Editorial Editor Tom Wheare Managing Editor Jonathan Barnes Production Editor Scott James Advertising Manager Gerry Cookson Email: gcookson@johncatt.com Conference & Common Room is published three times a year, in January, May and September. ISSN 0265 4458 Subscriptions: £25 for a two-year subscription, post paid; discounts for bulk orders available. Advertising and Subscription enquiries to the publishers: John Catt Educational Ltd, 15 Riduna Park, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 1QT. Tel: (01394) 389850. Fax: (01394) 386893. Email: enquiries@johncatt.com Managing Director Alex Sharratt Editorial Director Jonathan Barnes Editorial address: Tom Wheare, 63 Chapel Lane, Zeals, Warminster, Wilts BA12 6NP Email: tom.wheare@gmail.com Opinions expressed in Conference & Common Room are not necessarily those of the publishers; likewise advertisements and editorial are printed in good faith, and their inclusion does not imply endorsement by the publishers. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recorded or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Editor and/or the publishers. Printed in England by Micropress Printers, Suffolk, IP18 6DH
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Summer 2019
HMC’s Autumn Conference later this month will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its foundation. On 21st December 1869, twelve Heads ‘traversed the dreary, sodden, mistclad country’ to join their convenor, Edward Thring, at Uppingham. The twenty-one volumes of the Taunton Commission had been published in February 1868, and, to quote Nigel Richardson’s fine biography of Thring, ‘the report proposed a complete overhaul of English secondary education, backed by greatly increased central government oversight. Each school’s charitable endowments would be reviewed, with some being re-assigned to create new schools.’ Following the report, with its striking pre-echo of recent government initiatives in this field, the process of drafting legislation was set in motion by the education secretary, WE Forster. In the first fortnight of March 1869, a group of Headmasters met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London to discuss the Bill, successfully sought a meeting with Forster, and met again to consider his response. Boosted by the experience, Thring suggested a further meeting at Uppingham at the end of the year. Thirty-seven schools were invited, but these did not include the nine ‘Clarendon schools’, which had been specifically exempted from the Taunton Report, and which Thring felt relied upon ‘their prestige and false glory’. Then as now, Eton was used as a shorthand synonym for exclusivity and elitism. Mitchinson, convener of the first meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern, said, ‘I think that if I may fairly claim to have laid the egg which developed into the present Headmasters’ Conference, Thring did all the clucking necessary’. Thring’s clucking has been transformed into an epidemic of headmagisterial twittering. Their thoughts are freely available, their experiences generously shared, and all this is in addition to the maintenance of regular letters to parents, former pupils and, if need be, the papers. It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that Heads should be amongst the most frequent fliers in the cyber sky, since some of the problems currently most concerning schools stem from the proliferation of social media. Whereas once the telephone was a stationary medium for conversation, the written word and the pictorial image are now the dominant form on devices that are mobile and part of a vast network of services and possibilities. Managing the use of mobile phones is a challenge for teachers as well as parents, and attempts to restrict their use can be seen in school as well as at home. In addition to informing and educating their pupils about the wonders and potential of modern information technology, schools have to protect them from its harmful side, teach them how to cope with its infinite capacity for good and ill and, finally, prevent them from wasting too much time in this seductive virtual world. Verba volant, scripta manent. The written word, either in the newspapers or on the smartphone screen, seems to possess authority and authenticity. ‘It must be true, I read it in the papers’ has now become ‘It must be true, I saw it on the internet’, or, worse still, ‘It must be true, I read it on the side of a campaign bus’. Headlines are very powerful and appear to convey simple, unarguable truths. Even when they are demonstrably false or nonsensical, they leave a parasitic message in the mind. Their spurious authority is exposed in Michael Frayn’s riff on Universal Headline Language in his wonderfully funny novel The Tin Men. Politicians have never been very trustworthy with words, but the present generation of journalist politicians is blatant in its use of verbal smoke and mirrors. In their original profession they acquired the skill of mastering enough of any brief or argument to make use of it as a means towards their word count end. With the new-found authority of office, this technique has become the basis for establishing governmental policy. Meanwhile, in America, a president who does not even bother to pay that much attention to detail, unleashes a stream of bees from his teaming bonnet, whilst outmanoeuvring his opponents by simply ignoring the rules of the game. Since words are the currency we use to transact thought processes, it would be as well to have a clear idea of what they mean and how to use them with some degree of precision.
Autumn 2019
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