EDUCATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
Sin,—The White Paper on Educational Reconstruction, which you justly regard as promising a " new era in education," omits one principle which would add to the novelty of its proposals in relation to recent tendencies. This principle indeed is not altogether new if we go back to the Dark Ages before education became a national service when the parents who realised its importance had to think and act for themselves, with the aid of such voluntary organisations as existed, and of some enlightened employers. ' I refer to the relation of the parents to their children's education, the anxiety about it of those who looked ahead, and the efforts they made, often pitifully mistaken. My father was appointed to one of the first Inspectorships of Schools in 1864, took part, after the Act of 1870, in the visiting of elementary schools in the North in order to ascertain the existing provision. He came across lamentable conditions in some of the " academies for young gentlemen," which the parents were misled into supposing to be very superior. But he also had oppor- tunities, even before 1870, of observing the keen interest of parents' when it had a chance of making itself felt. He visited, by invitation, a school in a pit village near Newcastle where the whole population were miners. Not being successful in their application to the colliery owners they had built a school at their own expense, and, offering a liberal salary, obtained two excellent teachers. They appointed four or five of their body as managers, who, unable to read or write themselves, took the greatest interest in the school. Fifty years later, when Warden of a London Settlement during the last war, I was in touch with a number of schools as manager. The only parents I came across in this connexion were those summoned to appear at a school attendance committee, where, their resentful attitude suggested that they felt the L.C.C. official to represent a hostile body. How should it be otherwise? Thev were left entirely out of the system which they realised chiefly as taking their children from them, sometimes conveniently, sometimes inconveniently. I see that according to Mr. W. Johnson's account of a " Village School " (The Spectator, July 16th) a similar outlook is known to prevail today. The parents, he tells us, think of the school as a pnson which keeps, at least the elder children, from doing useful work. I met no parents amongst the managers. This is surely where they ought to be well represented. It would be brought home to them that they belong to a democratic country and the educational system is their own system. But the managers should be given more important functions.
It is here, if anywhere, that class contrasts go deep. Compare the relation of the middle-class with that of the average working-class parents to their children's education, the intense interest with which the child is, in general, surrounded in the former case when he first sets forth on his educational adventure, with the little interested acceptance in the latter. The working-class parents must accept as a matter of course the organisations which will, as is anticipated in the new plans, mould the children from the age of two onwards, without any 'voice in the arrange- ments. Not that they do not welcome nursery schools But that they should be called into consultation in the planning, here as also at later stages. In the White Paper the only place where the parents definitely come in is in the liberty granted to withdraw a child from attendance at a religious observance, or to ask for another form of opening
Educational reconstruction is to mark an important stage of democratic progress. But the spirit of democracy will not live at the top in the political realm if it is not alive in the most personal relations, in the. home. In order to break down the division referred to above, many of our reformers would 'compel equality by treating all children as children of the State rather than by giving the working-class parents some oppor- tunity of active participation in their educational destiny, such as is still possessed by other sections of the population. The latter (as it seems to me) is the more truly democratic way. It may be added that this would give the parents one of the best experiences of adult education they could have, humane education for their own life tasks.—I am, yours, &c.,
22 Tufton Court, Westminster, S.W. I. HILDA OAKELEY.
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