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At the end of the war my father renewed his offer to find me a place in Barclays Bank with responsibilities in Oxford and for work overseas. I had a strong difference of opinion with my father about my future career. 'Schoolmasters are men among boys' he remarked one day, 'but boys among men.' I was never able to convince him that I had made a wise choice. There is a quotation inscribed in a stone above the entrance of a certain school in the Lake District, and had my father known the quotation he may have had more empathy for the choice I was making: 'An opportunity of a lifetime must be taken during the lifetime of the opportunity.'
I had already been interviewed by the Chairman of Barclays Bank on the work I might undertake in Africa, France, and Oxford. 'You can go and learn your banking in Timbuktu, if that is what you want,' he said. I was very sorry to disappoint my father, who had set his heart on my acceptance. However, whatever length I had stayed there, it is doubtful whether I would have found a way of lending to the poor. It was difficult enough in my own country. But it was a good offer and now I wonder whether I made a mistake. I think not though, because I always remember that doing a little against war is better than doing a lot against poverty. John Parker MP, and Chris Mayhew MP, encouraged me to join the politicians, but that was, I thought, out of the question, in view of people's dislike of conscientious objectors just after the war.
This dislike was soon to be put to the test. I was appointed to teach physical education at the Birmingham Emergency Training College for Teachers, by an admirable Principal. I bore him no ill

will when he wrote two weeks later to say that he had made a mistake in thinking that there was no regulation against this. No wonder that I made my own error in accepting by phone a comparable position at a Training College belonging to the Church of England situated near the gas-works and partly funded by a brewing firm. In mitigation of my error, it should be said, I was recommended by my tutor at Carnegie College in Leeds, who had been teaching in the college in Birmingham doing the work which I was to take on myself. Later on, maybe recognising his mistake, he was glad to be in a position to offer me one post at the University's Department of Physical Education and another at Bournville Works designing exercises to off-set the impact of working, at a variety of machines, work which had harmful effects in the long run. These offers I had to refuse, partly because I was still suffering from a bad back, and partly because my interests became centred in the teaching of Education.
The Principal of Saltley College was a very persuasive man indeed, especially when appointing staff and selecting students. For the first term or two I was living in the college, taking lunch in the hall with the students and staff and in the evening I was alone with the Principal for dinner. He talked with enthusiasm about the college and the students as well as about his own teaching. At first he sounded a good man and believed he could win my admiration. On one occasion, however, he failed to impress me at all. 'It is strange' he said, 'What a large number of students are attracted to those rails,' indicating the Birmingham to London main line just across the football pitch from the college buildings. It did not occur to him, it seemed, that the way he ran the discipline of the College, forcing students to report on other students, may have accounted for the plight of those desperate young men who had attempted suicide. Nor did he see that the former youths of eighteen to twenty and the ex-servicemen could not be treated alike. If a man has served in the forces all over the world it is unlikely that he will accept lights out in the dormitories at ten o' clock! To make matters worse he expected me to turn them off myself. Despite this the students seemed to go out of their way to welcome me. They invited me to play rugby football with them, but the Principal soon put a stop to that. Then we tried to form a debating society but he also stopped that

