Athens or Sparta? Joe Spence Edward Thring’s Theory, Practice and Legacy: Physical Education in Britain since 1800 by Malcolm Tozer

Reviews Athens or Sparta?

Joe Spence reviews…

Edward Thring’s Theory, Practice and Legacy: Physical Education in Britain since 1800 by Malcolm Tozer Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019 ISBN 978-1527528185

Malcolm Tozer has been writing about Edward Thring’s influence on schools and about the history of physical education in Britain for some 40 years. This book synthesises much of his own work while incorporating findings from some recent surveys of 19th century public schools, and current research and reflection on the place of Physical Education in the curriculum. Educationalists who enjoy plotting the course of Western pedagogy, and finding that not that much has changed since Socrates, will enjoy Tozer’s playful and often helpful distinguishing of Athenian and Spartan, and Platonic and Aristotelian, approaches to education.

Edward Thring was one of a number of Victorian Heads who re-founded their schools, reconstituting ancient foundations that had long since lost sight of their original missions. He turned Uppingham, which he led from 1853 until 1887, from an insignificant country boarding school into one of the great progressive schools of late Victorian England. That the promotion of physical education in the curriculum, while avoiding the cult of athleticism, played its part in his achievement is a major theme of this work. It is a case study of Thring’s Uppingham and of his legacy, notably to the schools of the Head Masters’ Conference, which he founded in 1869.

The title and subtitle of the book reveal its author’s major and minor concerns. The first 200 of its 350 pages examine Thring’s work in making Uppingham a school fit for the purpose of teaching English gentlemen how to live a good life and how to rule an empire, albeit Thring was less jingoistic than many of his contemporaries. The progress of physical education in the curriculum is dealt with in the last third of the book, in what Directors of Sport and other PE practitioners may find a relatively cursory manner. Tozer might usefully have raided his own work, notably the collection of essays he edited on Physical Education and Sport in Independent Schools, 2012, for excellent material on such topics as girls’ games, sport and the disabled, the idea of the sporting school, and the issue of masculinity in the 21st century.

Tozer relishes sharing with his readers that Thring went about his work by advocating an holistic education. Accepting the Platonic principle that a soul absorbs its environment, Thring believed that every school should have a library, a workshop, a museum, a gymnasium, swimming baths and a wealth of other sports facilities. In this, as in his promotion of music and art in the curriculum and in his consistent belief that every child matters, Thring is strikingly modern.

What marked Thring out from others who looked to use sport to drive their schools forward was the breadth of his PE programme. It encompassed recreational country pursuits, as well as gymnastics, swimming, athletics and games. The importance of games was that they were character forming, inculcating that one should never cheat, funk, lose one’s temper or brag. That is, games and PE encouraged manliness of character, a Victorian objective Tozer has explored through the lens of Thring in other work (The Idea of Manliness, Truro, 2015).

An analysis of the impact of Social Darwinism on schools is missing from this volume, but Tozer writes well about the importance of Thring’s reading of John Ruskin, Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. He writes eloquently too of the influence of F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, though Thring would never be a fully-fledged Christian Socialist, having an aversion to anything that bore the label of socialist once it had been acquired by followers of Marx and other distinctly left-wing thinkers.

However, this does not suggest an aversion to all things foreign, and Tozer examines how much Thring was influenced by von Humboldt’s Bildung view of education. It was exposure to German education that, more than anything else, led Thring to an appreciation of the importance of the subjects he brought to the fore at Uppingham and, indeed, led to his employment of German teachers of art, music, modern languages and science as well as physical education.

Thring’s influence was widespread. His Theory and Practice of teaching, 1883, sold 25,000 copies in several editions. However, when Tozer examines Thring’s legacy, the tone is cautionary, offering words to the wise as to how the best of educational ideas can have unintended consequences. Tozer indicates that there is a distinction to be made between the work Thring

did at Uppingham and that of such Head Masters as Charles Vaughan at Harrow and George Cotton at Marlborough, who also used games to turn their schools around. Unlike Thring they succumbed to ‘Athletocracy’ and ‘athletic Philistinism’ with an attendant over-competitiveness in sport, ‘the rule of the bloods’, an arms race for facilities and the employment of professional coaches. The lure of Sparta, more muscular than Christian, took over from the influence of Athens.

The rise of the cult of the sporting hero was particularly evident in the traditional and more socially exclusive public schools inspected by the Clarendon Commission in 1861. Tozer enjoys Thring’s differentiating of the vitality of the schools he gathered for the first meeting of HMC with the degenerative conformity of ‘the Clarendon Nine’ resting as they did on antiquated traditions and their status.

Tozer has a tendency when dealing with Thring’s legacy to take a Manichaean view of teachers and headmasters, and whether they are aligned with the forces of light or darkness depends on whether they saw things as Thring did. But Thring was not alone in making excellent changes in schools in the late 19th century and wider reference to how others went about this, not least acknowledgement of the work of F.W. Sanderson down the road at Oundle, would have been valuable.

For Tozer, when the Head of Bedales wrote, in 1937: ‘We now recognise more clearly that education is concerned with the whole human being’, he was following in the footsteps of Thring, as did those who led schools like Loretto, Gresham’s and Gordonstoun through the inter-war years. The Thringian legacy is also seen to have infused Lawrence Jacks’ Education of the whole man, 1931, and it is noted how often Jacks’ son Maurice, Head Master of Mill Hill, mentioned Thring in Total Education, 1946. There is, rightly, special mention for Thorold Coade who, in his promotion of service (pioneering) and the creative arts, ensured that Bryanston, of which he was Head Master from 1932 to 1959, anticipated by many years what was to become standard practice in independent schools.

By the end of the 20th century, Tozer can record that the quality of PE and sporting achievement was high in most independent schools, with the healthy lifestyle of pupils, their engagement in competitive sports and their contribution to national sporting success being the best evidence of this. However, he is concerned to see PE squeezed out of the timetable in state schools and quotes worrying statistics as to the lack of physical prowess among today’s pupils, whether educated by the state or privately. Lord Coe’s pledge, that the London Olympic Games should improve the nation’s health and well-being, has not being realized, albeit that London 2012 sparked the restoration of an independent and state school partnership forum, in which the author played no small part, the result of which has been the creation of over 600 sports-based partnerships.

Edward Thring’s Theory, Practice and Legacy is a timely work that should inspire further studies. The blurb on the back cover suggests Directors of Sport, trainee teachers and historians of education, gender, society and sport should read it. In fact, it has much to say to headteachers and senior leaders too, about the balanced curriculum, about creative pupil leadership and about sport as just one of the co-curricular enterprises that deserve their support. The book made me think afresh about prefectship. How do you establish sound pupil leadership, giving prefects scope to leave a legacy in their schools, without reinstating the worst abuses of ‘the rule of the bloods’? Such a question needs more attention than it can be afforded here, but reading Tozer is stimulating. Like all good authors, when he doesn’t have the answer, he sets the reader the right question.

Dr Joseph Spence has been Master of Dulwich College since 2009

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