Old School/New School

I'm going with a literal approach to theme this week in blogging about my old school - which also happened to be a new school in premises barely three years old when I enrolled, as I'll explain shortly.

First a bit about me and how I got to go there. When my family arrived back in England from Nigeria (where I was born and spent my formative years), we lived in Peterborough for some time. My dad was a Methodist minister and I went to infant and junior schools in the city between 1958 and 1964.

Methodist ministers move parish about every six years (it appears to be a bit of a tradition to keep things fresh) and so in the summer of 1964 we were about to move to Cambridge.  My parents were faced with sorting out a secondary school for me in a new city. I'd recently turned eleven and had just sat the 11+ exam, as all children in their final year of primary education did in those days. (I believe it was finally phased out in 1976.) It turned out I did quite well. I not only passed but earned a county scholarship into the bargain.

When my dad enquired as to what the best secondary school in Cambridge was, he was told that it was The Perse School. The Perse was originally founded in Cambridge in 1615 by a wealthy benefactor, Stephen Perse. Born in Norwich and educated at Norwich School and then Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Perse became a Doctor of Medicine and a shrewd businessman. In his will he left money for the founding of a Free School in the city, originally in Free School Lane (as it came to be called) from 1615 until 1890. Free School was a bit of a misnomer as it was a fee-paying school. The fees per pupil when it relocated to newly acquired and built premises on land in Gonville Place in 1890 were £3 per term. (Nowadays they are up to £7,500 per term, excluding VAT.)

From 1945 until the mid-1970s, although still a Public School it was also classified as a 'direct grant grammar school' meaning that though the majority of boys were fee-paying, it also offered free 'assisted places' to bright boys from poor families -   and that's where my county scholarship came in handy as it entitled me to go there, covering the fees that a lowly paid Methodist minister would simply never have been able to afford. 

Off to the Perse I went, in September 1964 in my purple and black striped blazer and purple and black cap, a new boy at literally a new school, for The Perse had recently relocated again away from its cramped site in Gonville Place in the centre of the city to its current spacious location in the outskirts, to elegant but functional premises designed by the architect Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, set among acres of playing fields, and officially opened by Princess Alexandra in July 1961.

artist's impression of the new school façade

I think even at the time I realised how very fortunate I was to benefit from such a good education in such well-appointed surroundings. In addition to the relatively small population (approximately 400 pupils compared to the 1,000 + that many schools contained) we had small class sizes in clean and bright classrooms and well-equipped labs. We even had our own theatre for drama lessons complete with sound system and lighting console, a lecture theatre, a music room, a library, a geography room complete with wave-tank, a  gymnasium, a hall with a balcony, a refectory, a cloistered walkway and a vivarium in the grounds, plus the usual playing fields (with cricket pavilion), tennis courts and a parade square for those who liked to march about.

It was a privileged education, but were school days the happiest? Probably not. For all the setting and facilities, I had to go nearly four miles to get there and back and sometimes envied my brothers who could just walk around the corner from home to their Secondary Modern school. I went by bus (two of them, changing in the city centre as I lived to the north of it and the school was to the south), and sometimes walked home if the weather was good - but never walked to school as that would have meant getting up an hour earlier than I already did. Even so I was quite often out of the house before anyone else was up.

The only real downside was school every Saturday morning, on account of us having two games afternoons in the week...and if you ended up playing for a school team as well, as I sometimes did, well that was your Saturday afternoon gone as well. Oh, and it was a rugby school, so football (as in soccer) was not an option, though it was rumoured that headmaster Stanley Stubbs had once been on the books of Stoke City. 

fresh fodder in the refectory ;)

It was also quite a regimented existence and I think there were regular instances of bullying, not that it really impacted me but I used to hear fairly macabre stories of stuff that went on in the boarding houses (for although I was a day boy, the school had quite a large number of boarders). And there was sometimes a subtle divide between cliques of fee-paying boys whose parents were obviously wealthy and the rest of us. 

Curiously though, The Perse was probably more like the soon-to-be Comprehensive Schools that would arrive in the 1970s than the other Grammar schools in Cambridge in that there was a true mix of abilities. Yes the 40% of non-fee-paying boys who, like me, had come in on 'assisted places, were all academically minded, but among the 60% of fee-paying pupils, there were more than a few perfectly pleasant but not terribly bright youngsters who were only there because their parents had money, and they struggled - though we all got along fine and they certainly benefitted from challenges and opportunities they wouldn't have got in a Secondary Modern school.

