SOCIETY TODAY

Education

Go west, young teacher!

Logic Bruce Lockhart

Ex-head boy of famous grammar school: first class honours degree in natural sciences, aged twenty-seven. Married; one small child. Able enough to be a hot candidate for any responsible post in the country. Eccentric enough to love teaching and to want to make it his lifelong profession.

Alex is installed now in a fairly good school . . . he had plenty to choose from. It happens to be a boarding school because he believes that this will give him greater opportunities to influence the young, but his lot would not have been very different at a day school. -Salary better than some at that age: £2,450. He teaches thirty periods per week, supervises eight hours of games per week (without counting time for going home to change). He corrects papers for another eight hours, lunches with the boys, takes evening expeditions, works Saturday mornings and takes games Saturday afternoons, attends Sunday services and takes play rehearsals in the spare moments of half-holiday or weekend evenings. As he is always being reminded, his holidays are generous. Unfortunately a part of them is usually spent at a corps camp or doing arduous training in the Cairngorms or Snowdonia and most of the remainder doing casual labour or marking examination papers in order to avoid having his gas or his telephone cut off. He pays his taxes honestly: there is no escape for him ,and those like him. He faces a ridiculously high mortgage on his rather pokey little house and has been savagely hit by his suddenly increased rates and the cost of petrol to and from school. He would cheerfully sell his car and ride a bicycle to work, but he cannot afford the time involved. Out of what is supposed to be left of his salary he is expected to clothe his wife, who cannot go out to work herself because of her newly arrived first baby, and to give an example of neat turn-out himself — not only in the classroom, but for cricket, squash and rugby. He is a first-class performer of all these games, for which he finds the equipment almost prohibitively ex pensive. Instead of adding to his reputation by playing for his county he prefers to coach small boys, who often seem to be material scarcely worthy of the special gifts and skills he devotes to them. He is expected to hobnob with Old Boys and parents on equal terms. There is no expenses allowance forthcoming from his local tax inspector, although he drives boys injured on the games field to hospital free of charge. He cannot, of course, afford to go away on holiday unless he takes a party of boys; even that involves leaving wife and child behind.

It would never occur to him to take strike action; that would be against everything he believes in but never talks about: devoted service to others, sacrifices for the sake of his community, joy through work and not through luxury.

He knows that there are thousands in a similar kind of situation and some worse off. After all, he might have been a girl who had opted for nursing. There are times when he wishes he could take his wife out once or twice a term other than by the condescending invitations of richer acquaintances whose hospitality he is in no position to repay. On occasion he feels the lack of a trip to the theatre or to a concert; these are things in which Alex is deeply interested by training and by nature. It would be pleasant to escape from boys or household chores, if only to a pub, without wondering whether the expenditure of the few extra shillings will mean no weekend meat.

Even after only two years of

-teaching his vigorous and optimistic leadership is sometimes a little

frayed by exhaustion. How will things be when he is thirty-seven? It is some consolation to think that he will almost certainly be a headmaster by then, provided he can prevent himself from lapsing into that chalky, sub-fuscous demi-world which loses touch with successive generations of rosy cheeked young hope fuls through desiccation and deprivation. To his surprise he will find that expenses have risen as fast as income. The extra money which might pay off his accumulated debts is drained by higher taxes. His fierce hopes of putting right all the wrongs he sees around him may be dashed when he finds himself torn between being in charge of a large institution in which he is powerless to. alter a situation where the children do not want to work and the staff have given up trying to induce them to do so, or being in a school where everyone wants to work but political hostility and economic conditions make it an impossible strain to maintain standards.

In the meantime he is not being entirely ironic when he says that it is the greatest job in the world. It can be as supremely rewarding as it can be sadly embittering. There are rare gestures of appreciation; there are pupils here and there who are fired by one's enthusiasm and achieve unhoped-for success, there are the graceless resentful fourteen-year-olds in full revolt who miraculously turn into charming young inn s umcen .

transformations me Alexes of the world play some part as well as Mother Nature. If they do no more than reduce the number of soccer fan hooligans and museum vandals who so astonish our former friends abroad, they will not have wasted their lives. They may even add to that tiny percentage who will devote their lives to building bridges of understanding between the warring factions of the world, instead of being guided by fashion or self-interest. It is a help to remember that the future of civilisation depends on these. It is a cause for which to live and to make sacrifices; but how big a sacrifice is one entitled to expect Alex to make?

You do not go into schoolmastering to make money. All genuine schoolmasters accept this even if they wish they were reminded of it less often. They do not quarrel with the suggestion that a hard-working miner should be as well rewarded. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of anomolies which are hurtful. Their sacrifices remain obstinately unappreciated by most children, who cannot believe that such highly educated people could be "so poor by choice compared to their cheerfully ignorant and welloff parents. To them it just means that society puts no value upon education. T teaching profession has become less rewarded in proportion as it has become more difficult and demanding. It is an extreme example of the strange British system • whereby increasingly harassed professionals and workers grow poorer as entrepreneurs and speculators and cash dealers get richer. The fact that Alex's local carpenter is much more highly paid would perhaps not worry Alex unduly; the fact that this well-heeled chippy also by chance finds himself the owner of a field which has through no especial virtue or prescience of his own become worth £100,000 over the last few years does, however, make Alex ponder wryly on the nature of social justice.

Funnily enough the only resentment he has shown is the impossibility of going to spend a few weeks looking at Grecian architecture, which is an abiding passion with him. When he learnt that large numbers of car workers from the Midlands were going over on a package tour to Greece he did not grudge them their money. It was the fact that they took Midland barmaids with them, Midland beer and fish and chips, and never set foot outside their camp. If they

have no other interest in that country, would it not be cheaper to install artificial sunlight in a Birmingham suburb? . It begins to look as though the truth was that this country has no

use for the values Alex stands for,

or for the pursuit of excellence, without which there can be no life

in education. Incentive has been destroyed, mediocrity rewarded; money has been poured out where it is wasted and withheld where it is essential.

The brain drain will start again, and the teachers will be in the lead.

What advice can careers masters give them but to get out into the world that buys and sells and often cheats, or to France, Germany or the United States, which at least provide a living for school teachers. We are nearing the stage when we offer neither. It is sweet to die for a patriotic cause, but every teacher must now wonder whether the sa crifices his country demands are doing that country anything but a disservice. I stay to fight because I am not as young as most of them, because I can still afford to do so, and because my loyalties will not allow me to do otherwise. Nevertheless, I can understand how difficult it must seem to the majority.

Go west, young teacher! There are other lands which need your quality and energy, and where there is room to breathe. It is only when the best of you have gone that your lords and masters will be .shocked into the necessary action.

Logie Bruce Lockhart is headmaster of Gresham's School, Norfolk