In this country, this refers to the education of children up to the age of 11. I have said elsewhere that I believe this to be the fundamental core stage in any child’s education. If you cannot captivate them then with the joy of learning, I suspect you never will. It is also the time when you take them from their homes and show them that there is a bigger world out there and they are going to be a part of it.
I remember my primary days well for I can still picture the buildings, the classrooms and some of the teachers. However, when it comes to learning, the picture is far from complete.
Sure we learned to read, to write and to do arithmetic, the old Victorian 3 ‘R’s’, essentials for survival in adult life. And we had to do this well, write neatly and get the spelling right. None of this simple decimal stuff either. You try dividing £14. 2s. 8d by 7 and you will know what I mean.
Much of the rest I am hazy on apart from Miss Tilson’s geography. She never taught us formal geography. She just told us stories with pictures and maps about the great explorers of this world and we had to write it up afterwards so by that means it was embedded.
She was grey haired even then but no matter. Her tales were the stuff of dreams. And that is why I shall follow Marco Polo on the Silk Road in the autumn of 2009. It is why I went to Africa (Livingstone, Stanley & Speke), to Antarctica (Scott & Shackleton) and maybe one day, I shall follow Orellana up the Orinoco.
History? Can’t remember much of what we were taught but it certainly wasn’t about remembering dates. I think it was mostly about Egyptians, Greeks and Romans plus the Battle of Hastings. What I do remember well is that we looked at the history of Tamworth - Ethelflaeda, daughter of Alfred the Great, Athelstan, her nephew, first king of the English, Offa, king of Mercia whose capital was Tamworth and Robert de Marmion , one of the guys in the Norman invasion and subsequently, King's Champion.
No foreign languages and no formal science to speak of although we did put tadpoles in jars and watch them turn into frogs.
Music? Well it was mostly singing and listening. Cannot recall anyone learning to play an instrument but then none of us could afford one.
Art? All the usual crap with paint and paper.
School plays. Oh we had a lot of these, large and small. My claim to fame was that I played Oliver in a Christmas play called ‘Oliver Twist asks for more.’
Games? Think this is PE nowadays. Usual stuff but I was never interested. They never even tried to teach me to swim which is a pity.
Homework? None but we were encouraged to go to the Town Library and look things up which we did. And, of course, when you are in the Library, you explore other things and that is where I started to read proper fiction.
Exams? Well they were simple in structure but they did ask you questions that you had to think about. None of that multiple choice then.
School trips? Can only recall two. One to Bourton on the Water and the other to Wall (aka Letocetum) a Roman site on the line of the Watling Street.
No computers and no internet, not that I am decrying either. Wish I’d had them. But we started with slates and graduated to exercise books.
I suppose that when you look at the above list and judge it by today’s standards, you’d say it was pretty poor. But then you must consider the outcomes as they say in modern education parlance.
Quite a lot of us moved on from our primary to a small single stream grammar school with a class size of 28. And there we dominated the class each and every year and most of us went to university. And this was against kids drawn from schools all over town.
Lost touch now but reflect:
I ended up running 4 businesses on 4 continents
Andrew became a professor of nuclear physics
Michael built his own pharmacy business
Alan is Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland
So there you have it. Little market town of 12,500, Victorian/Edwardian buildings (although the 10- 11 yo class was in a hut), relatively poor, no prescribed curriculum that I could divine, no H & S regulations and no SATS.
But plainly my two schools gave us something that lived with us forever.
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