Quite early in his Oundle days Sanderson displayed his disposition¹ towards collective as against solitary² activity in his dealings with the school music. When he came to the school the 'musical' boys were segregated³ from the non-musical in a choir⁴; the rest listened in conscious exclusion⁵ and inferiority. But from the outset he set himself to make the whole school sing and[Pg 53] attend to music. The few boys with bad ears were carried along with the general flood; the discord⁶ they made was lost in the mass effect. Towards the end a very great proportion of the boys were keen listeners to and acute critics of music. They would crowd into the Great Hall on Sunday evenings to listen to the organ recital⁷ with which that day usually concluded.  
3
Presently Sanderson began to apply the lessons he had learnt from grouping boys for scientific work to literature and history. Most of us can still recall the extraordinary dreariness⁸ of school literature teaching; the lesson that was a third-rate lecture, the note-taking, the rehearsal⁹ of silly opinions about books unread and authors unknown, the horrible annotated¹⁰ editions, the still more horrible text-books of literature. Sanderson set himself to sweep all this away. A play, he held, was primarily to be played, and the way to know and understand it was to play it. The boys must be cast for parts and learn about the other characters in relation to the one they had taken.[Pg 54] Questions of language and syntax, questions of interpretation¹¹, could be dealt with best in relation to the production. But most classes had far too many boys to be treated as a single theatrical¹² company, so small groups of boys were cast for each part. There would be three or four Othellos, three or four Desdemonas or Iagos. They would act their parts simultaneously¹³ or successively. The thing might or might not ripen¹⁴ into a chosen cast giving a costume performance in public. The important thing is that the boys were brought into the most active contact possible with the reality of the work they studied. The groups discussed stage 'business' and gesture and the precise stress to lay on this or that phrase. The master stood like a producer in the auditorium¹⁵ of the Great Hall. Let any one compare the vitality¹⁶ of that sort of thing with the ordinary lesson from an annotated text-book.
 
The group system was extended with increasing effectiveness into more and more of the literary and historical work. Here the School Library took the place of the laboratory and was indeed as necessary to the effective development of the group method. The official life of Sanderson[Pg 55] gives a typical scheme of operations pursued in the case of a form studying the period 1783-1905. The subject was first divided up into parts, such as the state of affairs preceding the French Revolution; the French Revolution in relation to England; the industrial system and economic problems generally; and so on. The form divided up into groups and each group selected a part or a section of a part for its study. The objective of each group was the preparation of a report, illustrated¹⁷ by maps, schedules, and so forth¹⁸, upon the section it had studied. After a preliminary survey of the whole field under the direction of a master, each boy followed up the particular matter assigned to him by individual reading for a term, supplemented when necessary by consultation¹⁹ with the master. Then came the preparation of maps and other material, the assembling of illuminating²⁰ quotations²¹ from the books studied, the drafting of the group's report, the discussion of the report. In some cases where the group was in disagreement there would be a minority report.
 
In this way there was scarcely a boy in the form who did not feel himself contributing and[Pg 56] necessary to the general result, and who was not called upon not merely by his master but by his colleagues, for some special exertion²³. It might be thought that the departmentalising of the subject among groups would mean that the knowledge would accumulate in pockets, but this was not the case. Boys of separate groups talked with one another of their work and found a lively interest in their different points of view. It is rare that boys who have received the same lesson can find much in it to talk about, unless it is a comparison of who has retained most, but a boy who has been preparing maps of the Napoleonic military campaigns may find the liveliest interest in another who has been following the history of the same period from the point of view of sea power. There was indeed a very considerable amount of interchange, and when it came to facing external examiners and testing the general knowledge

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