Ejjercayshun: the thots of Charles Sharpe,(aged 74)

    I have adapted this admittedly polemic article from something I wrote many years ago but the changes which have occurred in the education of our children in these last weeks must have given children, parents and teachers cause to consider how we help children learn. The hiatus may give us time to think if we could, or should, explore other avenues to promote learning. Here I am taking an opportunity to reveal my prejudice. 

    There is a predominant assumption in western society about the proper way to give our youngsters an education, that is : in formal groups in a classroom with a nominated teacher who has professional training. Yet I don’t know of - and I may be missing something - any universal biological or physiological law which demands that children must be educated by this method or indeed if they should be formally educated at all. 

    A politically radical of way of looking at this might be to say that schooling as we know it developed from powerful families among the primeval horde deciding that if their offspring were to sustain or build upon the dynasty’s potency and wealth they must learn a thing or two about how to be on the right side of their own kind of God and how to count and defend their money as well as all the other things which flow from that. It was inevitable that this kind of education became more focussed on protecting the wealth and power of “clan rich.” This was achieved by organising and developing learning in groups called schools, which, in the interest of gaining more control of the children were eventually broken up into smaller groups called classes. This exclusive system also kept the little rascals out of their parents’ hair. From this a curriculum grew which kept everyone in place and led those, not sufficiently privileged to attend school and learn, to lag far behind, usually in penury and poverty. These are characteristics evident in the schooling we have in the United Kingdom now.

Those in accord with the idea that education developed in the way I’ve described may also agree that schools are institutions which are used to protect the status quo and the vast majority of our youngsters are  educated to look after and sustain the needs of the powerful. Even when eventually, “education for all” was deemed by the powers that be, a not too dangerous path to follow, the schools the rich kids went to were different from the schools the poor kids attended. Over centuries, occasionally those of a socialist leaning have cried out and railed against these matters but nothing much changes and even if they do things soon fall back into their old place. 

Accepting that schools, if nothing else, can play 
an important a role in the social development of 
children I have reluctantly - and shamefully some may say - I have come to an accommodation with this "education" system that defends the current economic and political state of affairs. It is a powerful juggernaut,  difficult to stop, but I can never accept that it is based on a valid ethical philosophy of education. I can’t say for definite which of any - education at school, education in the family home or indeed no education at all - is the superior but I  have a personal view about how children learn best.

I trained as a teacher in the early 1960s when teacher training was influenced by educationalists such as the Forfar born Scottish educationalist A.S.Neill who suggested that if parents get the emotional upbringing right then intellectual development and learning will follow naturally. Neill also suggested that children learn best and become more imaginative and creative if they are helped to learn through their own natural curiosity and their own discoveries and not by having a narrow taught curriculum foisted upon them. The trouble with children educated in the AS Neill way  at Summerhill School is that they become inquisitive, they question things – particularly the status quo – and though society might have time for a few oddballs doing this, it can't tolerate the majority questioning things like the distribution of power and wealth. This is why teachers trained in the 1960s were labelled permissive and have been condemned, certainly in England, as being solely responsible for damned near destroying the education system and thank goodness that Mrs Thatcher came along and saved the nation from the fate people like me had in store for it.

A.S. Neill at Summerhill

     As I said, I haven't reached the stage where I think I've got a definite position on where and by whom children should be educated, but you will have guessed I do believe children learn better from a stable emotional base and okay, I'll admit – at the risk of being condemned for envy and not understanding just who it is that has created the quality of life I apparently enjoy – that I think children develop best not only when they are helped to learn through their own discoveries but also by being given a great deal of responsibility in choosing their own learning path.

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Two quotes from A.S. Neill

Kids weren’t designed to sit on their arses for 6 hours a day.

If someone from Summerhill became prime minister I would be deeply disappointed. I would feel we had failed.

In later correspondence with Neill’s daughter Zoë Neill Readhead. the current Principal of Summerhill, wrote saying Neill also used a different version of the quote. He replaced “Prime Minister” with “teacher.”  (I mention this along with apologies to my wife, my daughter, my daughter in law and my many friends who are teachers. I hope they know what I'm getting at).

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Wider reading

Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed   New York : Herder and Herder

Neill, A.S. (1962) Summerhill   London :   Gollancz

Charles William Scott Sharpe 1926 - 1985 : My Dad

Young Chic Sharpe  1933

   

     Thirty five years ago today my Dad died. I miss him. I think it’s because I have a deep regret that I did not get to know him better. Always known as Chic, he was a brilliant design engineer. He helped design watches for Timex in Dundee, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Besançon in the Jura. Later he designed robotic submarines used to set up the oil pipes that were being built under the North Sea. 
     
    When I was born in 1945 he was serving as a rating with the Royal Navy in Holland clearing barges of mines left by German forces with the intention of slowing the advance of the allied forces. 

    As a boy I handed spanners to him every weekend when he was renovating his old cars. I got to know the difference between Whitworth, AF and Metric spanners but I was never as interested in mechanical things as he was. While I was growing up we did have brief conversations but we never got on to discussing deeper things. He had lofty ambitions for me, none of which I achieved. He was quite alarmed when my Mum told him I wrote poems. 
    
  Apart from one memorable occasion he kept his emotions close to himself. On rare occasions when he returned from his lengthy - both in time and distance - business trips he would make gestures to engage with us and these left a big impression upon us.   In our childhood my two sisters and I didn't dare be cheeky to him although my youngest sister managed to draw out a funny side to this on those Sunday afternoons when we enjoyed family outings to Arbroath.


As a young man he was keen on building model aeroplanes with balsa wood and tissue paper. He would temper the tissue by painting it with something he called “dope”. I don’t know what it was but I remember it had a particular and characteristic smell. I’d recognise it even now. The planes had tiny petrol engines and every Saturday morning he'd take me with him to a park in Forfar where the members of the model aeroplane club met to fly their planes. The noise of the engines was a high pitched rasping whine. It was exciting for a boy of four years old to hear. 

Later in my early to mid-teens my Dad took me to watch motor racing. Unlike me Dad was not a man overly interested in sports but motor racing was an exception. We shared a joy in it.  We’d get up really early and he’d drive us from our home in Coventry to Mallory Park in Leicestershire, where I first watched a legendary future world champion  Jim Clark driving a Lister Jaguar for a racing team called the Border Reivers. Later he also took to me to watch formula one races at  Silverstone.

My favourite story about his boyhood is of an occasion in 1936, when, at the age of 10 years, he took his father’s Beardmore car and drove it several times around the square in Letham, Angus. I am told his friends were very impressed with this, and I heard that my Grandad Sharpe was very angry about it, but I suspect he was in fact proud of his precocious son.
  
    My father's full name was Charles William Scott Sharpe. It was a name which had been used for a number generations alternating with George Muir Sharpe which was my Grandad's name and if tradition had been followed George would have been my name too but Dad decided I should follow in his footsteps and carry his name. Family folklore has it that the original Charles William Scott Sharpe made a name for himself in the mid-19th century as the harbourmaster at Sydney in New South Wales. I've never found any evidence to substantiate this but it makes a good story to  pass through the generations of our family. I have no idea how my namesake got to Australia!
     
     My Dad and my Mum were married for 40 years. He was a young father: only 19 years old when I was born but Mum and he worked hard to make us a strong family. On the whole I think they succeeded.

     In the way that he could I think my father loved me. I love him. He inhabits my  dreams still and though he didn't live as long as I have - I am 74 years old - I still see him as a man to whom I would defer.

My Dad died of cancer the pancreas at the age of 58 years. I wish I'd got to know him better.  

To be continued....