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An Essay in the Future Tense*

THE NEW EDUCATION BILL will be passed only after much opposition and delay. Strikes, protest meetings, demonstrations will shudder the country, and the Government will be forced into a general election. Nonetheless, the Bill (being conceived by a Scots Minister of Education) will eventually pass into law. Under it, pupils will attend whatever classes they wish and each teacher will be paid according to the number of his pupils.

At the start of the new system, schools throughout the country will pass into a time of wonderful confusion. Pupils will devote the first days of their new freedom to those subjects they enjoy. The gymnasiums and football pitches will be unusually crowded. But by the second week even the most vigorous will have had enough, and will drift into other classes.

This drift will be sustained by the second part of the Bill – the part which has the teacher paid according to the size of his class. While the P.T. teachers are earning £50 per week, the other teachers will have to leave the profession or make their instruction interesting.

They will do this in many ways. Probably a progressive art teacher will lead the way, replacing the drearier cylinders and stuffed ducks of his classroom with specially hired artists’ models. Similarly, the classroom with rows of hard desks, bare walls, and black-boards, will give place to rooms bright with colour, hung with good pictures and interesting apparatus, and well designed furniture. For instance, the maths room of the future will be fitted with working models which explain geometry and algebra in terms of aeroplane designing and boat-building. The walls will be decorated with murals depicting incidents in the lives of famous mathematicians (such as Archimedes leaping from his bath shouting “Eureka”). Cinema and television screens will be in every classroom.

Pupils who naturally dislike a subject, and who have not just been discouraged from it by dull teaching, will not attend that class. Why should they? Should a boy who loves engineering and will eventually make his living by it, be forced to attend classes on painting, unless he wishes to? Force him to study painting against his will and he will hate it. In the same way the artistically inclined pupil will not be taught mathematical problems used in building machinery, unless he enjoys them. Of course, the dull teachers who are not interested in making their subjects enjoyable will have no pupils and no pay, and will leave the profession. They will become what nature intended them to be – bank clerks, commercial travellers, and museum attendants. Similarly, pupils lacking interest in all subjects in the curriculum will leave school and become gravediggers or politicians.

There are many drawbacks to this scheme, but these will be gradually overcome by wisdom, imagination, and experience. By that time Whitehill will have its own canteen, swimming-pool, kitchen-garden, theatre, newspaper, dance-hall, psychiatrist...

THE STUDENTS CHRISTIAN UNION

The S.C.M wants to make more students consider thoughtfully the teaching of Jesus. It does this through debate. The members discuss different ideas of Christianity, each giving his own view of the matter, whether it is orthodox or heretical. The meeting has a place for many shades of religious (or irreligious) feeling. The only condition of membership is a willingness to listen to the ideas of other people, and to explain your own. The founders of the S.C.M. believe free discussion is a step nearer the truth – which is also a step nearer God.

The Whitehill branch of the S.C.M., at present designated S.C.S. (Student Christian Society), was founded at the start of the year. We began with quite eighteen names on the roll. Through time, the meetings have become more and more select, until now we have an average attendance of six (seven, if you count the chairman). Although this has not impaired the quality of the speeches, it does not make for variety, for by this time most of us know what the others think on the most important topics.

This is not satisfactory. We would enjoy the Society more if it had new members with more ideas. If you are an intelligent, talkative person in the Fifth or Sixth Year you may wish to try us. The S.C.S. meets fortnightly in Room 81; usually on Wednesdays at 4.15. Mr. J. M. Hutchison is our chairman. WARNING: Don’t come if you dislike discussion of your deepest beliefs, or object to being contradicted.

* From the 1952 Whitehill Senior Secondary School magazine. The non-coercive secondary school agenda proposed here still strikes me as both practical and humane, on a financial basis that should appeal to lovers of the free market. The 2nd item shows my wish to be in any group discussing big ideas.