of clear thinking’, and being ‘aimless work that could be described as a slow disintegration of an idea into a pleasant fac¸ade’. This was a valid comment which might have been very useful if it had been made to me at the time, but it wasn’t. As usual it was just sent to my parents in an end-of-term report.
Since then I have often wondered about this phenomenon: the contrast between the outspoken and generally damning reports sent to my parents and the carefully noncommittal and evasive attitude of the teachers. Some years later I had an opportunity to talk about this with an ex-member of the school staff, one who was, incidentally, the author of one or two of my reports. He explained that, because there were no rules or any discipline to support them, the teachers were inevitably vulnerable and at a disadvantage in their dealings with their less-than-endearing pupils. These could be as foul as they liked without any fear of reprisal, while the teachers, bound by the theory-driven education method, could not answer back. This situation did not allow them to be spontaneous in their responses to their pupils, nor did it encourage them to form genuine relationships with them. Luckily, he explained, they didn’t have to. Freedom was seen as being the ‘cure-all’. So long as the pupil had freedom, the teacher could look away, remain cool and detached, and leave them to their fate, saving their real comments for the parents’ reports.
I could understand that, even sympathize with it, and it went some way to explaining why, at Dartington, I had sometimes felt I was in a zoo rather than a school. In the light of it I now cherish the thought that, although at the time I had slunk shamefully away, I did, once, cause W. B. Curry, the headmaster, to lose his cool.
Curry gave evening seminars in Philosophy for interested pupils at his house. At one of these he told us that we would be discussing ‘good’.
‘Good!’ I said enthusiastically. ‘Good what?’
‘What d’you mean, good what?’
‘That’s what I mean,’ I answered. ‘What are you going to talk about that is good?’
‘No,’ he explained. ‘Not good anything … The Good. Good as a quality in its own right.’
W. B. Curry went on to discourse on Plato’s Essences, on the nature of Good and Truth and Beauty, and all the time I found myself becoming more and more agitated and, no doubt, huffing and puffing and tearing my hair. In the end Curry turned to me and said: ‘All right, then. What’s biting you?’
I said: ‘I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think what we are talking about is there. I mean, I don’t think I can think about Good as if it were a thing because I don’t think it is.’
‘Well, what do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t see how a quality can exist all on its own.
I think it’s the name of an adjective, an aspect of whatever it is describing, an observation about something.’
‘Is that really what you think?’ asked the headmaster.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Right, then!’ he snapped, his eyes blazing. ‘FUCK OFF! ’
1. If A comes before P in the alphabet, put a cross in the square marked Y.
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