the boys and girls in this school were sent here because they needed a change, because the people in charge of them felt that they needed a change of environment, of school, and a change within.
It is appropriate that I should talk about this subject today, because we have an unusually large number of new pupils for the beginning, of a Spring term. For most of them it is a great change, either physically or in atmosphere. Our newcomer, who has already been all round the world by the age of 11, was hurtled. from India on a Comet, dropping in for a week-end at Cairo on the way. But she comes from a school in India where the ideas are not very different from ours. Others have come just a hundred miles or two on a humble train, yet perhaps find the habits and atmosphere of this school as bewildering as those of a foreign country, quite different from all that they have been used to.
Why have these pupils - and indeed all of you - suffered this change? Why were you sent here? Can you remember? Here are some common reasons. I do not think it is good for me or the school that I should claim too often that the school is different from others. Yet that it is the reason most often given by those who send children here. They know It is different, or they hope it will be. It seems to them that the school cares about individual children. Because classes are small and because it is a boarding school we have the time and the opportunity to do for individual children what a large day school cannot do. Often because many of us are Quakers members of the Religious Society of Friends, people think they can specially trust us to discover what their their children need and to give them it rather than make their children fit a pattern. It is often very difficult for long-established schools, heavily weighted with tradition, to avoid forcing their pupils into a mould instead of helping each pupil to discover what his own true pattern of development should be. It is certainly true that we do want each boy or girl to develop his own personality to the full, not to be in any way a copy of an approved pattern. I hope there will never be such a thing as a typical Wenningtonian.
Is it enough that the men and women in the school should care for the boys and girls in it, should study carefully what they need and then give them just what they need? No. We can hardly do anything for a child who does not respond, except be patient. The change occurs only when the child responds, begins to enjoy what is provided, and begins to work with us in what we are doing for him. I often feel that once we have in the school a group of 'boys and girls who really understand what is distinctive about the school and what good things are possible in it, they - the -boys and girls - can do more for the rest of you than we can. You know that your friends - other boys and girls - generally matter more to you than grown ups in the school - and therefore you learn more from them in a good many respects.
If a boy brings his old habits and attitudes into the school and refuses to change them what can we do? If he thinks of teachers necessarily as his enemies, or as the people whose demands he must automatically resist. A great number of children in schools all over the country do get this impression of teachers. If they were to give a definition of a teacher it would run almost like this: a teacher is a man or woman who wants me to do something I don't want to do. It is difficult to change a habitual attitude like this, if you have established it over many years, yet it must be changed if you are to derive the benefits that this school is supposed to give you.
VVhether you are one of the fully understanding group or not, it is still true that you are all the time educating each other through your friendships. Many of you are very much concerned about having friends - girls more consciously than boys, and it is true that what happens about your friendships is of very great importance. So perhaps I should givesome advice about this. We cannot get friends by wanting them or grabbing at them. Friendships cannot be grasped. If you try to grasp it you will find your hand empty every time. Either the other person will not respond or what you think at first is friendship will after prove to be a sham. This is one of things that young people find it very hard to accept. They go on longing and longing and longing, as though by wanting hard enough they will get what they want.
I sometimes see a boy or girl standing about looking miserable, and I know what is wrong. But I am often unable to do anything for that boy or girl because there has to be a change in attitude. Real friendship comes only when we are prepared to give something. I do not mean sweets or anything material, but something from inside ourselves. A lonely person may find a friend when he or she discovers another person who is lonely or in need and is so touched by this other person's condition that he forgets all about his own loneliness in the desire to give something to that other person. It may not however by (sic) as clear as this; anything that makes a lonely person forget his own loneliness may bring him a friend – the discovery of a new interest, bringing him into contact with other people in a self-forgetful way. No, wanting and longing do not bring us any nearer to friendship, they only shut us up tighter and tighter inside a prison where other people cannot reach us.
I ought to say something to those people to whome (sic) friendships come easily, the popular people who gather friends round them. They have a special responsibility. People in that position sometimes discover that their popularity gives them power over others and they may make use of that power in such a way as to cause mischief. But if their popularity is based upon really sound qualities, upon a real capacity for sympathy, they can be of great value to those who are really in need of friendship and do not get enough.
There is sometimes a serious obstacle to be overcome in a person who is lonely and in need of friendship. Sometimes that person may get into such an obvious state of distress that a fellow pupil at last takes notice and offers friendship. Sometimes the lonely one, instead of readily accepting the offer, begins to be diffident and awkward and ends by saying, after a good deal of fuss. No. I'm all right, thank you. It's a bit like a young, child who howls for a particular sort of food., gets the whole family in a state of distressuntil at last it is put in front of him, but then pushes it away saying that he doesn't really like that stuff. We must ask ourselves sometimes whether we genuinely want friendship or only wish to be the centre of fussy attention.
When a friendship has been formed, how should the partners judge its quality.How shall we, the staff, judge it? Not all friendships are good. A friendship that is close and possessive, that shuts others out is not a good friendship. A good friendship makes the live people concerned not less able to make friends with other people, but more able. A good marriage does not consist in retiring into a house and slamming the door on everyone else. It increases one’s circle of friends and makes those friends even more interesting. Loving one person wisely and deeply should make it more possible for us to love and understand others.
One of the habits that I see often damaging good relations in the school is that of making friendships an opportunity for gossip and confidences about other people. Often this is done in such a way as to make thos[e] other boys or girls painfully aware that they are being talked about. Need I say, that this is thoroughly bad? It introduces an element of spite and meanness, and it implies that what you call a friendship is not a friendship at all* This is a besetting sinwith girls. The element that is most dangerous in boys is the tendency to make their friendships what one might call criminalfriendships. Just as the "cosh-boys" and - the "Clapham Common Spivs," become, closely united in real crime, so boys everywhere are tempted to join together in friendshipswhose main aim is not to enjoy each others company and personality, but to aid and abet each other in acts that are destructive. Most boys pass through the "gang stage" but they must pass out of it if they are ever to know what true friendship is.
I have made this little detour in the matter of friendships because when you come into the school it is infriendships that you feel most the impact of change. But friendship isn't just neatly put into a department of school life. It is closely tied up with everything else - with your attitude to the school as a whole. That brings meback to the subject of change. Are you ready for things to happen to you that will make you a different person? If you are, then the, school will soon mean a great deal to you and you will enjoy it.
Nearly everyone has a fear of change. We are afraid of new thoughts, new feelings, just as we are afraid of strange food.
Just a fortnight ago I was walking through the Latin Quarter in Paris with my son,looking, for a restaurant that I had known and like[d] in the past. When we reached it we found that it was closed for several days. We were disappointed and began to walk haphazardly through streets off the. Boulevard St. Germain looking for some other place. We suddenly found ourselves outside a little eating house and bar, where food was being cooked inthe window. Outside was a blackboard on which the dishes and their prices were scrawled in chalk. I hesitated; itwas not the sort of place that I ever went into in England. But myson pushed me through the door; he was hungry. There was nothing outwardly attractive about the place; a lot of wooden tables, pushed very closely together, coats and hats hanging over the backs of rickety chairs. Beef and "pommes frites” at 130francs was, incredibly cheap, surely we could not expect much. But we found placed in front of each of us a mountain of chips with a great slab of grilled steak, tenderly cooked, and a foot of bread.
Through fear of the unusual I might have lost the opportunity of that very good meal. If you are prepared for change you may have experiences as satisfying to your spirit as that steak was to my stomach.
Archive reference PP KCB 3/7/2 document 05