RICH REWARDS

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22270, 8 December 1937, Page 5

RICH REWARDS

% HEADMASTER’S EXPERIENCE AND REFLECTIONS I Chose Teaching. An Autobiography. By Ronald Gurner. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 312 pp. (10/6 net.) Those who read his terrifying novel, “C 3,” will know that Ronald Gumer is a realist, not a man with a muck-rake nor a man who pores over trifles, but one who sees good and bad, ugly and comely, and who tries to relate effects to their right causes, a wise, if sentimental man, a man of common sense. “C 3” showed how a young man, faultily educated, descended to ruin and despair. Mr Gurner in “I Chose Teaching” speaks more plainly and technically about education. Except for the war years, he has taught or commanded in a school for 25 years. The first half of his book is autobiographical and shows how headmasters become and remain headmasters. This one had a harder job than most, for, among other difficulties, he had to contend in Sheffield with political influences that were upsetting his school. Nowhere was his headmastership easy. He passed' from a public school appointment to a State secondary school in London, and from Sheffield to an old foundation that was a day school. Few teachers have had a career so varied. In Mr Gurner’s shoes, any man would have learnt humility as well as persistence; but he had the willing heart and the sensitive spirit that make men wise and understanding. The present reflections, delivered, it seems, many years before retirement, are the fruit of a wise man’s experience. Knowledge of educational history, ancient and modern, contact with important men, and a constant empiricism make all Mr Gurner’s reports worth attention; but he has such a profound sincerity and such an exalted view of his work that many of his utterances have the earnestness of prophecy. For this teacher the categorical imperative is the basis of all personality, manliness, even integrity. Not that he is a champion of the mark-book, cane, and detention-list of the old birchman. Far from it. He has examined and tested most of the educational theories that, for better or worse, are harassing a vexed profession. From heaps of chaff he has winnowed a few grains, planted them in a bed well worked, and they bring forth abundantly. This prudent man has strength to resist the new merely because it is novel, and shrewdness enough to blow up fanciful theories that deceive simpler souls with their new-fangled jargon. Much of the new, free educational practice Mr Gurner stamps upon

very vigorously. For him it is a eupeptic philosophy, like Christian Science, “enjoyed by those remote from mundane care.” Like many of his brethren he has learnt and believes that a core -of hard work, some of it uncongenial, must support any educational theory; and that soft, easy pedagogy is not ideally fitted for a life that becomes progressively more hard and complicated. In free schools, he reports, he saw more frequently than in others unjustifiable anger, nervous instability, sadism, impatience, arrant conceit, lack of decency, and lack of self-control. But despite this ruthless objectivity, no parent need fear that under Mr Gurner his son will be dragooned and quelled. The boy will learn to work and to use his faculties, as well as to enjoy the best in life and to stand on his own feet. Among the host of perplexities examined and enlightened in this book, and most of them are considered, two matters will most engage its readers: religious instruction and the day school. Mr Gurner’s own firm belief and sense of duty leave him no alternative to testifying his faith in God and his allegiance to Christ. He is the better teacher for it. He strikes good blows for the day school. As he declares, the boarding school in the last 3000 years, in Greece or Scotland, in Germany or England, has made an insignificant contribution to the education of mankind. The day school, by a different technique, achieves the same results. By worth, academic, cultural, athletic, and spiritual, the education which it offers must win and hold the loyalties claimed of right by boarding schools. Most day schools succeed. Mr Gurner will shock and annoy many of his professional readers; but he will do them all good.

“BODIES WITHOUT BRAINS”

Addressing the students and others associated with the Queen’s Road Commercial Institute, Dalston, on the occasion of speech day at the Town Hall, Hackney, last month, Mr Herbert Morrison, M.P., leader of the London County Council, said there was just a little danger in the world today that physical fitness and appearance, a capaicty to make certain movements with regularity and precision, were becoming an unbalanced ideal. There were some nations in the world which were deliberately discouraging thought and independent judgment among young people, and were substituting a mechanical obedience, an uncritical acceptance of ideas from others, and the cultivation of physical fitness alone. Let it be remembered that no country could permanently prosper on fit bodies alone, and that countries which discouraged mental alertness and independence and creative individual thought were committing a crime against human dignity, and in the end must destroy their own potential greatness.