UP IN THE MORNING & OFF TO SCHOOL…
I’ve been thinking a lot about school these past few months. With retirement as a teacher in two years both longed for & dreaded at the same time, I find myself the more acutely conscious of the nature & character of my job. And I’m conscious too of the changing nature of my perception of & relationship with teaching after so many years. What strikes me most forcibly is that for more than 30 years I have been party to one of the most sophisticated, systematic, highly organised, tightly structured & fundamentally meaningless pursuits ever devised by humankind. At the heart of the entire schooling process there is nurtured a sort of lie: that the dissemination of pre-digested & packaged knowledge to kids constitutes a meaningful education for life. In the face of everything that we now know to be true about the relationship between experience & learning, we continue to present to our children bundles of freeze-dried facts, insist that they memorise them & then require them ceremonially to regurgitate them. In formalised 3-hour sessions we expect our 16-to-18-year-olds to consign to paper a synopsis of everything that they have been taught during the greater part of their time in school. And, on the results of these preposterous inquisitions, we make life-altering decisions on their behalf about their further educational & professional futures. Then, as parents themselves, pursuing whatever professions were accessible to them in the wake of those inquisitions, they collude with the very same schooling system & line their own kids up on the starting grid.
Think about it. When you look back on your own schooldays, what do you remember most vividly? The bold, invigorating patchwork of lessons that now forms the bedrock of your wisdom? Those bracing exams that so sharpened your intellect & tested your mettle? Or the school trip up into the mountains where you saw the bear? Or the camp you built out of old doors in the trees in your garden? After three decades on the front line I have seen no evidence that knowing all about bauxite mining in Northern Australia, the struggles of the Weimar Republic or the life cycle of the tapeworm has brought about enlightenment & self-empowerment for the student. Sure, there will be the odd Damascene conversion & another geologist, historian or surgeon will spring forth into the world. But for the lumpen proletariat of the schoolroom – which is most of us – this highly specialised & focussed knowledge will float in its own juices up to the exam & then it will dissolve, leaving little or no trace.
On the day that I retire I shall look around the arena in which I have spent the greater part of my working life. On one side of it there will be stacked every inane, pedantic blue or green form I’ve ever had to fill in, every tedious, arid exam paper I’ve ever had to mark, every specious, clichéd, repetitive report I’ve ever had to write. And on the other side there will stand a bunch of kids – faces familiar even if the names have gone – each remembered not for their scholarly esteem but for some quirk of humour, creativity, personal warmth, wisdom beyond years. These are the ones who have survived the education system – whose way in the world has been of their own choosing, taken in spite of our attempts to impose uniformity, convention & respect for appointed authority.
There is no sensible argument against the acquisition of skills. We communicate through language; we calculate through number. But to my mind education is not a process of forcing in but of leading out & the social, emotional, spiritual, cultural, intellectual context within which it takes place is all-important. By my own definitions of what constitutes a healthy educational environment, I was lucky & I found such a context. A few years ago I wrote an article for the Friends of Summerhill journal concerning my experience of a very different kind of schooling from the norm. This is it.
Latchmere Road Primary School was a small, red-bricked, white tiled, parquet- floored establishment, safe, comfortable and traditional. With one or two monstrous exceptions, the teachers were kind and supportive. The headmistress of the infants' school was archetypically maternal; the headmaster of the junior school was avuncular. It was a stable, happy school. And I was utterly miserable there.
After so long a time it's difficult to identify what frightened and oppressed me most. I have murky recollections of asphalt wastes patrolled by fierce, bulky boys smelling of penny chews and unwashed clothes. Their sticky hands pushed you hard in the chest; their scabbed forearms compressed your windpipe, locked your head to their panting chests in dispassionate and unmalicious aggression. Asexual voices bayed and shrieked, whistles blew and ragged queues formed. Boiled meals reeked and steamed; you had to eat the beetroot, the pink mince, the frogspawn semolina. Incomprehensible prayers and sermons were uttered from the stage; discordant hymns punctuated the ritual, and we filed out to "Sheep May Safely Graze" played on an upright piano by a fierce little woman with hair coiled in cartwheel plaits over her ears...
