LIFETIME AT SCHOOL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 791, 17 September 1954, Page 14

LIFETIME AT SCHOOL

| SCHOOLMASTER’S HARVEST, by J. H. Simpson; Faber and Faber, English price, 1 R. SIMPSON was nurtured in a preparatory school for Rugby, and went on to Rugby, where later for a number of years he was a master. But he was an alert and ambitious young man and early sought experience elsewhere, especially under G. W. S. Howson at Gresham’s School in Norfolk. He left to become for a short time an Inspector in the Board of Education before returning to Rugby. Coming under the influence of Homer Lane (of the Little Commonwealth in Dorset), he rather naively introduced a system of "self-government" in his form at Rugby, and has recorded this experiment in a book-An Adventure in Education (1917). He was able to develop his ideas in a more favourable educational climate when, in 1919, he was appointed to establish at Rendcomb in Gloucestershire a privately endowed and well provided .boarding school for promising boys from the public elementary schools, a scheme that "was certainly not likely to be popular with the local county families and their friends." He left this post in 1931 to become Principal of a Church of England Training College (for teachers) in London. He says he had heard with incredulity dreadful stories of the customs and general conditions in such places, and of a kind of discipline resembling that of "an inferior nineteenth century boarding school." His incredulity, he adds, was "by no means justified." It was here that, in 1937, I called on Mr. Simpson, to find him still puzzled by those "Contrasts and Uncertainties" to which he devotes a chapter in the book under review. As may be expected from such sowings and from such varied soi] conditions, Mr. Simpson’s harvest comprises a great deal of rank straw from which the grain must be sifted. He tells us he has had two questions constantly in mind: first, how far was the purpose of each institution clear and co-ordinated, and how far was the institution sticcessful in finding méans adapted to that purpose? In so far as the institutions dealt with most critically are the English public school and its: junior relative, the preparatory school of 40 to 50 years ago, the question is now, surely, merely academic. At least one hopes so. His second question-the place and meaning of discipline and freedom in these schools and in the others in which he had later experience -is of more general interest, and his discussion of great value, though there are frequent reminders, of which the author is unconscious, that Rugby put on him an indelible mark. Nothing I have said is intended to detract from the interest of this very readable book, written by a cultured

and amiable gentleman who, with sympathy and discernment, has devoted a lifetime of service to youth.

L. J.

W.