Norwood (1943)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part I Secondary education
Chapter 1 Nature of secondary education
Chapter 2 Secondary education as it is
Chapter 3 Secondary education as it might be

Part II Examinations
Chapter 4 Existing examinations
Chapter 5 The reorganisation of examinations (i)
Chapter 6 The reorganisation of examinations (ii)
Chapter 7 The Inspectorate

Part III Curriculum
Chapter 8 The curriculum in general
Chapter 9 Physical education
Chapter 10 Religious education
Chapter 11 English
Chapter 12 History
Chapter 13 Geography
Chapter 14 Mathematics
Chapter 15 Natural science
Chapter 16 Modern languages
Chapter 17 Classics
Chapter 18 Art, music, handicrafts
Chapter 19 Domestic subjects
Chapter 20 Education for commerce
Chapter 21 Wales and the teaching of Welsh

Conclusions and recommendations
Appendix A Note on the Central Welsh Board
Appendix B List of witnesses
Index

Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941

London: HM Stationery Office 1943

Chapter 21 Wales and the teaching of Welsh
[pages 133 - 138. In the printed version this is Part III Chapter XIV]

In writing the preceding chapters of this Report we have made no distinction between England and Wales; for educational progress, as we foresee it, will take place both in England and in Wales on much the same lines. But there are two points of difference to which we call attention.

In the first place, the suggestions which we have made about examinations affect the Central Welsh Board rather otherwise than they affect the other seven examining bodies. If these suggestions are adopted, it appears to us that change in the existing machinery of examinations in Wales would be necessary. It is not for us to say what form this change would take; it is a matter which must be taken up by the appropriate authority in full knowledge of all the facts of the situation at the time. All that we can do is to draw attention to the new situation created by our suggestions; and for the convenience of those whom it will concern we have appended a short note on the history and functions of the Central Welsh Board.

The second point of difference is the place which the Welsh language occupies in the culture of Wales and therefore in the schools. To the question of bilingualism we devote this chapter.

The broad conceptions of education that are characteristic of England, and their consequent translation into school systems, curricula, syllabuses and method are no less valid for Wales. It is, however, inevitable that a country which, alongside a great neighbour, has retained its language, literature and cultural institutions should seek to maintain and confirm in its educational life these distinctive features; and inevitable also that it should encounter in the process problems which are peculiarly its own. This means that the approach to education in Wales must put in the foreground the question of the maintenance of the language, since the preservation of national culture would have little meaning, in Wales at least, unless it implied primarily and above all else the maintenance of the language. One of the aims and one of the greatest problems of the schools of Wales is and must continue to be that of making their pupils efficiently bilingual.

The pursuit of such an aim is linked up with the clear necessity for equipping the children of Welsh schools at the same time with the language and background which will enable them to participate fully and efficiently - and on equal terms with English children - in the life of the British Community as a whole.

The general principles enunciated in the earlier chapters of this Report would apply to the grammar school in Wales no less than in England. In their application to Wales, certain fundamental differences must be borne in mind. They arise from the following facts:

(i) Wales is a country with a language, history and culture of its own.

(ii) In rural Wales, which comprises three quarters of the geographical area of Wales, the Welsh language is still the home language of the very large majority of the inhabitants. In industrial south Wales English is the home language of a majority of the inhabitants, as it also is in some measure in the coastal areas of Wales and in the border counties, though the minority is substantial.

(iii) Welsh literature and cultural institutions have a history of over a thousand years. Their life and vigour persist today. Modern Welsh writers, both in prose and in poetry, are widely read; weekly and monthly periodicals maintain their hold upon the life of the people; Welsh drama flourishes; the National Eisteddfod - concerned with literature, music, drama, art and crafts - has been able to meet, though on a smaller scale, in all but one of these difficult war years.

(iv) Wales is joined to England by geographical, economic, and political ties. Welsh men and women have found their careers across the border, and Englishmen and women have found careers in Wales.

'The child is to grow aright and to grow eventually to full stature; but he starts with the stature of a child, physical, spiritual and intellectual. His experience and his interests are limited; to some extent they differ according to the nature of his home and the environment of his home; they must widen naturally as he grows; attempts to enlarge them hurriedly or prematurely for particular ends can bring nothing but the loss arising from forced growth.'

