When Sanderson first came to Oundle his ideas seem to have differed from the normal scholastic¹ opinion of his time mainly in his conviction of the interestingness and attractiveness of real scientific work for many types of boys that the established classical and stylistic mathematical teaching failed to grip. He developed these new aspects of school work, and his earliest success lay in the fact that he got a higher percentage of boys interested and active in school work than was usual elsewhere, and that the report of this and the report of his wholesome² and stimulating³ personality spread into the world of anxious parents. But it early became evident to him that the new subjects necessitated⁴ methods of handling in vivid contrast to the methods stereotyped⁵ for the classical and mathematical courses.  
[Pg 46]
 
There have been three chief phases in the history of educational method in the last five centuries, the phase of compulsion, the phase of competition, and the phase of natural interest. They overlap⁶ and mingle⁷. Medieval teaching being largely in the hands of celibates⁸, who had acquired no natural understanding of children and young people, and who found them extremely irritating, irksome, or exciting, was stupid and brutal⁹ in the extreme. Young people were driven along a straight and narrow road to a sort of prison of dusty knowledge by teachers almost as distressed¹⁰ as themselves. The medieval school went on to the chant of rote-learning with an accompaniment of blows, insults, and degradations¹¹ of the dunce-cap type. The Jesuit schools, to which the British public schools owe so much, sought a human motive¹² in vanity and competition; they turned to rewards, distinctions, and competitions. Sir Francis Bacon recommended them justly as the model schools of his time. The class-list with its pitiless relegation¹³ of two-thirds of the class to self-conscious mediocrity and dufferdom was the symbol of this second, slightly more enlightened phase. The school of the rod[Pg 47] gave place to the school of the class-list. An aristocracy of leading boys made the pace and the rest of the school found its compensation in games or misbehaviour. So long as the sole subjects of instruction remained two dead languages and formal mathematics, subjects essentially¹⁴ unappetising to sanely¹⁵ constituted boys, there was little prospect¹⁶ of getting school method beyond this point.
 
By the end of the eighteenth century schoolmasters were beginning to realise what most mothers know by instinct, that there is in all young people a curiosity, a drive to know, an impulse to learn, that is available for educational ends, and has still to be properly exploited for educational ends. It is not within our present scope to discuss Pestalozzi, Froebel, and the other great pioneers in this third phase of education. Nearly all children can be keenly interested in some subject, and there are some subjects that appeal to nearly all children. Directly you cease to insist upon a particular type of achievement in a particular line of attainment¹⁷, directly your school gets out of the narrow lane and moves across open pasture, it goes forward of its own[Pg 48] accord. The class-list and the rod, so necessary in the dusty fury of the lane, cease to be necessary. In the effective realisation of this Sanderson was a leader.
 
For a time he let the classical and literary work of the school run on upon the old competition-compulsion, class-list lines. For some years he does not seem to have realised the possibility of changes in these fields. But from the first in his mechanical teaching and very soon in mathematics the work ceased to have the form of a line of boys all racing¹⁸ to acquire an identical parcel of knowledge, and took on the form more and more of clusters of boys surrounding an attractive problem. There grew up out of the school Science a periodic display, the Science Conversazione, in which groups of youngsters displayed experiments and collections they had co-operated to produce. Later on a Junior Conversazione developed. These conversaziones show the Oundle spirit in its most typical expression. Sanderson derived¹⁹ much from the zeal²⁰ and interest these groups of boys displayed. He realised how much finer and how much more fruitful was the mutual

Join or Log In! You need to log in to continue reading

Create a new account   I have a account already

	Create an New Account
Email:  (User Name)
Password:	Letters and numbers only. 6-20 characters.
Retype Password:
Screen Name:	Letters and numbers only. 6-50 Characters.
Confirmation Code:	(Please type in the characters in the green image.)

	Login into Your Account
Email:
Password:
	Remember me on this computer.

(Left Keyword <-) Previous: 5小节 Back Next: 23小节 (Right Keyword:->)