The David Gribble Archive : Talks

My Apprenticeship

Leipzig, 2006
Page 3

Third Chapter: I wait for my mother in a bookshop

I still had not found another job, and although I still wanted to be a teacher, I didn’t know where to turn. During the holidays before my last term at Repton, I was waiting for my mother in a bookshop, where you could take books down and browse in them. By chance I found a book about Dartington Hall School, at the end of which there are forty pages about a school that amazed me. They were written by W. B. Curry, the head teacher of Dartington Hall School, who had founded its whole tradition.

Until then my education both as teacher and as pupil had mostly been negative. I never wanted to humiliate or suppress or torture children, as I had been humiliated, suppressed and tortured. I did not want to work in a school where there were only boys, where the most important activity was sport, where teachers and students could never be friends, where the teachers used canes and patriotism was the basis of all morality. I wanted to avoid all the unnecessary suffering that I had undergone in my school days.

Now I found in Curry’s words exactly the ides that I was looking for. I will quote a few passages.

At Dartington we have had no patriotic assemblies, exercises or celebrations. . . . The atmosphere of the School has been one which would encourage children to think of themselves firstly as members of the human race, and only secondly as members of a particular country.

Punishment at Dartington is practically unknown, and the tradition of the School is now strongly opposed to it.

Adults who like to exercise authority will give orders whenever the case for freedom is not overwhelming. Adults who do not like giving orders will allow freedom whenever the case for authority is not overwhelming. We have wished our teachers to have the latter bias.

In this school, I read, boys and girls learn together. The school had a farm, where the children could work. No one believed in the traditional idea that “children would prefer to remain ignorant, and that you must therefore have an apparatus of bribery and coercion designed to overcome this preference,” as Curry expressed it.

And so on.

But at the end Curry confessed, “As to what has actually been taught, and how it has been taught, I do not think that we can claim to have departed in important or significant ways from what is done elsewhere. So that while I believe most of our teaching to have been good, and much of it outstanding, I cannot claim that in this field we have done much pioneering.”

Later I did get to know pioneers in this field, but that quarter of an hour in the bookshop was one of the most important quarters of an hour in my life.

I wrote to the school, and luckily the German teacher’s mother fell ill, she had to go back to Germany to look after her and I got the job.