APPROVED-AND WHY
By SIR- ALEXANDER PATERSON THE Englishman is never in such a morass as when he attempts to explain to the visitor from the United States or Europe the different sorts of schools that flourish in our midst and produce the sort of people we are. He explains with some misgiving that the " public school " is really a private school, reserved for the sons of the few and privileged rich, that the grammar school, so far from specialising on grammar, frequently emits boys and girls to whom the King's English is still a mystery. When he is asked the last awkward question, " What do you mean by an approved school? Surely all schools are approved, or they cannot exist," he is frankly puzzled, but at length is fain to reply a little extensively, "An approved school is a residential school, so thorough and complete in its all-round training of habit and character that it has been approved by the Home Office for the training of under-privileged children who have been handicapped in the earlier years of their life. To such schools come two different streams of children. Some have been
found guilty of an offence by the Juvenile Court, others are committed by a similar Court for `care and protection' because it is considered that their environment is .such that unless they receive corrective training at this stage they will inevitably become delinquent and in due course be committed to an approved school."
Criticism is sometimes directed against a system which sends to the same school those who have actually committed an offence against the law and those who are in danger of doing so. The sentimentalist can complain that it is unfair to compel the children of poverty to consort with the children of crime. Those, however, who have spent their lives in dealing with the potential and actual child delinquent are quite unanimous in saying that there is little difference between the two categories, and that they require just the same training and attention.
Disturbed a little, like many others, by newspaper accounts of what
had happened at a certain approved school, I decided to bring my experience a little more up to date by visiting one such establishment that I had known many years ago. It seemed to me that I should get a fairer picture of an appros ed school if I could see it in acute contrast with the alternative treatment of bygone days. Anyone studying the records of small boys at an approved school knows well that fifty or sixty years ago they would nor. heve been committed to it for eighteen months of training and education, but must have been sentenced for eighteen months of imprisonment and punish- ment in the nearest local prison.
Therefore I spent a morning recently at a local prison, where some forty boys were confined, and spent the afternoon of the same day in an :approved school, barely ten miles away, where sixty boys of a younger age-group were in the process of training. In this way it was possible to catch a glimpse of the method of last century and the method of this one. The young prisoners were clean and orderly and well-behaved. They obeyed orders, knowing well that bread and water diet was the alternative. The psychologists might with their rare acumen here detect a " split personality." Certainly the young prisoners had two personalities, and their whole attitude, whether in the workshop or in physical training, seeme4 to depend on whether the officer was looking at them or whether they were unobserved.
Moving from a very well-conducted prison to a very good approved
school I seemed in a few miles to travel a hundred years, for I was going from the methods of a century ago to those of today. I left a bunch of lads in a prison workshop, doing repetitive and mechanical tasks that were measured in terms of production, where their incentive to work hard consisted of a few pence each week to be converted into surprisingly few cigarettes, and came to a school where boys with no previous technical training were being taught in well-equipped work- shops to be first-class craftsmen in the wood and metal trades. The.
bait dangled before them was not a handful of cigarettes, but the real pride and pleasure of having done a good job, of having created one really good and perfect thing, rather than producing a large number of articles each exactly like the other. The school was concentrating on quality of work, the prison inevitably measuring industry by quantity. One was concerned with instruction, the other with output.
The bearing and demeanour of the lads in the prison was as different from those of.the boys in the school as children playing soldiers in the nursery differ from defaulters in a detention barracks. The approved school can claim that no less than eighty per cent. of the boys make good when they leave the school. That is a fine record, when it is remembered from what poor beginnings they have come. It justifies us in describing them as schools that are " approved."
Finally it will be remembered that the boys in the approved schools are with other boys of the same age and type. They are all school- boys with schoolboy standards of honour and value. They' tend to worship the strong and skilful among them, rating boxers and foot- ballers very high, and not thinking overmuch of gangsters and crooks. The boys in prison are kept away, so far as is humanly possible in a very fixed perimeter, from the adult prisoners, but it is impossible to guarantee that they never catch a glimpse of the occasional murderer or gangster confined within the same wall and possibly even in' the same cell block. A young prisoner may return to his home and his home town claiming perhaps to have seen a local criminal, when a boy from the school can boast that in the gymnasium one day he squared up to a middle-weight who is not altogether unknown. Which is the healthier of these boyish boasts?
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