. From other members of the staff I learned that his miserliness was so great that our salaries, for example, were four months overdue, and that the Vice-Principal had consulted with the doctor as to whether the poor man should be certified.
It seemed to me such a serious situation having the library permanently locked for fear of losing any books, having some students running a burglary racket, with the help of Sten guns and ammunition so that they went to prison and other similar failings, it was necessary to blow the whistle. To their shame no one else was prepared to help me. I appealed to the College's Inspectors through a friendly colleague of his who knew me, but he was about to retire and wished for no trouble.
Most of the forms of corruption were visible in the management of the College by the Principal. He relished too much the wielding of power, he disliked any actions which lessened his influence and that meant making disparaging remarks about anyone whom he considered too popular with the students. By using objectionable methods of extracting information he maintained his influence throughout the institution, which he made his own. To minimize outside influence he barred the staff from meeting the Governors. He used his monopoly of power to his own financial advantage. The Bishop described him as spiritually exhausted.
All the time I was lying awake at night wondering whether I was doing the right thing, until my wife became so worried about me that she moved to Birmingham to make it possible for me to go home and relinquish my residential duties. The Bishop was the next person to visit. I asked him to alert the Governors but would not give the details myself. He knew about the students in prison and may have asked the Governors to send someone. As previously mentioned I invited one of my MP friends, Billy Hughes to visit the college incognito and report to Ellen Wilkinson for whom he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary. Finally I wrote to another friend, Vice-Principal of another college, who took it upon herself to write to the clerk of the Council of Church Colleges. He cannot have been a skilled negotiator because he let the Principal know the source of his information.
A strange scene followed when the Principal, his eyes blazing with his mental disorder dictated the letter I was to send, to

qualify the previous information. I feel ashamed to admit it, but his eyes were so wild that I humoured him and sent it. How can truth and madness be assimilated?
After two years his successor came and dismissed me, but the Vice-Principal had it revoked the same day, so I stayed a third year before moving to another Church College, St Paul's at Cheltenham. In its social atmosphere or ethos St Paul’s was as good as Saltley had been bad.
St Paul's was a good college in many ways, but the effect of the war on the schools near by which were used for teaching practice was even more obvious. No wonder a bright Infant School teacher remarked 'I'd like to live to see the day when the RAF had to organise jumble sales when they need a new fighter-plane, like we do for our equipment.' In Gloucestershire the schools were antiquated. One building was designed for the monitorial system of teaching and proudly carried an inscription in large letters outside 'Founded by the Duke of Wellington fresh from the laurels of Waterloo.' In another even older building the headmaster reached up to a pigeonhole to show me a dividend voucher dated 1782 of the Canal Company that had built the office for its own purposes. I found a student whom I had come to help, teaching in a very narrow stone building originally used for weighing canal barges and their cargo. The lively teacher aged fifty-seven told me that as a boy his headmaster had been very good to him and allowed him to learn his physical education by spying on the police through a keyhole while they performed their exercises. This was his training for teaching, which he carried on with exemplary enthusiasm.
The Director of Education for the County at the time insisted that the scarce funds would be confined to those required for following the Parents National Education Union (PNEU) courses. This resulted in my listening in one class to the story of how Horatius defended the bridge over the Tiber until he was ready to dive into the river. When I moved next door to a parallel class of the same age, Horatius was just hitting the water. This is the death of creativeness both for teacher and class, I thought to myself, as I left. This will not prepare them for living in a rapidly changing society, or for tackling the issues thrown up by pollution or the threat of another war. National Curriculum enthusiasts should beware.

A rebel headmaster, so far as the PNEU went, insisted that every boy should learn to grow his own vegetables and that wartime 'Digging for Victory' campaign should be made permanent in this way. He had no use for training college lecturers and was never seen by any of us except in his Wellington boots ready for gardening. He had more sympathy from me than he ever discovered, even though he would insist that the students called the manure 'by its proper name 'shit'.' He was punctilious about his impoliteness.
It was apparent that the government in the year leading up to the Second World War gave physical education a very high place in the curriculum and accordingly, after my year at Carnegie College in Leeds, I was able to get appointed to a post wherever I wished. At one point I was invited to become an inspector of schools (HMI) specialising in this subject. One HMI even joined the students in my class one day. But I was bent on other things and had joined a huge class of seventy studying for an M.A. in Education. The course was severe, and it took three years of Saturday lectures and four more for writing a thesis for me to pass as the seventh out of seventy students to complete it. I thought Birmingham University rather stingy in not granting a doctorate. I wondered whether I was being penalised for my Quaker views.
At Saltley and St Paul's I insisted on teaching Education in the hope that I might make a tangible contribution to the improvement of teacher education as it was coming to be called instead of 'training', a word which suggests that teachers rely on a bag of tricks rather than setting an example or model for the children to emulate unconsciously. With my new degree I could consider myself to be fully equipped for my new work so long as I continued learning.
My next appointment was made to teach Social studies and later on Education at Dudley Teachers College. The Principal had watched me 'facilitating' leaderless groups at a vacation course for teachers and as he believed that Social Studies should be learned by the students contributing their own experiences, he hoped I would be able to organise the students less by dominating them than by drawing them out. He was undoubtedly right in believing in democratic methods for learning about democracy, but was aware that most schools and teachers feel they can only cover the syllabi by authoritarian means.

