What suggestions are made by J. Dover Wilson HMI, in his
pamphlet published by the Board of Education (1921, but written in 1918) for
teachers implementing the 1918 H.A.L. Fisher Continuation Education Act?
This
is important because like New Ideals in Education conferences, from 1914, this
was not a 'talking house of philosophy and ideology', it was a pamphlet for a community of
practice, but unlike today, practice not based solely on outcomes, but founded
on values and philosophy. This pamphlet embeds the suggested practice into the
current needs, the vision of the 1918 Education Act, the attempts to respond to
the dehumanising effects of the industrial revolution, and the old ethic that
human beings are makers, makers of culture, art, communities, objects and
ultimately themselves.
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| William Morris |
To Wilson the teacher is the interpreter and voice promoting
the views of William Morris.
“‘If art which is now sick is to live and not die, it must
in the future be of the people, for the people, by the people; it must
understand all and be understood by all.’ These are the words of a dreamer, our
greatest of modern times, William Morris, artist and craftsman. If, not an
isolated prophet, but a whole generation could dream such dreams they would
come true, for what a people desires in its heart that its hand will fashion.
The humanistic teacher in the continuation school stands between the prophet
and the people, and can make them dream his dream if he have the will. In any
case let him write up over the door of his class-room: Nihil humani a me alienum puto. And if the students ask what the
words mean, let him reply, ‘They mean that we must try to make poetry out of
the spinning-mules.’"
His starting point for teaching the teenager is to gain the
consent of the student. For the teaching of history, to gain the conscious
permission of the pupil he starts with the jobs of these part-time, or evening,
continuation students, teenagers, who for the first time, had a right to
schooling.
He states that the consent of the student must be obtained
to engage in the study of history. He sees that
‘academic history’, that does not relate to the present life, culture,
work of a place or the student, will not gain consent. That the history can
only engage the teenager if they can relate to it, if it can tell them
something about their lives, cultures and society now, if it can help them to
understand themselves.
“…Such history is ‘academic,’ that is to say its aim is
knowledge divorced from reality. It has its uses, and they are manifold, but it
is out of place in the continuation school, where history will be studied with
a very practical end in view, viz., to explain the students (and their
immediate surroundings) to themselves.” P63
He sees two aspects of history teaching, one is the
academic, and the other is the history that helps the child to develop their
own identities and relationships with the world. He has effectively created a
revolution in teaching, for he is separating the teaching in the school from
what might be held as the holy grail of education or learning, the gaining of
knowledge, the professor and researcher of the University. The ‘founder of a new knowledge’, quoting
Matthew Arnold about converting the ‘harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract,
professional, exclusive’ knowledge into ‘sweetness and light’ for all instead
of ‘the clique of the cultivated and learned.’
One New Ideals community member, a school manager, reports
her initiative to re-engage the students in her school with history, that had
up to then failed to create any enthusiasm from the girl students. She asked them
to interview their parents and neighbours, and to relate the stories of life,
change, and generational differences with the history of their village or
community, and linking that to the history of the nation. Her experiment
worked, and the history teacher reported a greater engagement with their
history lessons.
Wilson suggests a different starting point, that of the
different work roles the teenage students have when not at the continuation
school.
He starts with the children’s jobs:
“The point can best be illustrated by taking an imaginary
example. At the hour marked ‘History’ on the timetable the humanistic teacher
meets a class of lads in the borough of X for the first time. He will start by
asking, in an informal way, how each boy earns his living, noting the
occupation down for future reference. He will then explore the matter further
by getting the students to describe their jobs in detail, a procedure which
will incidentally give him valuable insight into the quality of their English
and their powers of expression…” p63
The use of questioning, of interviewing the children about
their lives, their work, would ‘catch the attention of the students and place
them on a footing of intimacy with the teacher.’ Two to three lessons would be
devoted to interviewing the young men in the example, using their experiences
and present lives as the subject of the lessons. This would be followed-up with
writing and drawing. Then looking at the relationship between the different
work the boys do, if they are involved in the same industry, whose work comes
first in the process order. If they had not noticed then they may have to
observe, when next at work, how the processes work. The teacher also raises the
issue of the relation of different jobs in different trades, without giving an
answer.
“From the job the class will then proceed to the firm, and
to the industry as a whole, while at the same time attention will be directed
to the borough and to the relics of the past (churches, customs, institutions
and what not) which it contains.” P64
This was the method to engage the young students, to gain
their consent to the learning and to motivate them, but also it is about
learning as a process of helping us to build our identities and sense of who we
are, and why. Something that Dr Arthur Brock, Wilfred Owen’s therapist for
shell shock, advocated, the concept of work as therapy, but work that is
embedded in local history and culture, and linked to a sense of making and
creating. This was a process he used with the soldier patients, and in a New
Ideals in Education Conference 1919 he urged teachers to use similar methods to
address the dehumanising effects of industrialisation.
