The View from my Grammar School
By WILLIAM THORNTON* T FIND it very difficult to write about education, ljust as I suppose a man who earns his living operating a pneumatic drill would find it difficult to write about the transport system. Perhaps more so. Teaching is arduous and demanding, and one is necessarily preoccupied with one's own hole in the road. The teacher's job is extra- ordinarily solitary and shut-off. One knows very little of what goes on in other teachers' class- rooms, and still less about what goes on in other people's schools. This isolation and ignorance is regrettable (if you can't stand it you go into administration or become a headmaster), but probably inevitable, because at the heart of the far-flung and rather depressing abstraction which we call education lies, or should lie, a vital human transaction which can only be effected within a living context of personal relationship. The achieving and maintaining of this personal relationship, from moment to moment, day to day, and over the years, is very difficult, and leaves neither time nor energy for discovering how other people's relationships are getting on —even if it were possible to do so.
There seem to me to be two main factors which decide the quality of the education which a school is able to provide: one is the social and intellectual climate which results from the quality of the human relationships existing within the school; and the other is the pressures• exerted by the outside world—universities, em- ployers, parents, society itself and its needs—on the content of what is taught in the school. The quality of the personal relationships within 3 school will depend to some extent on the nature of the people involved, particularly, no doubt, oa the nature of the headmaster and the senior members of the staff, but once a tradition of decency has been established it appears to en? body marked survival characteristics.
If I had to give a single illustration of the social climate of the school in which I teach, I would _describe a collision which occurred one morning between a small boy and a senior mem- ber of the staff. It was in the notice-board passage, neither of them was looking where he, was going, and the collision was violent and perhaps painful. The boy dropped his books, which shied across the corridor; boy and master looked at each other for a moment; and then the master said with an appearance of much concern, 'I say, I'm terribly sorry!' and pro- ceeded to help the boy to collect his scattered books. In fairness, I should mention another collision with a different outcome, when the master kicked the boy's backside very hard all° expressed the hope that that would teach biro to behave in a civilised manner in future; but this was a newish young man, as yet unaccus- tomed to the ways of the school. A good school, educates its teachers and where it is established the tradition will probably withstand anything save major reorganisation or the influence of an * Mr. Thornton is a member of the staff of a large direct-grant school in the North of England.
odistandingly capable and wrong-headed head- master.
So far a, the teacher is concerned, the most difficult and demanding relationship he has to achieve is the one that needs to exist between himself as the man by the blackboard and the successive groups of from twelve to thirty boys of varying ages and abilities who slide, period by period, into the -desks. When he succeeds in this, education tends to occur, and he feels ex- ti aordinarily happy; when he fails, a feeling of depression results, which may extend far outside the classroom and temporarily colour his whole view of life. (Teachers are notably prone to alternating moods of content and near-despair.) When all goes well and education occurs, infor- mation and skills may be successfully trans- mitted; it may even happen that there is a meeting of minds in a region where truth matters and is seen to matter.
It would be foolish, of course, to see too much in the part that the teacher plays in the whole process of education. Children are active, developing beings, endlessly sorting, combining, discarding, resolving, and nourishing the incom- ing welter of data that life presents them with. Or they should be. School is the place both set apart for this to happen and arranged so that it can happen. Or it should be. A teacher's in- fluence on a child's intellectual development may be seminal or formative, but there are many other forces at work within a school—the mutually educative influence of young people upon one another, for example, and the experi- ences provided by such institutions as the school's orchestra, its camps, its drama, its debating society, its games. It is customary to pay tribute to such activities on school speech days, and their actual influence on individual develop- ment might be difficult to exaggerate.
My thesis may, therefore, be seen to be that a good school is an organic, subtly articulated whole, whose proper internal functioning is a complex process ultimately dependent on the relationships existing between its human com- ponents. But no school is entirely self-contained, and two main observations about the pressures and influendes from outside, mentioned earlier in this article, might be made.
First, as to the influence of all those who require and/or demand (and they are very potent) certain standards of achievement from the schools—it seems to me that all such people and bodies should carefully consider the effects of their demands (whether they are for three Grade Bs at 'A' Level, five '0' Levels, the ability to spell 'grammar,' or the need to achieve a society where everybody has oil-fired central heating), because as things are the schools will probably do their best to meet such demands. It is, in fact, already apparent that many people —headmasters, teachers, children themselves— are ready enough to substitute a single-minded, clear-cut attempt to satisfy the examiner—that faceless, unaccountable monster of our times— for the pursuit, of the difficult, unmeasurable process of trying to see to it that the young grow into intelligent, balanced, sensitive, kindly, happy, grown-up people.
There is another impingement of the outer world upon the school. A school derives from society and must be concerned with society. Proper relations between people in a school cannot ultimately be divorced from a proper relationship between the school and the society in which it exists. Politicians and others respon- sible for ordering the closure of grammar schools are engaged in an act of educational surgery from which some uniquely valuable
patients arc quite certainly going to die. Those, on the other hand, who are anxious only for the survival of a privileged form of education are practising a kind of institutional egoism, which in the end will prove sterile and self-consuming. It is one thing that children in Bristol should march in defence of the grammar school; it is a different thing that secondary modern children in the same town should march under the
banner, 'Give us comprehensive schools.' These are not merely two sides to an argument, any more than 'Give us bread' is an alternative cry to 'Save our cake.' The comparison is inexact, but the point is real, as is the further question that arises: must this be the choice?
No school is an island; a good school should surely be like home in Robert Frost's words: 'Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'
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