The discussions on such matters at Dudley among the staff and to a lesser extent among the students reached a very high level indeed. It was an inspiration to take part in these discussions. I notice now that these discussions confirmed my greatest hopes as the Three Ps are now accepted as the basis for educational reform. The three Ps are as follows:

Power spreading for Peace education is essential in the core of Social Studies.
Parents’ interest and encouragement are vital.
Play for the younger becoming creativeness for the older opens a new approach.

These three statements are not an attempt to define the whole of educational reform and much less a definition of education. Defining education as promoting personal growth does not prove very helpful in educating teachers, whereas a lively discussion follows the statement that educated people are those who can entertain themselves, can entertain their friends and even more importantly can entertain new ideas. The Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers has a longer definition, which ends with a significant phrase of people when educated being 'willing to lend a hand to anyone in need of it.' The three statements overlap at various points but it is proposed to take them here one by one.
The Home and School Council in England began in the thirties; the Council benefited parents when it fostered an enlightened interest in their children. It benefited teachers when it gave teachers a deeper understanding of their children and thereby helped the children. The Council worked most easily in Nursery Schools because the parents have to bring their children to school in the morning and fetch them home at night so they meet other parents and can easily approach the teacher when they need to do so. The schools and classes are small enough for everyone to know the others. I was so impressed by these schools that not long after completing my thesis I applied to become secretary of the Nursery School Association. Unfortunately I was turned down initially for being a man and when minds changed I had already obtained another post. I was hoping to get into the Public Relations side of education, which has been neglected for too long.

Although teachers and parents have the common interest of helping in the education of the children, misunderstandings easily occur. The mother of a secondary schoolgirl had never attended the Parents and Teachers Association (PTA) meetings but there was real trouble at home when her daughter came back after school and burst into floods of tears. She was overweight and the teacher had called her a scurvy elephant and 'she'd no business to be rude like that.' The mother became as indignant as her daughter and the very next morning, asked to see the headmistress. She was clearly very upset and needed time to recover over a cup of tea. She was then able to explain her indignation to the headmistress who asked the teacher to come. The teacher heard the story and looked very puzzled. 'No I never said anything like that.' The mother looked defiant but then the teacher added 'Just a moment; I did call her a disturbing element.' After that all was well the girl accepted polite criticism!
I like to think that PTAs provide a good opportunity for people to learn how to work together and sort out disputes, either in this kind of case or in others. In being slow to anger and quick to mediate, as the headmistress was, she set a good example to all who heard the story as well as to those directly involved. I was less successful on one occasion when called in to mediate between staff and parents, being shouted down when attempting to explain the one side to the other. Feelings were running so high that I got no chance to speak.
There is a somewhat similar failure occurring frequently in China. Owing to the successful policy of insisting on parents having smaller families to limit the growth in population there are many one-child families, but this has had results which were both foreseen and unforeseen. These 'little emperors' have the attention of both parents and up to four grandparents anxious to meet their every request. They come to expect grown-ups to wait on them hand and foot, and they learn little about sharing or taking turns. In consequence they may appear to be selfish and spoilt. When they begin school they tend to complain about their teachers who do not have the chance to give them undivided attention and the children's dissatisfaction spreads to their parents. On a visit to Beijing I was informed that relationships between parents and teachers have never been so bad as they are now.