'That the purpose of education is to provide the nurture and the environment which will enable the child to grow aright, and to grow eventually to full stature, to bring to full flowering the varying potentialities, physical, spiritual, and intellectual, of which he is capable as an individual and as a member of society',

We may say, therefore, that the grammar school in Wales has, over and above the functions it shares with England, two special functions:

(a) It must pay heed to the language, literature, history and culture of Wales. More especially, the Welsh speaking pupil must be given ample opportunity to study his own language and its literature, and the English speaking pupil must be given opportunity to acquire a knowledge of Welsh. Furthermore, both types of pupils before they leave the school should know about the history and traditions of Wales.

(b) At the same time it must be ensured that the pupil, before he leaves the school, has acquired a sound knowledge of English. He must be able to speak and write English correctly and intelligently and to read English books with pleasure and profit. He must also be made aware that, while he is first and foremost a citizen of Wales, he is also, in a wider sense, a member of the community of men and women who form the population of this island, and in a yet wider sense a member of the community of nations which form the British Empire.

These considerations, if they are given due weight, will affect the shaping of the curriculum at every stage. In particular, they will affect the curricula in Welsh, English, classics, modern languages and history.

A: Language study

It has been noted above that the large majority of the inhabitants of three quarters of the area of Wales speak Welsh as their home language. The language of the infant schools - or a substantial proportion of them - in this area is Welsh, and, while few of the children will have reached the junior school without some knowledge of English, it is not until that stage that formal teaching of English begins. The pupil will therefore enter the secondary school having studied English for 4-5 years, and in the Welsh speaking areas the language which he will hear at home, in the street, and in his place of religious worship will be Welsh. He will have heard little English except in school and from his wireless set [radio]. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that when he enters the secondary school his knowledge of English has not reached the stage at which the language can be freely used as a medium of instruction in all subjects, especially in those subjects which are new; and experience has shown that it is frequently desirable during the first year to use Welsh as the medium of instruction in these subjects, so as to make certain that the pupil has grasped the fundamental principles.

So far as these pupils are concerned, the pattern of the scheme of language study is to some extent already determined. He must continue and develop his study of the language and literature of his native land, and he will have to pay considerable attention to his first 'foreign language', which is English. That this is in itself a problem of considerable dimension every English master or mistress in the Secondary Schools of Welsh, Wales knows only too well. Some pupils, while their spoken English is inadequate, are yet able to profit from lessons ordinarily taught in English. It is for these, no less than for others, that speech training is of the first importance. This is dealt with in Chapter IV of Part III of the Report [Chapter 11 in this online version]. How many other languages can be added to the scheme will then depend on the linguistic ability of the individual pupil. There will be some for whom Welsh and English will present sufficient difficulty; others will be able to add one or perhaps two other languages, and a few of the more gifted may even be able to take up others at the sixth form stage. The governing principle should always be that for the Welsh speaking pupil an acquaintance with one or more modern languages and/or Latin and Greek cannot compensate for an inadequate mastery of his own language and its literature and of English.

The second type is the pupil who enters the secondary school able to speak Welsh and English with reasonable fluency. The home language of this pupil will almost certainly be Welsh, but, living in a bilingual area, he will have picked up a fair knowledge of English in his daily life outside the junior school which he has been attending, though that school will have done its share in developing his knowledge and will have been at some pains to correct some of the English which he has picked up outside. Here again the governing principle in determining the scheme of language study should be the same. The first aim should be the twofold one of developing the pupil's knowledge of his native language and seeing that he is given as thorough a knowledge of English as is possible. Here, however, the pupil's acquaintance with English, on entry, will make it possible to add one or, for the more gifted pupil, even two or more languages with less danger of strain. It need hardly be added that the framing of a satisfactory scheme of language study always involves considerable staffing and timetable difficulties, and the smaller the school the greater these difficulties become.

