The David Gribble Archive : Talks

My Apprenticeship

Leipzig , 2006
Page 2

Second Chapter: Before I had heard of democratic education.

If I want to work with children, I thought, then I will have to be a teacher. It seems to me almost incredible now that I wanted to go back into the artificial, narrow world of school so soon, but I immediately entered myself for Cambridge and in the six months between my decision and the beginning of the university term I worked in a little private school near London and was happy that I was doing something useful.

At the university I was not a second-class person, as I had been at school. I composed songs for the Footlights, a group who performed a revue every summer, first at Cambridge and then in London. I became editor of Granta, the student magazine, a position which carried a certain amount of status. In my exams I was only second-class, but we all said that people who got firsts would only be able to study, and would never have successful lives.

The school where I worked after finishing at Cambridge was Repton School, near Derby, in the middle of England and also in the middle of the tradition of the nation’s traditional expensive private schools. Once again, there were only boys there, aged between thirteen and eighteen. In comparison with Repton, Eton was blissfully free.

One of my responsibilities was as "Master in charge of the jazz band". Most of the boys played better than I did, and I learnt a lot from them. We played at every moment they didn’t have to be doing something else (except Sunday afternoons), and that came to four and a half hours a week.

One of the boys I already knew from the holidays. His brother was at Cambridge at the same time as I was, and I was very keen on his sister, so he was a good friend. He was still a friend at Repton, although we seldom spoke to each other. This friendship showed me clearly how impossible it was to build up a genuinely friendly relationship with the other boys; it was as if there was a wall between masters and boys. We could play jazz together, I could learn from them, but we lived on different planets, we were different species. That worried me.

I had other problems too. There was a hierarchy not only between teachers and pupils but also within the staff group. We younger teachers were just as inferior to the older teachers as the younger boys were to the older boys. As teachers we were still not equals, and I had not expected that.

A seventeen-year-old was beaten, because he had worked in the laboratory instead of watching a football match: loyalty to the school was a training for patriotism, and patriotism, as an older teacher explained to me, was the basis for all morality.

After three years I decided that I must leave the school. There was a rule that the boys were not allowed to eat sweets during lessons. I thought it was a stupid rule, because it is often easier to think when one has something to eat or drink close at hand, and I tried to avoid noticing any such crime. However, one day a boy threw a sweet right across the room to a friend, and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it. I had to punish him, and that meant giving him a number of lines to write out. The lines had to be written on blue paper, that could only be obtained from your housemaster. The boy went to his housemaster, who asked him what he was being punished for, and when he heard, he caned him. I couldn’t take that, and I gave in my notice.