The safe, predictable, instantly identifiable atmosphere terrified me. Why, I don't know; the passage of time and the depth of the imprint defy analysis. But my mother tugged me onto the 604 trolleybus every morning, both of us in tears, both of us anguished and baffled. At night I dreamed about corridors, classrooms, the banshee voices of wild children. By day I cowered in corners, hiding from the pounding, reeling jungle of it all. Without recourse to the post-60s label, "school phobia", my parents had a problem on their hands: if I was rejecting school at the age of seven, in what educational condition would I be by the age of eleven?
A mildly radical past and a subscription to the left-wing journal The New Statesman provided a possible answer. As a pipe-smoking, corduroy-wearing member of the Independent Labour party in the 1930's, my father had read Neill's prototype "Summerhill" book That Dreadful School. Recollections in the '50's of its cheerful, vernacular style and refreshing absence of cant were jogged by a small ad on the back of his favourite weekly publicizing a little progressive school in the nearby market-town of Epsom. It was called New Sherwood School and in the summer of 1953 we drove in Dad's new Morris Minor to see the school and meet its headmaster John Wood.
The school was situated in a large, white, mid-19th century lodge in about an acre of grounds with a two-acre paddock attached. As we drove in through the front gates, the sense of a sprawling, bohemian family environment was immediately apparent. Thick climbing ropes hung from trees; there was a wooden climbing frame built around the bole of a huge beech tree; three gaily-painted cart-wheels mounted horizontally on three-foot high posts acted as roundabouts; doors in the house bore scuff-marks and windows were patched with corrugated cardboard. John Wood approached us along the gravel driveway that surrounded the house and he guided us over to the roundabouts. The interview was entirely informal: John - bearded, tieless and kilted - chatted gently about the philosophy and practice of the school, pushing himself to and fro on the wheel. Behind us, a tiny, dark-haired boy of about six ran tirelessly around the house, pausing only to yell, "Fuck off! ", as he approached our small group. Initially, John ignored the demonstration. After one particularly shrill utterance John smiled and remarked that Mikey had only just learned the phrase and that we mustn’t take the invocation too seriously.
So, in the autumn of 1953, I joined the sixty-odd pupils at New Sherwood School as a day-pupil. My initial reports home were ecstatic: no more beetroot, no more asphalt battleground, no more booming corridors, no more hymns. My perception of the school was determined at first by what it didn't have. My experience was all of freedom FROM" and, in my early days, I could make little sense of the implications of "freedom TO". Day-to-day life was a process comprising fitful attendance at the voluntary lessons and long, absorbing periods in the sand-pit building castles and railway systems.
Time passed and the old horrors receded completely. I made friends and found that my fear of sport and competitive activity was offset by an ability to initiate and sustain imaginative games. When, after a year, I began to board, my relationship with, and understanding of the nature of, the school deepened. Slowly I began to recognize the teachers and other adults as congenial individuals. Increasingly I came to see them as larger, wiser versions of us, providing security and support and yet immediately responsive at the intuitive, affective level at which we children operated. (John and his wife, Irma, would tend to refer to the adults in the community as "big people", this somehow expressing the differentiation between staff and pupils in terms of size rather than status). It became apparent that I could argue with teachers and that they would respond in kind; that I could wrestle with them, or fall asleep with my head in a lap; that in calling them Ted or Mary or Gerry I was permitted an intimacy of contact that bridged the interstellar distances that I perceived to exist at Latchmere.
The functional life of the school fell into three main categories for me: lesson-time, the School Meeting, and boarders' free time after the school day had finished. Lesson time followed a fairly conventional and thus familiar pattern during the school day. By School Meeting decree the lessons were voluntary, although, out of fairness to the teacher and the rest of the class, the absentee had to announce intention to miss lessons and then had to remain out for the remainder of the week. The lessons provided some shape and focus for the day and, by and large, they were well-attended. Missing lessons tended to occur collectively when something clearly more important than lessons came up. During one term, virtually the entire school population gave over two or three weeks to the building of a stockade in the paddock. At other times activities like school plays needed extra work and they replaced the scheduled timetable. I have a clear recollection of both those lessons that entranced me and those that, atavistically, brought back the sense of oppression that blighted my previous school experience. History and English fed my imaginations; Maths filled me with a claustrophobic sense of failure and hopelessness that even the congeniality of my environment could not dispel.
