EXPERIMENTS IN EDUCATION

Weekend Telegraph No. 82 April 22, 1966

Susan Bocking, 18, recently graduated from one of the most unusual schools in Britain - Dartington Hall in Devon; run by a system of "collaboration" between staff and students.

Dartingtonians are not hearty, but might stretch their muscles in the gym at Aller Park during morning break.  Though the school has no uniform, a majority of the pupils wear the currently fashionable jeans and blue sweaters, with bare feet - some with painted toenails.  There is central heating, but they go barefoot inside and out, even in winter.  The school is rich, and more than the £504 charged for a senior boarder is spent on keeping each child on the 1,100-acre estate, with a teacher to every nine pupils

The progressive system seems to work particularly well with younger children.  The junior and middle schools at Dartington are combined at Aller Park, a lively place.  They have their own band, top, supervised by a teacher, which thumps out modern jazz and rather dated dance music.  Music and all the arts and crafts are encouraged at Dartington.  The pottery, above, has its own kiln

Experiments in education: Part 1     Founded in 1926 without compulsory lessons, Dartington Hall in Devonshire has changed this but kept most of its freedoms.  The older boys and girls, aged 10 to 18, make the rules, have no marks, punishments, prefects or bounds.  There are no religious services or compulsory games.  Pupils can do what they like after classes.  They call their teachers by their Christian names.  These are probably the freest years of their lives.  EDWARD BLISHEN, a teacher himself, visited the school.  Photographs by DMITRI KASTERINE

HE was a little boy, on his way from one lesson to another: shaggy-headed, barefoot, wearing jeans and a loose sweater of dizzying hue.  He wasn't remotely shy, but at the same time there was no touch of pertness about him.  He knew I was an inquiring outsider and was anxious to put me straight.  "This school," he called as he left me, "is OK for those who like to be free."
     I went on my way to an art lesson given by Bernie - it can actually be difficult to discover the surnames of teachers at Dartington Hall - looking once more at the image I  had brought with me of the "progressive school".  A place without rules, or compulsory lessons, filled with children who run wild among sandalled adults benign to the point of lunacy.
     This image was formed 30 or more years ago when our handful of progressive schools were richer in theory than in experience.  What does such a school really look like in 1966?
     It was in search of answers to this question that I had gone to Dartington Hall, near Totnes in South Devon - as superbly situated as any school in England.  It is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, begun in 1926 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, an exercise in economic and cultural community that in the 1,100 acres of the estate has created a rich range of industries and educational activities.
     When you enter the Dartington world, you feel at once the influence of a highly efficient idealism.
     The school buildings lie here and there among those Devonshire acres - by any standards, handsome and generous buildings.  There is a nursery school, a combined junior and middle school at Aller Park, and the senior school, Foxhole.  Just over 270 boys and girls receive their education there, 170 of them as boarders.  (On the principle that children need to enjoy their family relationships before leaving home, boarders are very rarely accepted under the age of ten.)

     The high standard of buildings, equipment and staffing - one member of staff to every nine children - is made possible by a large annual endowment from the trustees, headed by the Elmhirsts.  Fees range from £84 a year for pupils in the nursery school to £504 for boarders in the senior school.
     Pupils are drawn from all over the country, and there are always some from abroad: Americans and Scandinavians particularly.
     The joint principals, Hubert and Lois Child, are a remarkable husband-and-wife team, accustomed to working and thinking together.  They were both once on the staff of Bedales School, at Petersfield, Hampshire, and for a time Mr Child was senior educational psychologist to the London Country Council while his wife lectured on education in a training college - experiences that have left them with very mixed feelings about the freedom possible inside the State system.
     When Dartington began it was startlingly different from the conventional schools of the time - its system based on the view that what was wrong with ordinary schooling was the authoritarianism of the adult.  Children couldn't grow up to be free human beings without freedom.  So lessons were voluntary.

FEW things more irk the Childs than the widely accepted belief that this is still so.  In fact, the practice was dropped before the war.  But "freedom" is still the key word in the Dartington vocabulary.
     The Childs would say that the adult at Dartington has had to learn to rethink his authoritarian role because it has become clear that children need security, consistency, and protection against being overwhelmed by their inner feelings and lack of experience.  This is a readjustment of the original attitude; but it has left a degree of freedom that by normal standards is astonishing.