The regimentation wasn't too irksome while we were young, green first and second years, but as we grew older and the permissive ways of the sixties began to hold an attraction for us, issues around length of hair, dress code, illicit smoking and drug use caused conflict with the establishment which wasn't kindly disposed to change or challenge. I was never compliant enough to be a prefect and would probably have declined the offer if it had been made, but in my upper sixth year I was chairman of the school council, a consultative body that had recently been established by a new headmaster, (Stanley Stubbs having retired  in the summer of 1969). So we passed through and out into the wider world, in my case to read English at university and then to become a teacher of English and drama in my own right at a London Comprehensive school.

Since my time there, The Perse has undergone more significant transformations. From 1976, when the 'assisted places' scheme was ended and state funding ceased to flow, it went completely independent. It also went co-educational in the 1990s, expanded both its intake and its facilities with more classrooms, a sixth-form block and an arts centre, and is now ranked regularly among the top independent schools in the country. It holds reunion events for Old Perseans, though I have never been tempted.

an imposing skyline

I've not had time to write a new poem this week, though ideas are percolating. I was planning to do so today, but I've ricked my right knee somehow and spent the afternoon in bed  asleep, dosed with painkillers and with a hot-water-bottle pressed to the knee (probably should have been an ice-pack but I couldn't face that idea).

I've gone with this poem by John Clare because the first poem I ever had published was something I wrote back in 1964 in that junior school in Peterborough as part of an English project marking the centenary of Clare's death, as he was local to the area. I don't have a copy of what I wrote. Neither do I have copies of any of the poems I wrote at The Perse and which appeared in issues of the school magazine 'The Pelican'. When my parents moved on from Cambridge, I was away at university, and they just threw out boxes of my school magazines, exercise books, project folders, essays, notebooks et cetera without even asking me if I still wanted them. Brutal.

I never walked to school, for reasons I explained above, but here is John Clare's delightful poem about doing so...  

Schoolboys In Winter

The schoolboys still their morning ramble take 

To neighboring village school with playing speed,
Loitering with passtime’s leisure till they quake,
Oft looking up the wild-geese droves to heed,
Watching the letters which their journeys make;
Or plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed,
And hips and sloes; and on each shallow lake
Making glib slides, where they like shadows go
Till some fresh passtimes in their minds awake.
Then off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow;
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride huge giants o’er the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.

                                                         John Clare (1793-1864)

                 

              Qui facit per alium facit per se 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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This Writing Game - Where Does It Start?

I’ve always had ‘this writing thing’, ever since I could hold a pencil and form letters, which was long before I started school. My mother taught me the alphabet in upper and lower case, how to write the letters and the different sounds they made, called 'phonics' now.  I was lucky to have my mother at home to do this sort of thing with me, and, although I was almost constantly the new girl at various schools due to frequently moving pubs with my father’s work, I had a good education. There was a lot of emphasis on producing good handwriting in my primary schools. An entire lesson could be spent practising until each letter was perfect and sat correctly placed along the lines in the writing book. I took pride in this, so much pride that my personal signature flourishes were frowned upon and deemed completely unnecessary. Individuality was not encouraged.

Books were a thing, too. My mother was an avid reader and she read my books to me. I was determined to read for myself and proved to be a quick learner when I started school. I’m from the ‘Janet and John’ era of the late ‘50s. I don’t think the ‘h’ in John ever gave me or my classmates a problem. We accepted what we were told, John says John. I remember being ready for my next reading book then having to wait longer because I kept mistaking ‘clothes’ for ‘cloths’. The things I still carry round in my head sixty-odd years after the event! No wonder I’m a bit bonkers. Anyway, I was moved up and continued going from strength to strength.

I was aged seven and in my last year of infant school when I was introduced to Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and The Rilloby Fair Mystery by some books that were given to me. I reached the end of the book and would go straight back to the beginning and read it again. I couldn’t get enough of Enid Blyton but her books were discouraged by schools. Both parents bought me books regularly. I must have been so indulged, but I was always reading and the more I read, the more I wanted to write. The seed was sown. It took a long time to grow.

I lost my main mentor when my mother passed away. Things can be ‘meant to be’, though, and upon leaving secondary school I was encouraged by my English teacher to keep writing, so I did. Life takes unexpected turns and leads us down unfamiliar paths, mistakes are made, lessons are learned and we move on. That makes it sound simple and straightforward when, as we all know, it very much isn’t.  Personal ambition was never far away. The writing game, it’s just there, we have to do it, even if it is something for ourselves, like a journal, it’s compelling. I hope someone reading this understands and agrees with me. I’m sure I’m not alone.

