What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?[1]
In a school, the regular set pattern of each day is often punctuated and symbolised by the ringing of bells for lessons and break time. Some might think this restrictive: imagine being an adult and still having your day determined by a bell every half an hour or so. In my experience, as a teacher, it’s a way of making sure you have the most exceptionally productive day. You might long for a precious free period to get your marking done, but it isn’t possible to find you’ve wasted over half an hour noodling around on your phone if you have twenty eager faces in front of you ready to discover the Russian language and you only have that particular thirty-five minutes in which to help them do so. A class cannot be kept waiting! And again, there is comfort in the familiar regularity. We conducted an experiment at St Paul’s to see whether to change the shape of the school day, but after a lengthy and highly consultative process, we decided more or less to keep things as they were. There was something in the rhythm and pattern that seemed balanced, as if we were biologically adapted: the changed day felt by turns piecemeal and baggy, lacking in proper flow – just wrong, somehow.
Living to the discipline of the academic year, week and day has its frustrations and constraints. At the same time, it provides a familiar rhythm from which we can draw confidence, security and comfort. I believe that the pattern and structure which we become used to at school meets a more fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood. In a world of expanding possibilities and greater uncertainty we are fortunate that in schools, our children’s lives still have this regular pattern: its cycle of peaks and troughs of concentration, anticipated special days and traditional events, giving the school year a safe and familiar rhythm. And just as a school encourages ambition and challenges its pupils to take intellectual risks and aim high, it balances this with a longer perspective, with patience and compassion. If you mess things up, there will be a chance to start again: next half, next term, next year.
A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?
The leaves are turning, the wind is gusting and I arrive in the office having lost yet another umbrella. As October starts, the academic year is well underway, corridors are humming with conversation and everyone is settling into the familiar rhythm of the term. In the admissions department, thoughts are already turning to next academic year, this being the month of open days for families considering applying to the school, so it’s time to brush up my speech for the prospective parents. It’s also the annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral, known as Colet Day, held jointly with St Paul’s Boys’ School, where each year we celebrate our foundation. Two reasons for me to be reflecting on John Colet’s vision for education, the case for single-sex schools, the education of girls in particular and what happens when girls will not be girls: in other words, the wider issue of gender identity schools are facing today.
Dean of St Paul’s, member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers and pioneering educationalist, John Colet used the fortune he inherited from his father to found St Paul’s boys’ school in 1509. At this time, the height of the Renaissance in England, Colet counted among his friends the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who assisted both with writing textbooks and a Latin grammar for the school and with appointing staff. Colet also knew Thomas More, another progressive thinker and advocate of the education of women – his own daughter Margaret Roper becoming a distinguished classical scholar and translator. Amongst the early high masters of St Paul’s was Richard Mulcaster, appointed in 1596, who wrote extensively on education, advocating proper training for teachers and the development of a curriculum determined by aptitude rather than age. He too thought women should have access to formal education, including attending university. Another contemporary, Robert Ascham, became tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and was the author of The Scholemaster, published in 1570 after his death and which, as well as being a treatise on how to teach Latin prose composition, explored the psychology of learning and the need to educate the whole person. These were forward-thinking men. Widely travelled himself, Colet believed that education generally and his school in particular should be for the children ‘of all countres and nacions indifferently’ and that it should, as the humanists of the Renaissance believed, concentrate on developing the life of the mind through the study of Latin and Greek and the scholarship of antiquity, all of this becoming more achievable with the advent of printing. Colet was ambitious for his school as an institution of learning but also as an instrument of social change. Given this and the cultural climate in which the school was founded – a time of burgeoning exploration, discovery and scholarship – it is perhaps surprising that it took another 400 years for the Mercers’ Company to establish a girls’ school. But in 1904 they did, and as I was fond of telling prospective parents, by the early twenty-first century, we had more than made up for the time lost, the two schools by then equally established and known for their breadth of education and academic excellence. As a result of a developing bursary programme, they were also no longer just the preserve of the wealthy, but educating a widening range of bright children from across London, reflecting the cultural diversity of a capital city.
To the contemporary Paulina, with her characteristic wit and taste for unexpected juxtapositions, John Colet is part embodiment of her love of tradition and part teen icon. Colet’s unblinking black bust, staring straight out and dressed in austere sixteenth-century clericals, presiding over the long, black-and-white chequered corridor known as ‘The Marble’, often appears in the background of selfies, with added sunglasses or perhaps a Father Christmas hat. ‘John Colet rocks!’ the girls exclaim with affectionate irreverence. And Colet’s legacy is extraordinarily alive in the two schools today, where his vision finds fresh and contemporary expression. I feel sure that the addition of the girls’ school is something of which he would have wholeheartedly approved.
Colet Day itself is a high point in the calendar anticipated with great excitement. The vast cave of St Paul’s Cathedral with its unnerving acoustic (open your mouth and you think you are singing on your own – very disconcerting) is packed with proud parents and in the front rows, under the echoing dome, the two schools sit, flanked by their tutors. A monumental rustling as the organ swells and the service begins, the clergy processing and everyone rising to their feet, anticipating the ritual that is to come. Moving to the lectern to speak my allotted words (the high master and high mistress alternate their lines each year, in careful observance of equality) I wonder again about the respective characters of these two schools, with their brother and sister relationship of familial closeness and sibling rivalry, and whether one day they will become one. For the time being, Colet Day brings the two schools together in symbolic unity and the question dissolves unspoken in the air.
Whatever form schools take in the future, the length of time it has taken us to take seriously the education of girls must remain one of history’s great opportunity costs. We can reflect that despite the efforts of early pioneers,
