Newsom (1963)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction, Principal recommendations

Part 1 Findings
Chapter 1 Education for all
Chapter 2 The pupils, the schools, the problems
Chapter 3 Education in the slums
Chapter 4 Objectives
Chapter 5 Finding approaches
Chapter 6 The school day, homework, extra-curricular activities
Chapter 7 Spiritual and moral development
Chapter 8 The school community
Chapter 9 Going out into the world
Chapter 10 Examinations and assessments
Chapter 11 Building for the future
Chapter 12 The teachers needed

Part 2 The teaching situation
Chapter 13 What should secondary imply?
Chapter 14 An education that makes sense
Chapter 15 Attainments and achievement
Chapter 16 The subjects and the curriculum
Chapter 17 The practical subjects
Chapter 18 Science and mathematics
Chapter 19 The humanities
Chapter 20 School organisation and staff deployment

Part 3 What the survey shows
Chapter 21 The 1961 survey
Chapter 22 The boys and girls
Chapter 23 The work they do
Chapter 24 The men and women who teach them
Chapter 25 The schools they go to

Acknowledgements

Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Sex education
Appendix III Deployment of teachers
Appendix IV Letter to Minister on teacher training
Appendix V Statistical detail

Index

A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1963
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Part Two The teaching situation
[page 109]

Foreword

We have drawn freely on the experience of others in putting down in this part of the report our view of the most effective way to set about the education of the boys and girls with whom we are concerned. Those who have helped us are not, of course, responsible for the use to which we have put their wisdom and none, probably, would agree with all that we suggest. Nevertheless this part of the report is essentially what Lord Wavell called his anthology of poems, Other men's flowers.

Chapter 13 What should 'secondary' imply?
[pages 111 - 113]

308. Boys and girls going to a secondary school for the first time are normally keen to do their best. It is a large and strange world compared to that which they have known. There are new subjects and new kinds of equipment to attract their interest. The craft shops, the special art room, the fully equipped gymnasium or the laboratory - these are for them new and exciting aspects of school life. But at first, and often well into the second year, they remain very much the children they were in the primary school. Much of the character of their school work is still what we should call primary. They are in the collecting stage - witness the badges in their button-holes and the tattered book of engine numbers. They collect knowledge wholesale which only later will they reduce to intellectual order. They are, too, at least for part of the time still in the stage of unselfconscious imaginative fantasy. The West is still wild; the frontier open. The world is still such stuff as dreams are made on. Watch the girl in the back garden. She would infinitely prefer the real thing, but she makes believe she is exercising a horse. The wise secondary school teacher, like the wise primary school teacher, makes use of these childhood traits.

309. There comes a time, however, when childish things are deliberately rejected. Too often school and school work are included in this list. A child who has been regular in attendance at school decides to stay away - far more of the children in our survey with unsatisfactory attendance records began their truancy in the third year of school life than the second. Discipline becomes more difficult, notebooks untidy, there is a struggle over uniform. Many boys and girls, of course, are not difficult like this at all, and many only for a short period, but it is frequent enough to be troublesome. One of the reasons for this rejection is that 'school' has become identified in the child's imagination with an outgrown phase. There are various aspects to this rejection of school. The one we are concerned with here is the loss of interest in work. Where this occurs it is often because of a failure on the part of those who plan the work to keep pace with the developing personality of pupils who no longer accept all that comes their way; but stand back and ask, 'What's it all for? What's it got to do with me?' Unless they are satisfied with the answer, their interest sags.

310. The kind of difference between primary and secondary which they seek is partly a matter of attainments, of doing more advanced work. But if this were the whole, or the main part of the story, many of those with whom we are concerned would hardly be capable of secondary work, and the promise of 'secondary education for all' would be impossible to fulfil. A satisfactory definition cannot start from the presumption that all that is below a certain standard is primary while all above is secondary. We cannot say, for instance, that in arithmetic fractions are primary, but logarithms are secondary.

311. Age, of course, also comes strongly into their feelings. They are so often urged to 'be their age' that it is reasonable they should demand an education which comes up to their age, and be dissatisfied with one which in their view often fails to get as far. The trouble with chronological age is that, though it makes a clear administrative division, it is much less satisfactory as an educational one. The rough administrative definition is that below the age of eleven is primary; what follows eleven is secondary. This is as straight a frontier in time as the 49th parallel is in space. The trouble is that psychologically eleven is no longer the watershed it was once thought to be. Different people cross from childhood into adult life, or rather into the debatable No Man's Land of adolescence, at considerably different ages. Moreover many linger behind childhood in some aspects of life long after becoming adult in other ways. Physiological and psychological growth do not proceed at precisely the same pace, and community pressures may push boys and girls into a seemingly earlier social than personal maturity. In terms of age the most that we can safely say is that the frontier of childhood is crossed during secondary school life; that boys and girls enter as children at eleven and leave as young, but very immature adults at fifteen.

