Teachers, Spiritual Pastors & Masters

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Good teaching is truly the bedrock of the independent sector. Contributing Editor, Michael St John Parker, explains why the prospective parent needs to be shrewd in his or her judgement in seeking the right school.

‘I don’t know, Ma’am, why they make all this fuss about education; none of the Pagets can read or write, and they get on well enough.’  Lord Melbourne’s characteristically insouciant remark to Queen Victoria has sometimes been quoted as evidence of the indifference of the English aristocracy to all but the social aspects of schooling – but it would be a grave mistake to take it at face value; the Pagets of that time were a racy lot, to be sure, but very far from unsophisticated, and Melbourne himself was happy to while away his leisure time in 10, Downing Street by reading classical authors in the original.  In short, Melbourne was exercising his talent for elegant irony.

Such subtleties would have been quite lost, one fears, on the subjects of a recent television programme which depicted the efforts made by a family of Russians, described as ‘oligarchs’, to place their children in an English independent school.  The central personality in this rather painful little tale was a dramatically beautiful Russian lady who was presented as paying for her own son’s education at a leading London establishment by acting as agent for the placing of two young sprigs of privilege whose parents (so we were unambiguously informed) wished them to acquire the manners of the English aristocracy and an early acquaintance with the ruling elites of tomorrow.

First, by way of a preliminary kitting-out, the boys were given crash courses at a country-house finishing – or, rather, starting – school, where they learnt such basic social skills as polo playing, bedmaking and clay-pigeon shooting.  Then we saw snatches from what was, apparently, an extensive tour of the country’s grandest public schools, in search of authentic magnificence.  Architectural splendours, enhanced by brilliant photography almost to the point of implausibility, rolled across the screen in stately succession, and classic English schoolmaster types deployed their angular charms in the diffident style which rarely fails to entrance young English mothers. 

But the merciless, eagle-eyed gaze of the beautiful Russian agent was cruelly fixed on practical considerations – creature comforts, facilities for exclusive sports, ease of access to the great world.  In the end, wealth spoke to wealth, and the two embryonic oligarchs were consigned to a school for bankers’ children, conveniently close to an airport.  Lifestyle was everything to these people, Russians and programme-makers alike, and the schools they visited were presented as nothing more than purveyors of lifestyle commodities.  One felt sorry for the schoolmasters in their fleeting appearances – dedicated teachers very probably, but here reduced to the role and status of eighteenth-century ushers, obliged to truckle to money and power.  The Russians are letting themselves in for disappointment, of course.  Although they seemed to be unaware of the fact, the social system to which they are seeking access through schooling died in the course of the twentieth century, and if the boys really do absorb the values of modern England they will be more likely to grow up apologetically insecure than confidently imperious.  But they will still enjoy the benefits of some of the finest teaching available in the world – even though that is not what their parents, and their parents’ beautiful agent, set out to find for them.

Even the best teaching can sometimes go astray, however.  The television programme came shortly after an unhappy news story that concerned a well-known independent school, an acknowledged leader in the academic field, which had recently decided to switch from A level to the International Baccalaureate – but without, so it was alleged, paying sufficient attention to the need to retrain the teaching staff.  The first round of examination results under the new system had turned out distressingly badly, and numerous bright pupils had failed to secure the university places which they had confidently expected.  Whether or not inadequate training was really at the root of the problem, the school’s teachers were receiving blame, in substantial dollops, from disappointed pupils and parents.  It was an altogether embarrassing story – but one that was much more to the point about the realities of education than was the tale of the socially aspirant Russians.

For good teaching is truly the bedrock of whatever success the independent sector can claim today – its strongest attribute, and the best justification for its existence.  Not ancient buildings, or luxurious sports facilities, or access to networks of influence, or even proximity to airports; it is the teachers that make the school, and form the pupils. 

Historically, of course, a tradition of good teaching attracts patronage – popularity, if you like; patronage brings prosperity, and even wealth, and so generates material advantages.  (And then sometimes, sadly, the material advantages come to loom so large that they overpower the importance of the teaching, and a reverse cycle of decline sets in.)  It is true, also, that even the best teachers can be affected by adverse circumstances, squalid classrooms, limited opportunities, low pay or esteem; any governing body worth its salt must be in constant pursuit of practical improvement if only for the sake of staff morale.

But for those with eyes to see, the quality of what goes on in the classroom is the only true indicator of a school’s worth.  What does it say, therefore, about the official scale of educational values, when Ofsted inspectors are instructed to concentrate their attention on a school’s facilities and the efficiency of its administrative procedures, rather than on the activity of the classrooms?  The shade of the great Victorian school inspector, Matthew Arnold, must be wringing his hands in horror!  Of course, a mere assertion of the centrality of teaching says nothing about the purposes of the exercise.  One might hope that it would not be necessary to go so far as the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford who famously proclaimed to his students in the beginning of a course of lectures that ‘ …nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.’

Equally, one would wish to shun the utilitarian Gradgrindery that dominates the thinking of the present government, and measures educational output in terms of mere examination results – which themselves have been progressively devalued into near-worthlessness.  Not that it would be at all easy to eliminate Gradgrindery even if a new government set its face against it – among many other appalling consequences of the Blair-Brown experiments on the living body of English schooling is the fact that they have created a generation of teachers so drugged by the toxic requirement to teach to examination syllabuses that they can hardly do otherwise.  Teaching is always central, and if you corrupt the teachers you corrupt the entire educational system.

The best teaching uses content of mostly transient significance as fuel with which to light a fire of understanding that can burn for a lifetime if its owner tends it with due care.  As Lord Lytton wrote,  ‘scholarship is but the parent of ideas; and ideas are the parents of action’.

But how can a parent, anxious and uncertain in the process of choosing a school for well-beloved but rather shapeless offspring, know how to gather reliable information about the teaching that may be on offer?  The answer, regrettably, is that there is no sure formula, and indeed the whole business of education is an unquantifiable gamble.  But the Shrewd Prospective Parent (S.P.P.) will politely discount the Registrar’s well-polished sales talk; will contemplate with courteous indifference the glories of the Olympic-scale swimming pool; will hear with calm equanimity the Head’s excited account of examination statistics excelled – but will pay the closest and most scrupulous attention to the words of the artless young person who has been deputed to conduct the S.P.P. on a guided tour of the premises, and whose (only lightly prompted) confidences about the teachers will be the pure milk of the truth – for those who know milk from water, at least.  ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings....’

And the title of this piece?  The Catechism enjoins submission to teachers, etc., as part of ‘my Duty towards my Neighbours’.  But the Catechism is not much in vogue these days.

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