Schooling, harm and good

Text 1: Recollections of a Parish Schoolroom, by Thomas Gedge

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I was sent to the National School at six years of age, and I remained there until I was eleven, when my father judged that I could read well enough to be of no further expense to him. The schoolroom was a long whitewashed barn with a single stove at one end, so that the boys nearest the master were roasted and the boys at the far end, among whom I generally found myself, sat with their fingers blue upon their slates. We learned by chanting. Two hundred voices together recited the multiplication table, the counties of England and the kings in their order, and I could rattle off every one of them long before I had the faintest idea what a county was.

Mr Holloway, the master, kept order with a cane which he called his Reasoner. He used it often and without anger, as a man might use a broom. I received it once for blotting my copy, once for laughing at a monitor, and once, I believe, for nothing at all, since he could not discover who had let the pig into the yard and determined that justice would be served if somebody were beaten. I bore him no particular grudge at the time. It was simply the weather of the place.

I have since heard gentlemen speak warmly of the schools of the poor, and I cannot quite share their warmth. I was taught to repeat and never to ask. Yet I must be fair. It was in that cold barn that I first spelt out a sentence in the Testament without help, and felt, as I have felt rarely since, that a door had opened in the wall. Everything I possess as a man, my place as a clerk, my little shelf of books, began on that bench. I owe the school my letters. I do not think I owe it my mind.

Text 2: The Envelope, by Pauline Harker

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The envelope came on a Saturday in March 1962. My mother opened it at the kitchen table, read it twice, and folded it back along its creases as though she could undo it. I had failed the eleven-plus. My best friend, Carol, had passed, and from September she would wear a bottle-green blazer and catch the bus into town, while I would walk down the hill to Brook Street Secondary Modern with the other failures. Nobody used that word. Nobody needed to.

For a long time I believed what the envelope had told me. At Brook Street we did typing and needlework and something called Domestic Science, which meant making scones for the headmaster. The message, delivered kindly but constantly, was that we were being prepared for useful lives, and that useful meant small. I stopped reading at home. I stopped putting my hand up. When Carol and I passed each other in the street we found less and less to say, and by fourteen we said nothing at all.

Then, in my third year, a supply teacher called Mr Pryce arrived to cover English for a term and somehow never left. He set us poems that nobody had told him were too difficult for us. He wrote ‘Why?’ in the margin of everything, so often that we started to ask it ourselves. I went on, much later, to evening classes and then to a degree, and people sometimes say that this proves the system did not hold me back. I think they have it the wrong way round. One man undid in two years what the envelope had done in a morning, and I am still angry about the morning.

‘Both writers suggest that their schooling did them more harm than good.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the writers’ experiences of school
• explain how far you agree that school did each writer more harm than good
• compare the ways the writers present their schooling.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.