     Rules are kept to a minimum.  Those that are made are the fruit of genuine discussion between pupils and staff.  At Aller Park the school government is representative - the children elect their spokesmen who attend the regular meetings of the "Council" - while at Foxhole everyone, pupil or adult, can be involved in the deliberations of the "Moot".
     Out of these discussions have grown, for example, a very strict rule about bedtime: and, recently, a rule about smoking - now forbidden in anyone's room except one's own.
     Participation of this sort by the children in the running of a school is more common now than it was 30 years ago, but progressive schools like Dartington are still, in one respect, way out on their own.  For there is a complete absence of the usual punishments and sanctions in the event of a rule being broken.  The staff lean heavily and confidently on what they call "the understanding we have with the children".

THE reality of this understanding astonished me as I made my way round the school.  Beyond the outward forms - such as the use of Christian names - there is a real sense of relaxation in the association of child and adult.
     At the first lesson I attended during my visit, I felt my professional hackles rising as the class assembled.  Here were girls and boys bumbling into the room, more or less punctual, talkative, throwing informal greetings at the teacher.  One or two boys wore trilby hats (a current lark).
     My reaction, as a teacher, was based on my own kind of experience; such behaviour could only be rebellious, intended to rile.  But as the lesson got under way I realised that these oddities of dress and informalities of behaviour were not those of the unco-operative.  Irrelevant remarks were made quite openly but attention swung again and again back to the point of the lesson.  I became certain as I sat there that the leakage of concentration was less in this unusual atmosphere than it would be in many class-rooms where the formal appearance of attention conceals much private day-dreaming.
     The teachers at Dartington are calm, at ease, confident that in all essential ways the class is with them.
     I can well see that the formal-minded visitor to a Dartington class-room might look no further than the slap-happy dress, the open chatter.  I can only say that there seemed to me to be a dignity here - indeed, everywhere in the school - that arose from the agreeableness and frankness of the relationships.
     The Childs claim that the school is remarkably free from cynicism, bullying, and cliques.  And it is certainly true that in this untyrannical atmosphere these common features of ordinary school life lack the soil in which to strike roots.

    Of course, there is a fine balance involved here that is partly explained by the quality and background of the children themselves.  Entry is not confined to children who in the State system would have passed their eleven-plus; on the other hand, tests given to applicants are designed as measures of intelligence.  Dartington is, to use our everyday vocabulary, a grammar school.  The children themselves told me that they work because "we see the point of it".
     The school, in other words, hasn't to deal with the problem of children who behave badly because intellectually handicapped or out of their depth.
     The high ratio of staff to pupils means that no class-room is over-crowded, no child even begins to feel overlooked.  Amiable relationships are more easily achieved where working conditions are so pleasant.
     Outside strict school time (during which no one below the third year in the senior school is allowed off the premises without permission), the uncoerciveness of Dartington is almost complete.  When classes are not going on, the children are free to choose their own occupations.

DARTINGTON has no compulsory games - though in fact a great deal of games-playing goes on, with many matches against outside teams.  No other activites whatever are imposed on anyone.  Yet I have never been in a busier school.     Partly this is to be explained again by the material advantages the school enjoys.  It has an astonishing range of facilities.  Foxhole, for example, has a nest of craft-rooms of great beauty.  Arts and crafts play almost as large a part in the life of the Dartington child as music.  Learning an instrument is not an extra - there is music everywhere you go.
     Science, too, is richly covered.  There are three general laboratories and three advanced laboratories for physics, chemistry, and biology.  They are always occupied, the work brimming over from the ordinary lesson to free-time research.
     With all this to choose from - together with sailing on the Dart, drama, camping, swimming, dancing and the use of a very large library - it is perhaps not surprising that the children are able (to use the phrase with which Hubert Child explains the principle behind this large measure of freedom) "to make their own choices and their own refusals".
     A hint that the younger ones may have to learn to enjoy such liberty is given by a notice hanging in the hall of one of the boarding houses at Aller Park.  Headed "If you are bored", it suggestes 40 occupations for those uncertain what to do with their time.  There is a touch of characteristic Dartington humour in the 40th suggestion - "Do nothing".