The opportunity to demonstrate how to dispel this clash of expectations has not yet been taken. It can safely be stated that this part of education for peace is still in its infancy. In some schools, however, great progress has been made in reducing the number of competitive games and increasing the number of cooperative games. It is not only in the cabinet where personal ambition spoils the achievements of the team. Most boardrooms of firms suffer from the same difficulties due to this special form of corruption among the powerful. In this country Mildred Masheder is well known for her books of games to play at an age when the personality is rapidly forming. She has a vision of the world where people suffer less from competition and aggression.
The work of the PTA was greatly encouraged by the findings of Dr. Douglas, which he reported in his book Home and School . In summary they suggest that the interest and encouragement by parents is more influential in determining success at school than the quality of the teaching. Rapid advances in education could be made if it were easy to show parents how best to help their children. Often the ambitious parents are anxious about academic success to the exclusion of everything else including creativity. This is unwise because it has been proven in American statistics in Maine, that schools which, provide artistic and creative lessons as part of their curriculum, achieve greater success in the other more ‘academic’ subjects including the sciences and mathematics.
I have sometimes warned such parents that the greater their success the further away their grandchildren are likely to live, high academic achievement being usually followed by jobs at a distance. One head teacher attracted a high proportion of parents to a meeting by giving as a title 'What I want my child to be.' The parents were expecting a talk on how to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a high-paid business executive; instead of this what they got was a talk about 'What sort of person do I want my child to be.' It was a salutary reminder that there are more important considerations than status and wealth.

Suggestions for Parents
One yes is worth two nos.
Play with your children, and see the world through their eyes.
You can judge a child by what he/she does with free time.

Mother love, like wealth and muck, does best when well spread.
Good mothers never hurry – a big change from office work!
No teamwork with no team, no leadership with no followers, no originality with no freedom, no grit without difficulties.

In the 1930’s at the final meeting of the Home and School Council, where it had been decided that due to lack of funding, the work could not be continued, I decided that something could, and must be done about cooperation between parents and teachers. So Ruth and I started the PTA at the Bournville School, an easy job thanks to a welcoming headmaster. We had our own periodical 'Children first'. This magazine set a good example to the children and parents and teachers, and through it they all learned a great deal from each other about the children in their care.
Having established the PTA in Bournville School, which all our children attended, the next step was to set up a Birmingham and District Council and later in 1956 we formed the National Confederation of Parents and Teachers Association (PTAs). It should have provided a useful channel for the best of the new ideas for education, which circulated after the war. Although my name appeared in the letter headings as the founder of the organisation I did not get much of a hearing, largely because of repeated absences abroad with the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO). Our current periodical Home and School is published professionally. Previously the Birmingham periodical 'Children First' had developed a lively image, but we found we had to write too much of it ourselves and had little time for increasing the circulation. We had to choose between advertising it elsewhere and a public relations firm. I chose the PR firm because I lacked experience of how such work is done.
One of our PTA activities was when the BBC arranged a competition to find the most skilful pair of parents; they asked me to help judge by viewing films made especially for the occasion, and interviewing the competitors. They were charming people to meet, even though a bit overawed. It is a great pity that it has not been repeated.
I had early on built up a reputation for writing articles for the PTA magazine. My articles tended to be outspoken,

