Staff News from sia

NEWS FROM STAFF

"CO-ED"

Two years ago I left St. Peter's, and I remember my three years there with pleasure and gratitude—though it may seem odd to some of you that people actually enjoy teaching, especially a lot of hard-boiled, largely northern stalwarts. I left for a co-educational boarding-school, which provoked sniggers from some, head-shaking incomprehension from others (after all, they've hardly established themselves in the mainstream of education, have they?), and perhaps an envying curiosity from a few.

My School has now been established 75 years, and there are probably less than a dozen comparable places. Why is this? We certainly don't experience any shortage of demand, though there are some parents who consider this sort of thing alright for girls, but not for boys—and vice versa. Perhaps they're not "safe"? have "problems"? interefere with singleminded education?

Certainly, they are more difficult to run, though not necessarily because they are co-educational. (There are usually less than a dozen steady couples out of 260 children.) But they are more a reflection of outside society, and so it is less easy to fabricate a neatly ordered schooly structure, in the way so many schools do. Added to which, the backgrounds of many of the pupils make them healthily intolerant of being foisted off with the more ridiculous aspects that schools, like other closed societies, tend to perpetrate.

Now this is going to be no ruuning comparison which would be odious, and maybe seditious. Let's leave it that some of the more conclusive parts of the Public Schools Commissions have vindicated many of the things these schools have stood for for some decades.

What it means for us is that there is no house system as it is traditionally understood : loyalties work between all boys and all girls (or "males and "females" as they rather revoltingly label themselves by custom), and, most importantly, between the two sexes. There is practically no hierarchy —seniority and so on (though one hopes there is increasing responsibility): dormitories are small, usually self-requested, and always of mixed ages; next term there will be no prefects, as the top year has asked for, and got—after much discussion—"collective responsibility"; and relations with the staff are often on a Christian-name basis (but there is nothing artificial about this).

Then games cause less heartburn; they are just part of the whole range of activities, which include: work on the estate; plenty of art and pottery; workshop (one boy made a clavichord in ten weeks: I mention this as an example of some of the very fine work done there); choirs. and two orchestras (these happen to be particular strengths of the school by tradition); dances; drama, and a vast amount of reading and writing (again, helped by a truly fine library—some 26,000 books, and a place for everybody-but then, a really large library should be at the centre of every school, in my opinion).

But this sort of range, all carried out to a high level, seems to me quite right and proper: in fact, the more extensively active and creative a society can be the better. And if some of the boys still have most of their friendships with other boys, they do also learn a proper friendship and respect for the other sex, without pedestals or a sort of apartheid ignorance; and

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