SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

Henry 'Moore is so unquestionably the giant among British artists of his time that it seems merely natural for his proposed gift to the nation of a collection of his work to be on a magnificent scale. Although his generous in- tentions became public only this week, in fact he has been pondering some such arrangement for years. At one time some of his friends suggested that the grounds of his home in Hert- fordshire, where many of his works are always arranged among the trees and lawns, might ulti- mately become the setting for a national Moore collection. This rather appealed to him, as he prefers his work to be seen in the open air. In the end he decided against it, partly for the absurdly modest reason that Shaw's ugly Vic- torian house in the same county had proved to be something of a white elephant, and he didn't like risking a similar fate for his own home. So the Tate is the beneficiary : and I hope that the trustees will overcome the difficulties and provide a special gallery for him. It is a debt owed to a great man, in spite of Sir Charles Wheeler's jaundiced comments.

Milestone

Lord Beaverbrook once reduced a royal com- mission to silence by breezily admitting that he ran his newspapers `to make political propa- ganda.' Nowadays the dominant men in what is unpleasantly called the 'communications busi- ness' are different : they tend to be efficient managers who might have been equally effective in any other form of production for the con- sumer market. Henry Luce, who died on Tues- day, was much closer to Beaverbrook than to the new breed. He was a keen businessman, but more besides. He had strong, often extreme, views, and liked to hammer them into the public mind; and also, of course, he showed genius in evolving a whole new category of popular jour- nalism, with its own rules and its own language.

I have known Time men fume and chafe at the restraints put upon them by the magazine's iron formula. but 'the organisation' exerts a powerful spell upon its inmates. Luce himself, in recent times at least, was a rather remote, dis- tant figure. Isolated to some extent by deafness, he was also not the most approachable of men by nature. Like his papers, he inclined to the didactic. I remember hearing of one lunch party for some of his staff at which the conversation flourished imperfectly and even looked like dying out. Then Luce cleared his throat and said, 'You might like to hear some of my recent thinking.' There was no conversation problem after that. He told them about China until the party broke up.

Goodbye, Mr Chips

Whatever they may do to their pupils, the public schools seem to bring out the worst in their political opponents. The memorandum of eyidence submitted to the Newsom commission by the National Union of Teachers is, I fear, a deplorably illiberal document. These schools are, of course, open to all sorts of criticisms, and I agree with many of those listed by the Nur; but when these spokesmen for the teach- ing profession depart from criticism and make proposals for the future, they sound a depress- ingly authoritarian note. They choose the Final Solution—that is, total abolition of all inde- pendent schools, by law; and they justify this

choice not by the value, or lack of it, which these institutions may possess as schools, but in the name of that current favourite among cant expressions, social justice.

The argument is terrifyingly simple. Such schools are declared to pose a 'social problem' to the 'community at large': therefore it fol- lows that they must be eliminated. There is hardly a minority or an institution in the country which could not be persecuted or ex- tinguished by this kind of reasoning. I don't personally have powerful feelings about public schools as such, and I don't belong to the so- called 'closed society' which the authors of this document presumably feel themselves excluded from. But I recoil in alarm from this kind of tidy-minded tyranny, especially when it eman- ates from the nation's teachers, no less.

I am puzzled, too, by the NUT'S readiness to permit a loophole. The memorandum admits the possibility that certain schools would migrate to Ireland or Switzerland or some other more permissive haven. The brain drain might then begin at the age of Common Entrance, or earlier. Surely it would soon be declared that it was 'socially divisive' for a minority of rich and privileged children to be educated at English schools in exile? I wonder how long it would be before currency regulations or some other convenient weapons were invoked to bring the defaulters into line.

Free school

After such a dose of educational totalitarian- ism it was a relief to read this week Talking of Summerhill, the new book by A. S. Neil, that remarkable and revolutionary schoolmaster.

But then he is an old-style radical: in other words Ise believes in greater freedom, not social engineering. 'I am glad to say,' he writes, 'that in Britain the Establishment is pretty tolerant, otherwise such a rebel institution as Summerhill would have been closed long ago.' True: but if it becomes illegal to pay fees for any form of primary or secondary education, then no such boldly unconventional venture as his will ever be permitted again.

Neill is eighty-three now, and has been run- ning his unwaveringly 'progressive' school for something like half a century. While most pioneers tend to grow away from their youthful ideas, moving towards some slightly less un- orthodox position, Neill has done he opposite: he has stuck to his early radical views and watched orthodoxy move closer to him. When I visited Summerhill a few years ago I was just as impressed by Neill's personality as I had been by his brisk and practical exposition of his ideas in his books. He insists that he has never been at ail tempted to 'mould the character' of a child. Of course, his benign and shrewd example is bound to be a powerful moulding influence, whether he likes it or not. The best teachers rely more on example than on discipline.

0 tempora!

'The weird antics, ridiculous fashions, and the sexual moves of British girls have made them a laughing stock abroad . . .' (From a letter in the Evening Standard, 24 February.)