one of them, 'Law-breakers in school.' In which I called the children in classes over the maximum size, 'Law breakers.' Another suggested that there was more to be learned from France, Belgium and similar countries than people liked to hear. A third 'To Whom Do Children Belong?' accused advertisers of stealing our children to turn them into the slaves of the consumer society.
I had written a book-length manuscript previously on PR in education in the hope that if parents valued education more highly everyone would benefit. The book covered PTAs and Education Weeks to allow the schools to provide parents the chance to see the work of the schools and ask questions of the teachers; all the schools of a Local Education Authority do this. In Birmingham we fixed a day in March for all the schools to have individual open days and spent a year making preparations for it but a couple of days beforehand thirteen inches of snow fell and all the meetings had to be cancelled or postponed.
My next undertaking was writing a series of letters to parents to help them know what to do at each stage of a child's development. They included suggestions for toys, games to play indoors and outdoors, visits to make to places of interest, what to look for in a school and what books to read both for the parents themselves and their children. The publishers did not wish to take them on as intended because it would have meant too much work for them to send the letters out every six months or yearly. However I published my letters in book form under the title Parents Only. It has long been out of print.
It was followed by the 'Robinson Crusoe Holiday Books' I wrote with the help of a student, providing suggestions for activities and craft-work during holidays. I derived the idea of these books from France and adapted them for us here. These holiday books were designed by me to be provided by the schools at the end of each term. They contained suggestions and occupations for school holidays, ranging from games to play to books to read, and places to visit. Their aim was to provide the incentive of an exhibition of work at the beginning of the next term. These proved popular and led on to a comparable activity. It seems that my colleagues were astonished at my forthright writing. These become more important as the roads became more dangerous for children, and parents

give less time to looking after them. It is more difficult for parents to take their children in to see their own work, where machines may be too dangerous. Compared with a peasant farm two hundred years ago, a factory workers council house is a frustrating place for children despite the television set.
It was not easy to bring parents and teachers together. Parents often had unhappy memories of school and teachers felt themselves to be on the defensive. Sometimes a line was drawn on the asphalt playground and a notice announced 'No parents are allowed beyond this point'. A number of head teachers confided in me that they were afraid that Communist agitators would break up meetings. We were thought by some to be agitators ourselves, and this mistake was only erased when we persuaded the Duke of Edinburgh to be our President. The Nursery Schools Association helped initiate the Birmingham and District Federation of PTAs. It was at one of these meetings that a mouse kept running out and sat contentedly in front of the crowd, washing its face. We didn't frighten a mouse but several head teachers shook in their shoes at the thought of parents getting together. Year by year patience and tact prevailed until nearly half the schools in the country belonged to the National Confederation and the voice of parents was welcomed in Whitehall. When a committee was invited to draw up a report on periods of psychological stress in primary schools with the help of a grant from UNESCO, I was surprised to be appointed as the reporter for the sessions. This was interesting considering my views at the time revealed by these excerpts from my writing:

Children are misfits in this fast age of machines.
As teachers are no longer a branch of the police force, they can become more like parents and vice-versa.
An Inspector of Schools can report on the effectiveness of schools by visiting the homes.
Teachers who walk to school teach more than teachers who ride.
To love a child is to love the future; to love the future is to love peace.

Following the parent’s role in education and especially education for leisure, some comments on creativeness are relevant. Obviously creativeness thrives as a form of play in leisure time and

like play it is also valued as an aspect of school subjects. Creativeness is the flower in the tree of life and has little place in the many treadmill schools where the books and teachers are geared to passing examinations only. It can be fostered by a favourable ethos in the school set by teachers who are themselves creative, and it is normally associated with the fine arts that form the core of a civilisation. Only in the twentieth century has it been recognised that creativeness has anything to do with children. Cizek was an early practitioner in child art; examples of his pupils' work were used to raise funds for feeding the children in Vienna after the First World War as I well remember. Dr. Viola came to England to expound his theories regarding child art. Discussions arose about how much help a teacher should give. 'To touch a child's painting is forgery' said Viola. It is possible to teach the handling of a brush and the mixing of colours but when a child wishes to paint a picture he is on his own. He may wish to talk about what he is going to do, but the teacher at this point encourages rather than giving instructions.
Once child art became well established creativeness began to spread. A ten-year-old girl in a Wolverhampton school began her poem with 'My stallion black with its querulous mane…'. This was an amazing example of how a child could not only use a word that many other children may not have understood, but she had used it in a new context with such creativity. The headmaster in her school used to give the pupils a sense of 'a good word to use,' he not only taught them to understand their language more effectively with new words but encouraged them to use these words creatively. The poet Auden must have had the same effect on his pupils when he taught at the Downs School in Colwall. Each of Auden’s pupils produced a passable poem for the collection that was later published. A writer on business management coined the phrase: 'He who quickens the sense of life in me is my leader' and aptly described the quality of a teacher of creativeness. Such thinking characterised the ethos of Dudley Training College when I started teaching there in 1950.

