The Problem Teacher
- Author:
Neill. Herbert
Jenkins. 5s.
A teacher’s problem, as diagnosed by the author of this book, appears to be that he is incurably middle-class in his ideas, economically dependent on continuing to be so, and yet socially barely on the fringe of the bourgeoisie. He suffers therefore, it is contended, all the privations?social, sexual and psychological?of his religious and moral ideology without the corresponding middle-class compensations of prestige and affluence. The result is an ” irritable mechanic devoid of inspiration, afraid of emotion which might bring him to loggerheads with his mentors, and clinging to a narrow intellectual syllabus, unaware of what is in his own heart and in the hearts of his children.
Neill sees the bare isolated subject teaching of the average curriculum and the craze for examination successes, as indirect outcomes of an attitude which expresses itself more directly in repressive discipline exercised by a pedagogue whose dignity is his only prop.
(As the book concerns the ” problem” teacher, much of this must be allowed to go unchallenged, though one would have welcomed some wider recognition to the many whose hearts do lead them to an understanding of the children they teach and who accomplish so much in despite of curricula, regulation and ideology.)
The teacher’s salvation is described to be in the direction of bending his energies to change all this by making politics his chief interest in life. To this end his training should include contact with the major current political view- points, as well as international travel and as much understanding of his own psychology as can be crammed into the time available. Then, and pre-eminently, a first hand study of children at play. Psychology should displace teaching method and should concern his own and the children’s emotions, not the learning processes.
Those of us whom Neill has helped to see how true education can be achieved by a sincere awareness of the abiding human needs, will not find this book hard to swallow though we may be a little disappointed that the author has not yet assimilated his own aggressive daemon. Those who need educating to this viewpoint will still be unconverted, because the book is an attack written in a spirit which will produce a counter-attack and proceeding probably from the same self-conscious wilfulness which led the writer to call a previous book about Summerhill, ” That Dreadful School ! ” R.T.
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