DEVELOPMENT OF RESPONSIBILITY

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25679, 16 December 1948, Page 2

DEVELOPMENT OF RESPONSIBILITY

SCHOOL ORGANISATION AND INDIVIDUALISM

“The Work of the school, council offers an illustration of the value of the individual’s part in the small communities which together make up our society,” said the headmistress of St. Margaret’s College (Mrs C. L. Young), giving her last annual report before her retirement, at the college prizegiving ceremony in the Radiant Theatre last evening. “This council is composed of representatives of all the forms in the school, and meets every few weeks under the chairmanship of the head prefect. Form meetings are the basis of the scheme, and the decisions which they make are reported by their representatives to the council, and there the final policy is arrived at. This policy is announced the next morning by the secretary’s reading to the school the minutes of the council’s meeting. “In this way the school has organised all its relief work, has raised by direct giving, during the last two years, hundreds of pounds for various good causes, has carried through several collections of food which have been sent to Liverpool Girls’ College, has collected enough money for the postage of many other parcels, has made collections of clothing for the Red Cross and of stationery and text books for Rewi Alley’s work in China, and has arranged for the sponsorship of four European children. “I am wondering whether all this points to the importance of fostering small communities within the larger ones. The small community of the class with its form mistress, its elected orderly, and other officials, the small group of junior boarders at Julius House, where the children gradually learn responsibility, the small junior common room group at Kilburn growing up into the senior common room —all these are small enough for the individual to feel her worth and, when they are set in the wider community of the school, for each individual to get a deep satisfaction from realising, as in the case of the school council’s decision, that she has had a part in the planned society that we hear so much about in these days. “Does this give an indication -of the wav in which the worth of the individual may be preserved within a planned society? Perhans here the schools may dn their part in casting forward a shadow, and thus influencing the future.”