1945-48 Saltley College, Birmingham
1948-50 St. Paul's College, Cheltenham
1950-56 Dudley College
1954-55 UNESCO Philippines

1956-58 UNESCO Thailand
1963-65 UNESCO Iran

Creativeness does not belong exclusively to painting and poetry. It also finds scope in craftwork, which in younger children may mean using their imagination while making use of scrap materials. It is applied in music, in dance, in drama and especially in combinations of dance with drama. The cynics complain that children have too little experience to justify relying on their imagination, but it is precisely their freshness, which needs to be valued and preserved. Within every child there is a potential poet and often it is to poets we must turn to appreciate fully what this word 'creativeness' may mean. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream wrote these lines:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare's words 'frenzy' and 'airy nothing,' describe experiences of successful teachers of creativeness. I recall one of my own student teachers bringing me an egg-shaped lump of clay, which a boy of ten years had made and lent to her. It looked, it must be admitted, rather a heavy 'airy nothing'! My student teacher went on to tell me the story of how the boy explained his little egg. She said, when the egg was opened there was a hollow centre with a tiny figure lying in it. 'What's that?' she whispered to him. He must have felt her to be a sympathetic friend as well as his teacher because bit by bit he explained 'That's me, lying alone in the dark.' 'Yes?' she commented. 'No I don't like it, not the dark. Dad and mum go out and leave me in the dark.' The student learnt that the parents apparently frequently left him alone in the house at night when they went out, despite his fear of the dark.
As often happens the full story remains to be guessed. Psychologists still disagree about the value of 'acting out' in ways such as this, so that fears can be managed or even mastered. It was a very important issue during the war and after, when the trauma

produced by air raids was at its worst. As weapons have developed soldiers are no longer sent out to 'die for their country' as the phrase had it, but more and more to kill women and children and traumatise others. It is time for psychologists to agree among themselves and then make recommendations for responses by schools to the prevalence of fears of violence. The stresses imposed by the National Curriculum are likely to prove more of a hindrance than a help. It crowds out the play-way of learning by concentrating on basic literacy just at the period when there is a very large movement in the USA, based on elaborate research, to attain higher results in the 3 Rs by focusing attention on creativeness.
The six trends in teacher education, which I tried to support, are not distinct from each other but overlap. They began with the three Ps – Power-spreading, Parents, and Play – and go on to the three Cs, namely Creativeness, Community, and Citizenship.
Creative work is normally practised by individuals, on their own; you cannot write poems in a committee or paint pictures as a group. However this does not imply that there is no place for teamwork or group work. The reverse is true that there is or should be a very important place for social education within the wider field. If creativeness is the flower of the educational tree, community education may be regarded as the roots.
By encouraging the individualism associated with the Miller of Dee, the specialists in curriculum reform have unknowingly contributed to the social chaos, which appears to lie ahead. When the turn-round begins and awareness prevails the schools may prove to be the best means at hand for introducing the community service schools. Their aim will be to produce Good Samaritans rather than Nobel Prize-winners; social education will be given preference, even over intellectual education. Trees will develop their roots as well as their flowers, roots consisting of loyalties to families, to neighbours and friends in addition to the more usual loyalties to work place and nation. Each school will ultimately serve the community around it and seek to turn it into a place where it is an education just to live.
At Dudley College I was already speaking in these terms. The students were expected to consider, the community served by

