Modern Educational Experiments
MENTAL WELFARE 49 III EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOLS Rose Lane School, Oxford
Rose Lane School was established by the L.E.A. as an attempt to help children whose backwardness seemed due to causes other than lack of intelligence? children who for various reasons were misfits in their own school and whose continued presence there caused increasing difficulties for themselves, their teachers and other children.
There are forty-four children with an age range of six to thirteen. Beside the Head Teacher, there is one other trained assistant and a Supplementary teacher.
The school works in co-operation with an Educational Clinic to which all cases of backwardness in the Elementary Schools of the City are referred. The majority of the children are suffering from emotional difficulties due in large measure to environmental causes. There is the nervous child who has fallen behind through fear of failure, the resentful child who may become delinquent, the child with a violent temper, together with cases of physical disabilities that tend to warp the child’s outlook.
Children enter the school with a report from the Clinic, together with one from the Head Teacher of the previous school. A report is also given by a social worker who has visited the home.
Anti-social tendencies are apparent in varying degree in every child admitted. Such being the case, the chief aim of the school is to make the child socially adaptable. If this object can be achieved, it is possible to remedy the educational deficiencies. The child may still show a certain degree of retardation, but is able to return to the normal school. This he does as soon as possible.
The time spent at the school varies. As the child’s difficulties are usually deep seated and of long standing, and educational attainments poor, it may mean a period of two years or more.
The school is housed in a picturesque grey stone building at the entrance to Christ Church Meadows, to which, through the kindness of the Dean, the children have access for physical training and play. The quiet beauty of these surroundings at all seasons of the year has proved of very real value in the remedial treatment of the children. An excellent midday meal is served, followed by rest on stretcher beds.
The discipline is rather that of the well-ordered home than of the ordinary big school. The children have various duties; they work in teams to lay tables, act as waiters, and help to wash up.
The curriculum is that of the normal school except that more time is spent on school subjects. These must of necessity be taught individually by methods best suited to the child’s needs. The children are encouraged to express themselves freely in every possible way. They choose their own topic for the morning talk, but whenever possible they work in groups and so learn to co-operate. Stories from readers are dramatised by small groups working under a leader! Singing and speech training are practised daily, but speech defects tend to disappear as the child’s emotional life becomes normal. The needlework and general handiwork are made as colourful as possible, and the so-called ” New Art ” has proved a source of great pleasure and profit. The children learn to forget themselves and to join with others in the joy of rhythmic movement.
There was a fear when the school was established, that contact with others all more or less abnormal would increase the children’s difficulties. Experience has, however, proved the contrary. The children are friendly co-operators and rejoice not only at signs of progress in themselves but in the forward steps of other sufiferers. One may perhaps sum up the work of the school in the words of a little girl who has completely changed in the past few months. It is a place ?zvhcrc we conic to be made happy and get our tempers better.
G.C. The Haddenham Road Experimental School, Leicester —————————————————- This school was established in 1932 for nervous and difficult children and for those with special educational disabilities.
Children stay on an average from 1-J to 2 years, and are then transferred back to their ordinary schools. The ages range from seven to thirteen-and-ahalf and the Intelligence Quotients from 85 upwards. The children are selected by psychological examination on the recommendations of their Head Teachers, and their homes are visited by the Social Worker before admission. Individual methods of work are used exclusively in all reading and arithmetic lessons. Handwork of all kinds?woodwork and pottery, gardening and gardening construction, as well as domestic science (for boys as well as girls)?is a feature of the curriculum, and there are four ” Subject Rooms “? for Fundamental Arithmetic and Reading, Arithmetic and English.
Each child receives careful individual study and an effort is made to find out what is the subject or occupation in w7hich he or she finds it easy to attain proficiency. When this goal in his own chosen subject has been reached, other work can be tackled with less hesitancy and difficulty and great improvement follows.
There are at present 124 children in the school?30 girls and 94 boys. An account of the aim and methods of the school will appear among a series of papers (shortly to be published in book form by the Leicester Education Committee) by teachers in their schools and classes for difficult and backward children.
An education which develops initiative, the open mind, and the questing will is essential if the difficulties of this age and of the years ahead arc to be successfully overcome. … The ansiver to the challenge will be in the coming generations. Any educational system which does not give them facilities for acquiring those attitudes which ivill assist them in the struggle, fails in its self-appointed task IVe educate for the future?beyond ourselves.
Stead, Chief Education Officer, Chesterfield.
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