The school orchestra is taken seriously.  The violinist here, playing Sibelius, is a talented junior.  Over the last ten years, between 25 and 33 per cent. of Dartingtonians have gone on to university, 40 per cent. to art school or training college.  But in 40 years, the school does not seem to have produced an Old Boy or Girl famous in any sphere except Michael Young, author of The Rise of the Meritocracy

Many of the pupils come from well-off, intellectual backgrounds.  Kenneth Tynan's daughter is there.  The school's politics seem to be mainly Left Wing.  Seniors can study in the very large library, and a popular relaxation after work is to go to the cinema in Torquay, ten miles away

Even the formal educationist would probably swallow with fair ease much that goes on in Dartington today, because progressive characteristics have spread to many ordinary schools.  There are three rather large gnats, however, at which such an educationist might strain.
     The first lies in the uncompromisingly genuine co-educational quality of the school.  Because it is believed that every child needs privacy ("otherwise they're at the mercy of the herd"), study-bedrooms are the rule.  Each block of bedrooms has its housemother and is firmly mixed.  The Childs believe stoutly that promiscuous sexual behaviour before marriage is a bad preparation for a satisfying adult sexual life, and they say that the rule against serious sexual experiment at school is accepted by their boys and girls.
     About this, of course, any mere visitor can have no certainty.  I can say only that the relations between boys and girls seemed pleasant and easy without being (as might possibly be the effect of co-educational boarding under such subtle constraints) in any way drearily sexless.
     Then there is the problem of academic pace.  No one at Dartington would deny that the rate of work at the school until the sixth form is reached is slower than in school applying the conventional pressures.  Dartington sees this as

a virtue: the major aim of the school is to enable children to "grow at their proper pace", and this means, as Hubert Child puts it, that they "don't want to avoid or scamp examinations but to see them as reasonable tests of readiness in terms of mental rather than chronological age".
     One or two of the children said to me: "We could work harder."  I guessed they were drawing on experience of other schools.  Their sense of guilt seemed a cheerful one, anyway.

DARTINGTON'S freedom from ruthless academic pressures is one of its most attractive features, as well as being an educational demonstration of some importance: we need to be shown that children can develop satisfactorily without being driven to death.  (Dartington has a good record of university entrances: and a list of Old Dartingtonians certainly wouldn't suggest that the school unfits its products for adult life.)

In the summer the junior school goes camping for a week in a Dorset cove.  The beautiful grounds of the school itself inculcate a love of the outdoors.  The pupil's enjoyment of the camp seemed an illustration of the point of the system.  The sexes are about equally represented at the school

     A final gnat: the absence of assemblies and of any formal religious observances.  Some children voluntarily go to the local church: and comparative religion is part of the sixth-form timetable.  Apart from this, the principals believe they do better by the spirit by providing in the environment ways and means of nourishing it that are not "contained in the net of any dogma or ritual".
     When I left Dartington I had another look at the old image I had gone to check on.  In so far as Dartington is typical, there is still much in the progressive school that is startling and original and that would shock the educationally conservative.  But under it lies now an acceptance of the more justifiable examinations, of the need a child has even when he is given considerable freedom to feel that there are also certain constraints that the adult, on the basis of his experience, believes to be necessary.
   Some aspects of Dartington look almost commonplace nowadays, because they have spread to ordinary schools.  It is significant that Dartington, which like other progressive schools used to be staffed by teachers who wouldn't have thought of working elsewhere, now recruits very largely from teachers with a conventional professional background.
     And yet there is still much in the Dartington way of life that seems to me to be way out ahead of the rest of the system.  Here is a school that manages admirably without marks, punishments, assemblies, prefects, bounds, call-overs and compulsory games.  Indeed, much of the unmistakable happiness of the place depends on the absence of these things.  Dartington has opted out of the academic rat race - with perhaps some small loss in sheer intensity of learning, but in general, I would say, to the enormous benefit of its children.
     The fact remains that this is a highly privileged corner

of the educational scene.  It is hardly to be expected that amenities such as Dartington enjoys can be provided generally.  And much that is admirable about the school clearly rests on the existence of those amenities.  The children are drawn from a narrow circle of families that are both well-to-do and unusual in their very choice of a progressive school for their children.
     The principals make no attempt to deny the privileged character of Dartington.  What they do assert is that its existence can be defended as an important contribution to educational thinking.  They believe that the progressive school has had a massive effect on English primary schooling.  They hope it will go on to have a similar effect on our secondary schools.
     On my way home I passed through Totnes and remembered I'd been told that there the old image of Dartington had never changed.  The children were still "a lot of Communists" and "all foreigners".

I thought of the children I'd moved among - long-haired, wearing odds and ends of dress: hunched perhaps, as I'd seen them in their own common-room, behind the morning's newspaper.  It seemed curious that Totnes should find the children strange, now that they looked exactly like most other young people.
     I thought of a phrase the Childs had used to describe their school: "A remarkably law-abiding yet dynamic society."  There, indeed, was the essential Dartington paradox.  I didn't think I had ever been in a school where the behaviour was more agreeable - but at the same time I'd rarely been in a school where so much, so seriously, was happening.