THE EXTRA SCHOOL-YEAR
By GUY BOAS*
APRIL 1st having been finally fixed, rightly or wrongly, for the raising of the school-leaving age from fourteen to fifteen, a new situation faces most of the secondary schools throughout the country. Whether the new step is an act of heroic folly or heroic faith, it is for the teachers to see that the national idealism which from an almost empty purse affords this gift—or makes this investment— shall not suffer ingratitude or fail to receive the ma'ximum dividend. Of the main parties concerned, all teachers worth that name will be glad to have their pupils a year longer. Some pupils and some parents will like the scheme ; a number of pupils in the past have voluntarily prolonged their attendance at primary schools beyond the age of fourteen. But, especially in country districts, the addi- tional year will be resented by many, and a small percentage of pupils in town and country would temperamentally be better out at work than remaining in classrooms.
The problem for the teacher, and especially for the heads of schools, is so to organise curriculum and activities, develop character and inspire morale, that those children who least wish to remain at school and those parents who most begrudge the postponement of their children's earning capacity are brought to realise that what may appear superficially to be a twelve months' further restriction is in fact a chance of greater life-long liberation. How the activities of this fourth year in senior schools are planned should be a matter for individual heads, for if the head is sound the rest of the school body will react soundly. Two main policies are possible, either of which may commend itself. One course, where staff and pupils are already. working contentedly at the conventional subjects, is to let well alone and allow them to continue, with the advantage of another twelve months in which studies may "serve for delight and for ability." Those amateur enthusiasts who disagree with this, and who cry for the inception of fourth-year novelties (" biology, folk-dancing and Russian"), should reflect on whether they really agree with the pupil who announced at fourteen that he had "finished physics." On the other hand, the head may prefer to set the fourth year to a new and individual programme—composi- tion, the result not of staff instruction but of individual research in the school or public library ; arts and crafts, the product of the pupil's own scheming ; plays, written, printed, carpentered, dressed, produced and acted under staff encouragement rather than by direc- tion ; more music, more dancing, more speech (Plato's triple funda- mentals); more opportunities for prefectotial leadership ; more visits to plays, museums and factories ; more part in school social functions ; for boys especially more games, gymnastics and swim- ming ; for girls more domestic science ; in fact, more introduction
* Headmaster of Sloane School, Chelsea.
to active and communal life rather than more academic contempla- tion.
Either policy has much in its favour, but probably a combination of the two has most. With either course there should be character- training. As one headmaster, preparing for April 1st, said: " I'd rather a boy at school learnt to grow up to treat his wife and kids decently than know all the French verbs in the grammar." But, whatever immediate procedure is adopted, it must be realised that the present raising of the age by twelve months is only a prelude' to a further raising in the figure. A curriculum must be envisaged which is not restricted by present conditions but worked out in the light of better times to come. The chief disadvantage of raising the school-leaving age at the moment, from the educational point of view—the expense and the loss to the labour market are political aspects—is lack of equipment. Unfortunately this lack is likely to hamper just such developments in the fourteen-plus curriculum as are most desirable.
A school, like a nation, must have an objective to work for if its best qualities are to emerge. It is useless to prolong education unless the pupils are given an intelligible purpose to which to harness their energies. The vast majority of pupils who are now to extend their school-life for a period not long enough to bring them to School Certificate standard (even if they were suited to that consummation) would best employ much of their time in learn- ing to do what they propose to do when they have left school. If they could do this in an atmosphere more sheltered than that of the commercial world, in a regime devised solely to meet their needs, with the adjuncts of games and social life, and above all inspired by ideals of decent living, the benefit of longer school- days would be manifest.
The boy could learn to be a good citizen while he prepared him- self to be a good printer, a good farmer, a good mechanic or a good clerk. The girl could learn citizenship while equipping her- self to be a good typist, dressmaker, saleswoman, or, most important of all, mother and housewife. But if a start is to be made in the schools in these practical and specialised activities, the necessary equipment must be there. Technical schools are provided, up to a point, with tools of the trades ; but "Modern " schools, where by far the largest number of the new pupils will find themselves, are either scantily provided or hardly provided at all. Until both such schools are adequately equipped, with workshops and kitchens and laundries and typewriters, with nearby practice farms in the country, and even mines, with music-schools and studios, and—is it fanciful to add?—with creches where, under expert supervision, the care of baby sisters could be practised (thus also relieving the harassed mother bereft of. her fourteen-plus daughter's assistance with the infant family), the chief advantages of continued education will not appear. It is useless to keep children for twelve months on the job if they are not 'provided with the tools. Nor will the tools be any good to the children unless teachers are trained to show them how to use them.
To expect such equipment at the present moment is to cry for the moon. But unless some long-term policy is effected on these • lines the postponement of the date at which unacademic youth can acquire the technique whereby it can earn its living will not bring anything like full advantage to the child, and it will bring more problems than benefits to the country. For, in the unfortunate turn which State education has taken, educational development has become dangerously entangled in political theories. Are the advo- cates of huge multilateral schools really thinking of the children, whose individualities together with those of their schools they pro- pose to obliterate, or are they, rising superior to the wisdom of tradition and experience, merely pursuing a political and verbal will-o'-the-wisp called " parity of esteem"? Do they ever give a thought to the grandiose structures raised by the husband of Jezebel, and how they were contemptuously dismissed in a verse by the author of the Book of Kings because they were not built for the right reason? "Now the rest of the acts of Ahab and all that he did, and the ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of :lie Kings of Israel? " Are those intent on abolishing the School Certi- ficate in State grammar schools while it is still operative in public schools really thinking whether or not they are giving State pupils the best chance of employment, or are they only anxious that all types of secondary pupil shall be equal in spite of Nature's un- repentant failure to make them so? Similarly with the raising of the school-leaving age: Are its sponsors merely spending the nation's money on diminishing by twelve months an inequality of opportunity, or are they really determined that the new school population and the nation shall receive something worth having out of the added months, and, if the age is in due course further raised, out of the added years? If so, the sooner in their benevolence they supplement the curriculum by, relating the new school-life to subsequent employment by the realistic provision of lathes and printing-presses and ovens and sewing-machines the better.
It is for the Government thus to provide the means as well as the chance, so that school days for the pupil may come alive and be related to his or her prospects. It is for the teachers to inculcate the idealism without which neither grammar nor lathe will satisfy the spirit. If there is one lesson before all others I would try to teach the young, it is how to merge themselves into something bigger than themselves, and to seek in so doing success in the work rather than personal reward. As Bernard Shaw wrote of Bunyan's hero looking back over the strife and labour of the pilgrimage: "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recog- nised by yourself as a mighty one . . . the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." And to all planners of State education I would address a single question: Are both your intellect and your heart really fixed on what will be best for the child? Or are you like that father of whom his children said: "He was such a good father—'he gave us everything he wanted"?
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