Creative writing continues to be my passion. I might get round to finishing ‘that novel’ or it might stay as it is, half of it on a shelf, the rest in my laptop. I loved writing it. I loved seeing a published short story in print. If that’s as good as it gets, I’m happy. It happened.

My poem, a tongue-in-cheek look at the future of education.  I’m glad that my grandchildren are learning handwriting and basic skills that I can relate to.

An Alternative Education

The 3 Rs soon to be redundant
Computer-led kids will be abundant
With all information mega-quick
It only takes a scroll down and click
No need for any conversation
Included in their education.

Last year’s reception class have all gone
And taken a leap up to Year One
To drag sticky fingers on iPad screens
And work out what technology means.
Will this be their basic foundation
Instead of formal education?

Numeracy, or let’s call it Maths
Has rules to follow specific paths
Beginning with learning how to count
Then adding up and sharing out.
One click away from calculation
Takes away their education.

The infants are learning to use a pen
It’s not a skill they’ll need again
For a future spent staring on-line,
Social activity in decline
With hardly any interaction,
So they won’t need our education.

When did this digital preference start?
Oh why no poetry learnt by heart?
‘Spell check’ becomes their favourite teacher
With ‘Grammar check’ an added feature.
The only future expectation,
A self-taught on-line education.

PMW 2015

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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TOWIE!

Apologies upfront to any junk media addicts who might have been expecting a blog about reality tv, being famous for being famous, or the tedious excesses of Essex life. You'll find no trivial hirsutes nor trash madonnas here. Nor will you find any mention of chief idiot abroad Karl Pilkington... (oops, apart from that one). Instead, I've hi-jacked the TOWIE acronym and I don't have a lisp. The Only Way Is Ethics!

Seriously...there are far too many idiots abroad right now - and I'm using 'abroad' in its conflated archaic senses of: a) out of doors (as opposed to in a foreign country) and b) in error. They are out there doing bonkers stuff in plain sight and getting away with it. That can't be right.

Some are in positions of power in a political sense, either seized by force, bought by virtue of great wealth, won via the ballot box or even a combination thereof. Others hold dominion in a religious context, empowered by the faith of true believers and an entrenched and ancient hierarchy. Still others exercise their power in the much more mundane settings of the workplace, the school, the club, the home. Regardless of who they are and how they got there, they ought to have a duty to wield any powers that they have wisely.

In an ideal world there would be no gassing of civilians; no refugee crises; no discrimination or oppression on account of  race, gender, political persuasion or religious belief; no child poverty; no state-sponsored doping; no turning a blind eye to human rights violations for the sake of sealing arms deals; no cynical exploitation of financial markets for personal gain; no ghettos; no coveting one's neighbour's ox; no fraud; no rape; no hooliganism; no domestic violence; no ignorance.

We don't have ideal and we never will have. The problems are age-old - it's just that the impact ramps up as society becomes more globalised. I'm not advocating an Ethics Constabulary, but am I wrong in believing that education - the minimising of ignorance - is the best hope for the future?  And an ethical education/education in ethics at that. It would sign-post a positive road forward for our human race and ought to be on the political agenda of every party in every country of the united nations.

This is the way to go.

You'll know from past blogs that I've got a lot of time for the ancient Greeks. Aristotle pretty much nailed this stuff around 340 BC. In fact he even wrote books about it, being a deep thinker, a cogent communicator and one of the great philosophers. (If I had a pantheon of heroes I think he'd be in it, along with Shakespeare and a few other notables). He wrote several treatises on the subject of Ethics, which he probably would have defined as an attempt to rationalise how one should lead a good life by always striving to do the right thing at the right time in the right way.

A student of Socrates and Plato, Aristotle built his ethical beliefs on four principles (or cardinal virtues) of prudence, temperance, courage and justice and expounded a theory of moral virtue in which the happiness of the individual (derived from doing the right thing etc) was also the cornerstone of the greater happiness of society at large. I guess it could be simplified and summed up in the '60s hippy mantra 'Be Kind'.

As an ethical system, it should transcend religions and geo-political differences. It ought to be a true expression of our humanity. For it to work, everybody would need a significant level of exposure to, awareness of and internalisation of the code of ethics, which is where education comes in. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but as an antidote to idiots abroad, it has to be the long-term goal. Ethics, not just 'citizenship', ought to be a core curriculum element - couched in terms appropriate for 6 to 16 year olds. There is work to do.

I was going to post a poem on theme, but it's not ready to show itself yet. In fact it's slunk away under the bed, with its back to the wall and refuses to come out until it's ready. Patience, poeticals.

Thanks for sticking with this. Have a good week and be kind to each other, S ;-)

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