The aspect of community life that established most manifestly the functional equality of children and adults was the Friday School Meeting.
Modelled on John and Irma's experience of self-government at Kilquhanity (where both had taught previously), the meetings were chaired, and minutes were taken, by pupils. All those who attended had equal voting rights, regardless of age or status. In principle, and sometimes in practice, children could outvote adults. Initially, this reality appalled me: this disempowerment of those who legitimized our existence seemed a heresy of the first order. But within a short time it became a normal aspect of life at New Sherwood, its processes facilitating, rather than impeding, the social order. Indeed, it was John Wood who proposed the abolition of all the school rules in order to re-legislate from scratch and it was the pupils whose caution moderated the proposal.
After 4.00pm the school belonged to the boarders. Numbers fluctuated between eight and ten in my five years at the school, accommodation comprising three rooms and a pre-war caravan. With such small numbers, the family ethic that lay at the heart of the school flourished most effectively. We all dined together, bathed together, lay around John and Irma’s' bed-sitting room floor listening to "Journey Into Space" and "The Goon Show", bickered, sulked, wooed each other back into the fold, and grew from childhood towards tentative adolescence together. My chief recollection - lent enchantment by the distance of years - is of the enormously elaborate fantasy games that we played around the building and grounds. Each context carefully chosen, each scenario carefully prepared, we would dress up in an approximation of the appropriate costume - American Civil War, Second World War, Arthurian myth - and launch ourselves into late summer sunshine or evening winter snow. The adults that we encountered in our unimpeded activities would be pressed into service. Gerry, the English teacher, caught relaxing in his caravan, would become Gandalf, from our favourite book of the moment, The Hobbit. Long-sufferingly, he would re-create the voice he used when reading to us before lights-out. Mary, the Bavarian cook (whose English husband had been a prisoner-of-war), would tolerate - even indulge - our insensitive representations of 'typical' German behaviour when rounding up our war-game captives. Obligingly she would goose-step into the kitchen, wearing one of our most cherished props, a German infantryman’s helmet, to make us massive cheese-and-pickle sandwiches for supper. We would go uncomplainingly to bed, still in role, exhausted from our labours in the other lands and other times that were encompassed by the small New Sherwood estate.
I left when the Woods emigrated to New Zealand, and went to Wennington School in Yorkshire. The advent of my teen years, 16+ and 18+ exams, the more formalized structures of the school drew a curtain across my time at New Sherwood. I lost touch with my friends there (although my family maintained contact with the Woods) and the school closed not long after I left, unable to find alternative premises when the lease on the estate was not renewed. A few years ago I revisited that little corner of Epsom and found the surrounding roads more or less unchanged. The estate itself had disappeared under high-intensity housing; neat gardens and mock-Georgian fascias reside where once beeches had accommodated tree-houses and uncut grass surrounded sand-pits. In mid-1993 a letter from Irma announced that John was dying of cancer. With customary courage she faced this event and after it she sent a videotape of John's memorial service around the scattered New Sherwood community. The various tributes to John's ingenuity, imagination and vision recreated vividly for me the qualities of that unique little community. As I parceled it up for the next recipient, this educational 'samizdat' document bearing revolutionary good news, I reflected on the acute need for hope and action on the part of those of us who look upon the educational wasteland and are tempted to despair. I thought of Joe Hill's great cry, "Don't mourn: organize", and - in spite of the torpor of middle age - I felt the blood quicken...
A.S Neill was a good friend of New Sherwood and visited on a number of occasions. Also his grandson and grand-daughter, Paddy and Angela Neustatter went there. Dick Jones has taught at progressive schools King Alfred School and Frensham Heights and is currently Head of Drama at St. Christopher School.
Reprinted from the Friends of Summerhill Trust Journal, Summer 1994
12:19:10 AM 
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