This method, starting with the immediate life of the
student, then going backward in terms of living memory, and further backwards
to times in which we must look at the evidence, is very similar to the modern
methods of using overlapping time-lines of the present generation, with their
parents and then their grandparents, to develop in children a relatedness to
history and a sense of perspective of time.
“If the ground is carefully prepared in this way, the class
will be ready for their history course. They will have come to realise that
their work and immediate environment are not only intimately related, but also
the last links in a chain of causation which goes back to a remote past; and
they will be anxious, or at any rate willing, to investigate the past…” p64
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| Robert Owen. |
He also advocated the use of biography, as it "has a special
appeal for the hero-worship of the boy and girl". With some interesting examples
“Something might also be made of the lives of social reformers such as Owen, Cobbett,
Oastler, Shaftsbury, and Kingsley.” P66
A Miss J. Noakes, member of the New Ideals community was
voted onto the Council of the Historical Association in 1918, when she
addresses the annual meeting on ‘The Effect of the War on the Teaching of
History’ p19-21:
“The teacher of history has had a much easier and yet an
infinitely more difficult task before her during these last three years easier in
the letter, more difficult in the spirit.
“It has been easier, inasmuch as the subject was now
absolutely living. History to-day interests not only the majority of the
school, but also those girls who are naturally more drawn to other school subjects;
that is to say that every member of the community has come to see that history
is no longer a ‘form subject’ a mere story of the past but the living
interpreter of the present. For the first time, even the younger girls
appreciate the working of cause and effect, they see the close interaction of
the parts upon the whole, and realise the continuity of the present with the
past in their efforts to find an answer to the question, ‘When did the war
begin?’”
Again focusing on history as a way of engaging the present
with the past, and how the lives of the children and relatives, and
communities, are affected.
With the limitations on time, on money, on the competition between
technical training, and the various subjects of the curriculum, Wilson does not
resort to the old adage that schools are only for the training of future employees,
but states:
“A little history and geography, a few scenes from
Shakespeare with a handful of poems, some practice in the writing and speaking
of the mother-tongue, a library of juvenile books – is this the mouse that
emerges from all our mountain of talk about the new era which continuation
school is to inaugurate? What of Music and Art? The impatient idealist will
enquire. What of that larger history, of which every modern child should know
something, the history of the universe and of mankind, the history which
involves astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology? The answer to such
questions is in the statute-book: ‘Subject as hereinafter provided, all young
persons shall attend such continuation schools… for three hundred and twenty hours in each year.’ We must cut our
coat according to the cloth, and the amount of cloth is very strictly
rationed.” P116
So, in promoting the use of the limited time allotted due to
the compromises of the 1918 Act Wilson concludes with how we should start the
children on their learning adventure, and as Sir William Mather had stated
about the elementary school, that success be measure not only in happiness but
in children becoming avid learners:
“The view taken in this memorandum is that (1) some training
in self-expression, (2) some acquaintance with the origin and significance of
the student’s ‘job’ in life, (3) an outlet for imagination, especially through
the medium of dramatic representation, which of all forms of art possesses the
most universal appeal, and lastly (4) an opportunity to know the value and use
of books as a resource for leisure hours, constitute the bare elements of
humanism, which no youth in a modern community can do without.” P116
Let’s end with how the New Ideals in Education community
members saw their teaching, not as efficient management methods, not as ways of
motivating disaffected children, not as making complicated subjects
approachable, not as gaining exam results but with the facilitation of a young
member of a species that is born a learner, that seeks a sense of identity and
relationship with the world, that celebrates our humanity:
“But more important even than the subjects selected is the
spirit in which the teaching is conceived. The Continuation School, at least on
the humanistic side, will be concerned not so much with the communication of
facts as with the encouragement of habits of mind. That the process of learning
is an Odyssey which teaches the voyager to exclaim:
'I am part of all that I have met
'Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
'Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
'For ever and for ever when I move;'
“that the reading of literature is not a difficult
accomplishment reserved for the ‘cultured person’, but the participation in a
pageant of frolic and song and high adventure, headed by Poesy herself, all
glorious within and her clothing of wrought gold – these are the two lessons
which humanism in the continuation school has to convey. And if it succeeds in
doing this, everything else will be added unto it.” P117