312. During that period boys and girls are becoming aware of themselves, self-conscious in both the good and the embarrassing implications of that term. It is possible to make good use at school of this characteristic of adolescence, and to induce them to think critically and purposefully about their work. It is this quality which is needed to give a true secondary flavour to their education. An illustration may help here. To make a pottery bowl involves considerable experience of handling clay: in getting to know empirically how clay behaves when wet or dry, and gradually acquiring skill of hand and eye in making it obey the potter's will. All this gathering of experience is learning of a primary kind whether the pupil is ten, twenty or forty years old. But the purposeful employment of this skill to produce a bowl which will serve a special purpose and look right in a particular place - and to be right in one's judgement nine times out of ten: this is secondary education. The progress from the child's first lump of plasticine at home to the housewife furnishing her house with conscious taste is a progress through primary and secondary ways of learning. A pupil's secondary education cannot begin until he has enough experience behind him to enable him to make sensible judgements on what he is doing. It does not begin until and unless he makes those judgements. It is, of course, perfectly possible for some of a pupil's work to be already secondary in character, while other parts of it are still wholly primary. There are pupils whose capacity in mathematics has brought them early to the secondary stage in that field, who yet see no more in a book than an exciting story with a good plot and plenty of opportunity for day dreaming. They have not yet developed the adult use of the imagination to enter with insight into the feelings and problems of others, but are still in the childish stage of fantasy and projection. The step forward from primary to secondary depends partly on earlier good teaching in the primary style and partly on a favourable opportunity being recognised and taken by the teachers in the secondary schools.

313. The work in a secondary school becomes secondary in character whenever it is concerned, first, with self-conscious thought and judgement; secondly, with the relation of school and the work done there to the world outside of which the pupils form part and of which they are increasingly aware; and, thirdly, with the relation of what is done in school to the future of the pupils, that is to the part they see themselves playing, or can be brought to see themselves as playing in adult life. The first of these characteristics, the quality of self-conscious judgement, differs in kind from the other two. It describes a mental process that involves the use of reason and imagination to bring order into the world of things perceived. The other characteristics define directions in which this process must be employed, at least for the boys and girls of this report, if they are to develop the power of judgement.

314. The degree to which most of the boys and girls with whom we are concerned can exercise this sort of mental ordering is strictly limited in precisely those areas of knowledge in which the most spectacular successes of the modern world have been made. The abstract thinking of mathematics, and the concepts behind the scientific method will be beyond their reach, but they can acquire a common sense in figure handling and a reasoned application of scientific skills to particular conditions, such as the diagnosis of electrical faults or the correct installation of a hot-water system, which involve true self-conscious judgement and are thoroughly secondary in the sense in which we have used the word. It is important that these boys and girls should penetrate as far as they can by secondary ways of learning into the world of mathematics and science. At present this is not very far. Better conditions of learning will add considerably to the distance they can go; but, compared with abler pupils and compared with their own possibilities in other fields, their journey into mathematics and science will always be relatively short.

315. The field in which it is most important that ordinary boys and girls should learn to exercise a common sense judgement quickened by imaginative insight is that of personal relations. Their greatest service to the community, and there is none greater, will be as men and women who can be relied on to make a success of their own lives and by the quality of their living to bring up their children to do the same. This is not something which can be taken for granted or left to traditional methods of indoctrination. In a contracting world, where all men are neighbours but by no means necessarily friends, everybody needs an education of the imagination and the will to enlarge the area of his concern and acceptance of responsibility. Self-conscious judgement, too, is necessary now that private life has become a target for every art of direct and indirect salesmanship of goods, services and entertainment. In this whole field of private conduct an education which is genuinely secondary can equip the boys and girls with whom we are concerned to make right choices and to carry them out.

316. The transition from primary to secondary in most aspects of school work needs to be completed early in the period of three years from thirteen to sixteen. If the secondary characteristics are not apparent throughout most of this period, the education pupils receive will not help them to grow up because it will not be directed towards responsible adult behaviour and understanding. For real secondary education the last of these three years is decisive. By the age of sixteen most boys and girls will have had sufficient taste of adult life to know what it implies. Only if they remain at school until sixteen will they be able to bring their education and the adult world into a common focus.