The David Gribble Archive : Talks

My Apprenticeship

Leipzig , 2006
Page 6

Chapter 6: The Wide World

In the book where I had first learnt about Dartington Hall School Curry wrote “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. . . I cannot claim that in this field we have done much pioneering.”

In other places I found a lot of pioneers.

Apart from Dartington and Sands I already knew Countesthorpe, a big state comprehensive school where Jenifer Smith worked, a teacher who had previously taught for two years at Dartington, and whose ideas have strongly influenced me. At Countesthorpe there were fourteen hundred young people between thirteen and eighteen, and each one of them had a different timetable. As well as that almost every timetable had big empty spaces, which were called “Team time”, when the students could work individually on their own projects, if necessary with the help of a team of teachers. These projects were not in the least like the school projects in which whole classes work together on some topic. The young people did sometimes work together, for instance when a boy who had written a play, produced it and organised performances in various primary schools. But for the most part they worked alone: one boy observed the birds in his garden at home, another experimented with pendulums, light and drawings, many went to work with disabled people or younger children or old people, one girl followed the history of her family back into the seventeenth century, another read all she could find about politics from the extreme right, so she could find answers to it.

Jenifer Smith has described how difficult it can be to help every student to find out his or her own interests.

You may do anything you like.

It may be difficult to do anything at all.

Realisations about what may be possible begin at the students' first interview with their tutor.

For some it is what they have been longing for;

or it makes something possible that they had perhaps hardly imagined and now they can hardly believe their luck.

For others it is terrifying.

It sounds a good idea but so what, it's school.

It sounds a good idea but I'm not sure what I'll do about it.

It's fantastic and I'm going to be a changed person . . . but in practice it's harder than it seems.

Oh yes, we've chosen our own projects before . . . and out they come with those dull tired old 'Projects' which somehow haven't involved a real choice, choice which has demanded some thought about what they would like to learn, what they need to do, for themselves.

It makes some angry.

Teach us. Tell us the syllabus. Yes, but what have we got to do?

We've come to school to learn, not to muck about.

Tell me what to do and I'll do it!! Anything! No, not that . . . No, none of those things . . . I know what I'll do.

You shift papers, decorate your folder, stand in the library.
You write a title, gaze through the window, talk to your friend.
How long can I keep away?
I can see a way forward. I know what you should do. We are both uneasy with this inaction.
Right. This is what you must do. And This. And this.
I hear your sigh. Watch your hand with reluctant obedience picking up the pen.
No, I say, wait a little longer.

You speak to me of steam locomotion, of evolution, of cruelty to animals, of Victorian Leicester you draw dream shapes, cartoon figures, meticulous designs, naive illustrations to your stories you write of magic, of love, of horror, of yourself, yourself, yourself you struggle up a rock face; speak with a deaf child; dig for bottles; watch as the image emerges in the rocking tray of developer.
I come to know your commitment which is that of scholar, artist, poet, scientist, historian . . .
We meet together in the seriousness of your choices.

I’m sorry to say that I never achieved anything like that.

And after I retired, I had time to visit other schools, to get to know other methods, to read other books. For example, I read Jürg Jegge’s books, and spent a week at the Märtplatz, his centre in Switzerland. I read Rebeca Wild’s books and spent a week at the Pesta, the school in Ecuador she ran with her husband, Mauricio Wild. I read Daniel Greenberg’s books and spent four days at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. I read books by Janusz Korczak. I visited the Democratic School of Hadera, in Israel. I have visited free or progressive or non-formal schools and other educational organisations in many other countries. In most of them I spent about a week: on the first day you are baffled, you don’t understand what is going on, you have the impression that, as people say, nothing is happening. On the second day you begin to understand what and how the children are learning and usually by the end of the week you have a fairly clear impression, which you could only improve significantly by staying in the school for months.

I have also been to New Zealand, Japan, Thailand and three different places in India. What I learnt there I have described in two books, but I can sum it up briefly – there is no single good method, there are hundreds of them.

However, what one finds in every democratic school is a fundamental respect for children. That is not an adequate expression. Bertrand Russell wrote that one must have reverence for the child, but in my opinion that is only a part of it, an emotional attitude which I understand and have also experienced, but it does not help us to understand why one should behave in such a way. You sometimes experience reverence for children, just as you often feel reverence before a new-born baby, but not all the time. David Wills said that you must love the child, but that is not enough either. You can’t spend the whole day merely loving the children. What one really can do the whole time, is firstly see the child as one’s equal, and secondly care for the child’s well-being. What I saw in every school was firstly equality, secondly care and only third and fourth love, awe and so on.

Perhaps I should expand on the word “equal”. It is clear that grown-ups often, though not always, know much more about a given subject than the children do. That is also always the case when grown-ups work together, or discuss something – some of them know more than others. But that does not mean that the ones who know most are better, and in such a situation it would be coarse and impolite to behave as if one was in all respects superior. And that is how it should be when adults and children work or discuss together.

When there is that sort of atmosphere, it does not matter whether one teaches this subject or that, what sort of school meeting there is, whether one has to go to school every day or not, how many rules there are, who has what power. In different schools I have seen all kinds of different approaches. I repeat – there is no single correct method.