The Sullen Assault
By FIELDEN HUGHES rrHE secondary modern school is important if I only because a good 70 per cent, of the nation's children receive their education from it. But besides that, it is important because if it should fail, there will be, in a few decades, a small elite educated elsewhere, and a huge culturally illiterate and consequently aggressive majority. Yet it is under a steady and prejudiced attack. Its critics do not hesitate to say, although these schools are only fourteen years old, that they have already failed.
The scale of the attack upon them is obvious. Television and the press have magnified isolated incidents of local significance, so that an impres- sion has been created, vague but dangerous, that secondary modern scholars are hooligans. There have been sensational accounts of their experiences by young teachers, who seem in some cases to have mistaken the results of their own beginners' incompetence for the natural depravity of their pupils. In this journal a few weeks ago Mr. Christopher Hollis said : In a good many of them [secondary modern schools] a savagery reigns that is reminiscent of ' Dickens. The only difference between them and Dotheboys Hall is that, whereas at Dotheboys Hall it was the masters who half-murdered the boys, here it tends to he the boys who half- murder the masters.
But how many is 'a good many'? And are the masters of secondary modern schools really like Mr. Squeers—cruel, illiterate, unable to spell, capitalising the poverty and ignorance of their pupils, cunning and cowardly? Are modern schools housed in dismal old structures, cold, unhealthy and insanitary? And, anyway, did the masters at Dotheboys Hall half-murder the boys? There were only two masters there—Squeers and Nicholas Nickleby; the one was a bully, the other a champion of the oppressed. Dickens at least admitted a 50 per cent. rightness. Mr. Hollis does not.
We who work in secondary modern schools cannot understand the hostility to them, the apparent desire to bring about their failure. One of the most 'subtle methods in this campaign against the secondary modern school is to discuss it in immediate context with grammar schools. The latter have a splendid history of centuries of development and service. To compare the two kinds of school is like contrasting an old scholar with a boy of fourteen. Yet the effect is to discredit the secondary modern school in the uninformed public mind. Inside the secondary modern school, part of the struggle is to win, by fair means and true achievement, the confidence and pride of the parents whose children attend it. Outside, publi- cists seem to use every unfair means of destroying that hard-won confidence and pride.
It is more than time that the truth about secondary modern schools became widely known, before they are finally pushed into disrepute. To begin with, these schools do not resemble any other type of school in data, aim, purpose or achievement. Generalisations about the children who attend them cannot but be false. If it is fair to say that on the whole, grammar school children are apt for bookish instruction, it does not follow that secondary modern pupils are not. Mr. Christopher Hollis made no bones about speaking of secondary modern children as those 'who have failed to make the grade.' This is a blunt statement of the prime heresy in a secondary modern school, which every headmaster vigorously extirpates. He must, because he cannot live with himself as the principal of an institution full of self-acknow- ledged failures. The first task of the secondary modern school is to'restore hope and self-confi- dence to its children, both of which the 'eleven- plus' examination has done its best to destroy.
If grammar school children are to some extent a type—a very good type--..-the one fact about secondary modern children which no internal observer can miss is not that they are short of gifts and talents;, it is the wide and fascinating variety of those gifts and talents. Sometimes boys or girls may be one-talent children. To us who run these schools, this variety of talent is not only our challenge; it is also our unique and wholly different Material, We are there to foster every gift, to develop every talent, and to point the way to the full life which is going to be a different fulness for every child, This means that the secondary modern school has to be, more than any other kind of school, sharply aware of its children as individuals, each with his own needs and potential.
The second fact which is evident to teachers in secondary modern schools is that even 'D'-stream children—that is, the least academic of a four-
stream intake—are handicapped only in respect of arithmetic and English. Many of them are bright, eager, socially responsive children, gay and co- operative, and very anxious to succeed. In general knowledge, in spoken English, in quick grasp of relationships, in drama, in the ancient delights like narrative poetry, miming, conversation—they are the most rewarding children any teacher could desire. Their school has to develop these gifts, and diagnose their other needs with a view to a steady cure. Secondary modern schools might well insti- tute a series of days when their critics as well as their friends could come and see who is there and what goes on.
In every place of any size at all in England, there is a secondary modern school; in large towns, several. The men and women in charge of them, and the teachers who serve in them, arc quite clear as to their policy, and the work they have to do in their generation. It is, for the first time in educational history, to take this excellent human material, study it and its needs, and evolve a quite new kind of educational technique and tradition, acceptable to children and parents as being not merely a good substitute for some other kind of schooling, but in itself an excellent best for them.
There are factual answers to the complaints of the critics. School libraries in full use; school clubs of every kind; individual projects, literary and cul- tural, carried to a high level of attainment judged by any standards; exquisite craftsmanship; first- rate relationship with parents; long-term career planning; and above all, thousands of children happy and successful, even in terms of external university examinations.
Those of us who run these despised schools are aware of the urgent need to do everything in our power to build, stone by stone, a reputation for the secondary modern school in its own locality which will remove the absurd stigma of failure at eleven plus, a stigma that shows itself over neigh- bourly walls, in family letters, in a score of mean ways. To see the edifice we are trying to make spattered with the mud of unjustified criticism only makes us the more determined to carry on building.
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