the schools that they had previously attended as pupils. They were to discuss the needs of the local community and draw up plans of action for the schools to meet these needs, with the added help of the local people. At this time I had no knowledge that this was already normal practice in the Philippines.
There were plenty of objections to Community Schools in England. It was said that teachers cannot be trained in such a variety of skills as would be required if schools were to become the agents of social change and especially as no one could foresee what changes might be demanded. Secondly it was argued that people had shown clearly that they valued their privacy much more than sharing in communal life.
Citizenship is increasingly discussed in education, the more so now that young people in many countries, even in Switzerland, are becoming less willing to use their votes. This may be because other activities such as watching television are more attractive or it may be that they feel that their votes count for little. Just as power tends to corrupt, so powerlessness tends to corrupt, and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Democracy is intended to spread political influence but Edward Heath, the former Tory Prime Minister, stated with emphasis 'the invention most needed today is how to produce democratic citizens'. He was appalled by the growing apathy. Educationists should be applying the principle of learning by doing in this matter. Talk about constitutions is too abstract, practising democratic procedures takes more time than ordinary schools believe they can afford.
It is perhaps for this reason that the two most impressive examples I have witnessed were in schools for disabled children where the pressure of time and curriculum are least. The first example was when I visited a school south of Shrewsbury at Condover for blind children who had a secondary handicap. Mr Myers the headmaster was conducting an assembly of the whole school that met weekly. A boy complained that someone had been disposing of waste paper by pushing it behind a radiator in the hall, although there was a waste-paper basket in each classroom. The headmaster asked the assembled children ‘Who knows how he could have made his way to the proper place?' Someone suggested, 'Surely he might have asked for help in finding a basket?' And somebody else

volunteered that 'there is a basket behind the door and everyone knows where that is.' In this way most of the business of the school was conducted by question and answer rather than by more usual discipline, and a public concern for the well being of the whole school was enhanced. Speaking up like that was a public-spirited act, and it was a feat on the part of Mr Myers to have created an atmosphere in which it happened. I suspect that children in such a school attract public-spirited teachers who pass on, often unknowingly, their attitudes to the children.
The second example was a school where John Cross was in charge. It was a school for children who were so disturbed emotionally that they had to have residential treatment. I took my own teacher-students to visit and sitting at the back of the weekly assembly we witnessed an extraordinary scene. It was like a trial where a confident twelve-year-old was conducting the business of the meeting and, I suppose, had been briefed for the occasion. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard him explain to a new member of staff that no one is above the school rules. The offence in question at this particular point was that this new member of staff had lost his patience and had been hitting a boy who was still up, and who was refusing to go back into bed at one o’clock in the morning. 'Yes, that is certainly against the rules,' said the chairman firmly, 'Chris is new here and doesn't know our rules.' Then turning somewhat fiercely to the boy, he added 'And so what were you doing at that time of night?' The boy looked ashamed and mumbled his excuses. There followed some consultations which I could not overhear and then silence was called for, to hear the verdict: Chris was told to take the boy out to supper in the nearby small town and the boy had to report to another adult, meaning not Chris, every four hours for a set period. In this way both of them were tactfully but firmly reproved. This is learning citizenship by living it and is likely to achieve more than hours of chalk and talk. The numbers in such situations have to be small and the pace of life different; the teachers have to be skilled even though the children would normally be easier to manage, than this story suggests.
If the young Hitler had been treated like that, history might have been different. My group of teachers gasped with astonishment, some said 'yes' and some 'no' to this daring demonstration of democracy for keeping law and order.

There needs to be in addition a greater recognition that it is difficult to inculcate a loyalty to something abstract and distant. When writing The Swiss Constitution – Can it be Exported I worked out that no politician in Bern, the federal capital, lived more than two hours from home. This favours a much more democratic government than can be found in the USA. It also implies the importance of local government and the principle of subsidiarity, which assures local government a significant role. The teachers of Social Studies may build the piers of a bridge to national and international governance but they depend on the politicians reaching out to meet them from their side if the interest, loyalty, and public spirit that are vital to good citizenship are gradually to be formed.