Room 13

Page 5

Another extraordinary thing is that the children had prepared and printed a thirty-page annual report, which they were now collating. Another is that the two boys were preparing a powerpoint presentation to show the parents. And another is, of course, the extraordinary variety of artistic activity. All this without adult control, and almost without adult supervision.

During my second visit I felt, for some reason, that there was not as much art work in the room as there had been when I first visited. It was a new school year, so perhaps there was a less experienced top group. I decided to make a list of all the works I could see, with brief descriptions, but I gave up when I had reached twenty. A few examples may give an idea of the range of the work, and the ready acceptance of whatever it is that the children may have to offer:

• A blobby brown creature with dots on it, on a plain green background under an unfinished dark blue sky.
  
• Patches of colour with writing in some of them, for instance, "Do you think you are lucky to be alive" and, "Death kill blood money."
  
• Two textured backgrounds made by screwing up a canvas and then spraying it green before stretching it on the frame. This gives a vivid, 3-dimensional effect.
  
• A glorious, rough, red sky above a strip of sand - real sand - and a large expanse of dried grass and lawn weeds.
  
• Yellow Chinese symbols on a dark red background. The biggest symbol, which is repeated, means "love".
  
• Three photographs one above the other; the top two are landscapes, and the bottom one is a dead lamb.

There is no censorship of the children's work, either in terms of quality or subject-matter, except for a rule, decided by the management group in 2001, that says, "No bedroom door signs. No football slogans. No 'silly' cards. No cartoons. No pouring paint on to paper, card or canvas just to make a pretty mess."

Joanne Kane told me that she liked to come to Room 13 to talk to Mr. Fairley, and to ask him what she could do on her canvas. He only tells her, she said, that she has to think of it for herself. I asked Rob himself what sort of guidance or stimulus he gives. "Only my own curiosity," he said. "In as much as I wouldn't go into a professional colleague's studio and expect to proselytise or teach. I would just ask the children questions about their work, and expect to get perfectly reasonable answers. . . So I think in that respect it is just a professional relationship. . . And possibly even in writing workshops when you actually look at a piece of work and then say what you know - 'Do you realise that if it was punctuated this way, or if you missed out those words it would still mean the same thing?' - maybe you'd get the same result more easily. It's still the same sort of criticism."

It occurred to me as I was writing this that Rob's approach reflected the discovery made by George Williamson and Innes Pearse at the Peckham Centre in the 1930s: that "individuals, from infants to old people, resent or fail to show any interest in anything initially presented to them through discipline, regulation or instruction which is another aspect of authority." (Williams and Pearse's report on the first eighteen months of the Peckham Centre, quoted in Alison Stallibrass's book, Being me and Also Us.) The re-emergence of this idea in a society which bases its educational practice on an opposite thesis is enormously important.