Whatever Happened To Education (8 April 1978)

We oldies blinked in disbelief when we noted the goings-on at schools just recently.  Here were teachers declining to do voluntary work.  And here were children posturing and gibbering in front of cameras and generally acting like the object of going to school was not to learn, but to obtain those same dinners at which many of them had previously turned up their noses.

Such a situation would have been unthinkable in our school days.  In fact, it would have been impossible for most, as school dinners were available only at grammar schools, where they seemed to consist everlastingly of shepherd’s pie, stewed prunes and tapioca pudding.

At my village school the children who lived too far away to go home for meals brought sandwiches and suchlike and ate them outside if the weather was good and in the cloakrooms if it was bad.  The teachers, too, dined on sandwiches, washed down with tea from a kettle and pot provided by themselves and heated on a solitary gas ring.

The majority of children lived near enough to go home – and they did.  Dad might be down the pit and Mum might be weaving at the mill, but more often than not there was either an older sister or a granny – or sometimes a grandad – living in the house, who saw to their needs not only at dinner time, but after school as well until Mum came home.  It was a singularly unfortunate child who could not get a hot meal either at home or at Granny’s or Auntie’s place.

How the world has changed – and not for the better in some respects.  Thousands of old people are now living alone who would have been accommodated by someone in the family.  It was accounted an ultimate disgrace for anyone to allow an aged parent to go into an old people’s home or not to call on them at least once a day, however grumpy and tiresome the old one might be.

Village schools did their job well, though all the tackle I remember having was a steel pen, a pencil, an exercise book for sums and another for “grammar,” and a ruler with angles etched in it.  A teacher made the ink from powder and selected pupils called “ink monitors” carried it round the desks in jugs, pouring it into the inkwells – with frequent overflows – and thoroughly messing themselves up in the process.

Sometimes village schools became very cold.  The rooms of many hereabouts were heated only by slow combustion stoves and if for any reason the stoves failed or did not heat quickly enough, the children were sent for a run to warm themselves up.  At the Old Bletchley C of E School in Church Green Road the run was from the school to the churchyard gate and back.

We were better off.  We had what was called an “appiraytus” in a dug-out cellar and this was designed to heat the whole school and not just one room.  Nevertheless, I remember times when we were allowed to keep on our overcoats and I recall doing sums while wearing mittens.

But the “appiraytus” taught us the inherent weakness of centralisation.  One winter it failed altogether and for three glorious weeks, with snow on the ground all the time, the whole school was closed for the repair to be made.  Older people chaffed us with remarks which, interpreted, meant “Which of you bust the school boiler then?”  But in reality the boiler died a natural death or comatosed a natural coma.

I sometimes wonder whether it was a good thing to close so many village junior schools, even on economic grounds.  Scholastically I believe it was a bad thing.  I remember seeing on TV a few years ago a film about a small school in the north, staffed only by two middle aged women, where the standard of literacy was remarkably high.  They had no secret except that they had been able to give a due amount of personal attention to every child.  Hereabouts, I recall how Stoke Hammond used to provide a higher proportion of “scholarship winners” than larger schools – and no doubt for the same reason.

In all this I am not advocating a return to older ways – far from it.  But how I wish teachers would not use industrial muscle to press their demands.  There is no need for it, momentarily successful as it might seem.  They had a far more appealing case to present to an otherwise grudging public than they seem to realise.

I suggest that instead of striking an attitude of “We are not child minders,” they should point out that schools are one of our most caring institutions and that they themselves are child minders par excellence.  From the moment of entering school premises to the moment of leaving them a child is in their care.

Think of all the times a child is taken ill at school or has a playground accident. Is not the teacher the first person to whom the child turns and does not the school then do its best to provide succour?

The teacher’s caring role can be even more onerous where extra-mural activities are concerned.  For instance, I know of a case where two or three teachers volunteered to take a party of children to Jersey for a few days.  One child became so ill that a doctor on the island was called in.  He calmed the teachers’ fears that they might have a case of meningitis on their hands and his prediction that the child would have recovered by the time they went home proved accurate.  But think of all the worry and strain those teachers – all of them young – endured in being father and mother to that child before home was safely reached.

Willy-nilly, teachers just cannot help being child minders.  It is implicit in their job.  They should accept and proclaim the fact.  I am probably more experienced in assessing public reactions and moods than they are.  And I assure them that that is a much more likely way of obtaining a listening ear than quibbling about what is a “duty” and what is not.