Mr. Hardman is Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education. On July 1st he opened his heart to a meeting of teachers at Dorchester; the Observer thought it important enough to accord a splash heading “New School Time Table.” Stressing as he did the urgent need for “co” ordination between hand and brain, and the high importance of inducing “delight” in the pupil while acquiring culture in its best sense, the words of the Secretary were a signal advance in the right direction; at least the ghost of Robert Lowe who flung his brutal “Board Schools” and scornful words in the face of the Working Class in 1871 has been well and truly laid; it may be hoped the Dorchester audience of Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s “captains and guides” grasped the full significance of Hardman’s speech.
But alas! even today the gulf between the aspirations of the advance guard in education and the possibilities of fulfilment yawns discouragingly. That gulf can only be bridged, when a New Society (Socialism) has swept away the inevitable evils that must frustrate educational effort under the Capitalist System, in spite of the good intentions on the part of reformers.
It would be folly to deny that there has been a notable diminution in the lads and lassies who creep unwillingly to school; there has been a welcome and growing comradeship between pupil and scholar; there has been a definite, if slow, distrust of the Examination Myth—Hardman himself gave a sour glance at it.
But after all. Education in the long run is governed by political considerations; it was by no odd freak of history that in ancient Greece the Spartan youth was trained to a super-Fascist "hardness,” while the Athenian youth (of the privileged classes, of course), was trained to enjoy Homer and Aeschylus; tradition counted, it is true, but the outstanding fact was that Sparta had no walls, and no sea barrier.
Fifty years ago, Margaret McMillan, the pioneer of Nursery Schools, wrote an enthusiastic Clarionette: “You teachers do love the Grind.” They did, and unfortunately even on the plane of mere amelioration, a lamentable number still do. In the last War, a London school found itself sharing the dubious hospitality (morning and afternoon shifts) of a Secondary School in a South Coast town. An elderly member of the latter staff proudly expressed his determination (a siren wailing applause) to carry through "his” Final Somethings, come weal, come woe. "I’ll stick to the deck, said he, so they stuck him on deck with glue,” as an irreverent youngster of the London School afterwards remarked to his colleagues.
A pitiful handful of school reformers are gallantly striving to keep alive private schools where the child is the centre of the picture, where Wordsworth’s “blind authority beating with his staff the child that might have led him” no longer applies. Happy kiddies! but, with relatively large staffs, etc. these schools are expensive, and therefore for the children of the well-to-do only; further. Government grants are a far-off contingency when “a daily act of public worship” is laid down as part and parcel of grant-earning. This type of school is different.
There has been a spate of loose talk about "equality of opportunity” since the last Education Act, a new version of the old Napoleonic bilge about marshal’s baton and private’s knapsack. It is pretty apparent that the vast mass of pupils attaining Grammar School status will never attain the prize dangled at the top of the greasy pole; the unwholesome preoccupation of youngsters to reach a prescribed goal, the abiding dread of failure, failure itself, entails sheer tragedy for many a sensitive plant in Shelley’s garden. Face the fact, too, of the working-class parents scraping and sacrificing to come somewhere near the school’s requirements in clothing alone; face the fact of much prized “traditions” which are a veritable hot-bed of snobbery, spite of good intentions; face the fact of a child gradually sensing a growing divergence in speech between himself and relatively uneducated parents. It is easy to brush these things aside, to attribute exaggeration to a sketchy outline of potential child torture.
It may well be asked here: what is the remedy, granted the picture is even moderately true? The S.P.G.B. has no hesitation in replying—that only by removing the causes of evil can a final remedy be accomplished. Quinine is a benign alleviator of malaria—elimination of the foul pools with their disease carrying insects is the recognised scientific remedy. The evils inherent in the Capitalist system which, spite of pietistic mouthing, elevates material success to a major virtue, can at its best endeavour but alleviate the worst horrors of infant torture which marked the period of mine and factory hells. And it is worth calling to mind that there were Christian apologists in that period who affected to believe that "wholesome toil ” was a good thing for the pitiful little broken and disfigured scraps of humanity.
The achievement of Socialism will and can be only accomplished by the Working Class; the main appeal of the S.P.G.B. is therefore to that class, but it may not be irrelevant to point out that everything in the educational garden of Eton and Harrow and their kind, as far as pupils are concerned, is not lovely; bullying, even if not of the order of Tom Brown’s schooldays, is not unknown—"worse remains behind.” Socialism would be a happy change for many a sensitive school- tie kiddy.
Hardman means well—as does his chief, ex-schoolmaster Chuter Ede, despite a lapse occasionally into the hectoring Trade Union leader when condescending to speak to his late co-workers. But fine words butter no parsnips, indeed buttery sentimentalism adds to the rough pack of the unthinking worker a new element of dangerous slipperiness; Sir Peter Teazle’s “O damn your sentiments ” seems to meet the situation.
To Working Class fathers, the S.P.G.B. makes this special appeal: even if you fail to realise completely the dire meaning of wage-slavedom for yourself: if you have but imperfectly grasped that Capitalism entails a harassed and inhumanly overworked wife, at least give a thought for your children, your bidden guests. The joy of life, childhood laughing as it goes, faces “ in which sweet records meet, promises as sweet ”—these can be a realised aspiration under SOCIALISM alone.
Augustus Snellgrove
1 comment:
Written under Snellgrove's pen-name of 'Reginald'.
Elsewhere in the August 1950 Standard, there's a mention that Snellgrove was at this time the secretary of the SPGB group in Brighton which, for people outside of the UK, is a city on the south coast of England.
He would have been retired. He was a teacher and a headmaster in his working life. Probably in his 60s or 70s. Sadly, he never received an obituary in the Standard - which really annoys me - so I don't even know when he died.
I'm always joking that Snellgrove had an old-fashioned style of writing even when he was writing articles for the Socialist Standard in the Edwardian era, so it's funny to see him use the term "butter no parsnips" in this article. The only other time I ever heard that term is when John Major used it forty plus years later when he was Prime Minister, and he was absolutely pilloried for being old fashioned.
The spirit of 'Reginald' living on.
Post a Comment