The third type is the monoglot English-speaking pupil. The majority of these will be found in the large Secondary Schools of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. At first sight it would appear that the problem of dealing with this pupil is not different from that of dealing with a pupil in an English Secondary School, but a closer scrutiny will reveal elements that are not present in the English problem. The most important of these is the choice of foreign languages to be studied. Many of these pupils will have begun to learn Welsh as a second language in their junior schools, and it is obviously desirable that their study of Welsh should be carried a stage further in the Secondary School. But, even for those who have learnt no Welsh hitherto, it becomes a question whether their first 'foreign' language should not be Welsh - the language of their own country and the language spoken by thousands of their fellow pupils in other parts of Wales. Whatever linguistic discipline is undergone in learning a foreign language will be undergone in learning Welsh equally with other foreign languages, and for the pupil who will take his study of foreign languages no further than the School Certificate stage Welsh is as desirable as any, since the opportunities for pursuing study after that stage are nearer to hand. When this order of priority has been determined, the number and choice of other languages will again be very much a matter of the pupil's linguistic capacity.

When the principles enunciated above have been determined, the choice of other foreign languages to be studied will be guided by the suggestions made in the chapter on modern languages and special regard should be paid to the first and second recommendations of that chapter. Earlier in this Report the problem of the adequate staffing of the Secondary School has been referred to. In Wales, in face of all that has been said above, it is clear that there are special considerations which call for generous standards. A full consideration of these and other allied problems is to be found in 'Welsh in Education and Life', the Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education to inquire into the position of the Welsh language and to advise as to its promotion in the educational system of Wales, published in 1927.

B: History

Paragraph 13 of the chapter on 'The Principles of the Curriculum' in the Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Education [Spens Report 1938 Chapter 4] states that 'for education one needs the influence of a concrete tradition or way of life. There is undoubtedly a common Western European tradition, derived mainly from the Graeco-Roman civilisation as it was transformed by Christianity, and one of the chief functions of secondary teaching is to make boys and girls conscious of it and regard it as something to be reverenced and preserved. But the right way to do this is to begin by making them conscious of that tradition as it exists in their own country ... The national tradition in its concrete individuality must, for the reasons adduced, be the basis of an effective education.'

In the section of the [Spens] Report (Chapter 10) dealing with the special problems of Wales it is stated that 'the distinctively national traditions of Wales, in our opinion, require also that a place should be given in all schools to the history of the Principality which should be taught as far as possible in close connection with Welsh literature and with physical and economic geography,'

The study of the history of Wales in as close an association as possible with its literature and geography appears to be the natural medium for giving the native tradition a basic place in the post-primary curriculum. The characteristic political and social features of each period are reflected with exceptional faithfulness in its contemporary poetic and prose literature. The preservation of the essential unity of Wales throughout the centuries cannot be understood without reference to geographical features. The teaching of Welsh history should not be divorced from British and European history in its treatment of the great movements which have vitally affected the development of Britain and western Europe or of the frequent and crucial contacts, affecting the destinies of both nations, which characterise the common history of England and Wales. It is, however, desirable that the essential groundwork of the story of Wales should be presented on lines which will adequately equip pupils with a knowledge of the distinctive and individual development of the Welsh people.

Such treatment should aim at giving greater coherence and continuity to Welsh history than has generally prevailed, and should result in awakening in the pupils a greater awareness of the past and a more intelligent understanding of the forces and movements which have created modern Wales.

The study of Welsh history, therefore, should be an essential part of the history curriculum at all stages in the Welsh secondary grammar schools. Further, it should be taught, not as a supplement to the mainstream of British history, but as a natural unity which can give to Welsh pupils, through a knowledge of the sequence of events, both an understanding of organic growth and a fuller consciousness of the continuity of native tradition. The objective, therefore, in this respect will be to give the pupils within their capacity a clear, coherent and consecutive impression of the past of Wales, which will lead to an understanding of contemporary conditions and provide a firm basis for future study.

Enough has been said to give our point of view, that the general lines of educational advance in Wales are likely to be much the same as in England and that Wales has a culture of its own closely dependent upon the maintenance of the Welsh language which is treasured today. How that culture can best be cherished in Welsh schools can be decided only by those who share its traditions and love its language. On such matters they must be in a position to exercise independent judgement. For the spirit which has maintained the national institutions and ideals of Wales was of spontaneous growth, and, if it is to be retained in its fullness, must be carried forward by those who understand and value it. At the same time education knows no bounds of space any more than of time; to be at its best in any place it must be aware of the work of others in similar fields, and must foster a self-reliance which does not exclude desire for self-comparison with other standards. For it is essential to a national education that its scope and standards should furnish a title to the widest recognition and should be interchangeable with those prevailing elsewhere.