1968: Michael Bartholomew: Author: Article in Anarchy92
Articles by both Bartholomew and Aitkenhenad
Transcript
. . .An extremely frank and friendly atmosphere prevails, and my visit was acknowledged by the kids insofar as they had a genuine interest in me. One or two asked me what I was doing, but most just accepted me as a temporary member of the community who was as useful as most at lighting fires and more useful than most at teaching the guitar.
Mr Aitkenhead, or John A as he is known, is an M.A. with two degrees; one in English and one in Education – he says that his education degree was useless ‘nothing practical in it’.
I arrived at 8 am on a January morning and after a brief introduction to john A was free to ramble about the school at will. Community is a better word than school, since Kilquhanity goes deeper and wider into the existence of its members than ordinary schools.
I breakfasted with the kids, who took no notice of me, and after a brief chat with John A was seconded to fire-lighting with 12 year old Heather. Each morning between 8.30 and 9.30, all the school, staff and kids, is engaged on the self-explanatory ‘useful work’ – sweeping, washing, mending etc. Apart from the Cook, there is no domestic staff.
Heather took me to the junior common room where she was having difficulty with the stove. The junior common room is a log cabin in the trees near the house and was built by the kids and a teacher who had experience of cabin-building in Russia. It is a fine affair, not skimped, with windows, properly pitched roof and pot-bellied stove. An enormous amount of gear at Kilquhanity is built by the staff and kids and is often of a surprisingly high standard. The design too, is often remarkably original and effective.
The fire-lighting took longer than expected due to damp kindling. Damp kindling was a common complaint that morning, and several kids said they would bring the whole subject of kindling at the weekly council meeting.
At about 9.30, I went to john A’s class. This corresponded more or less to top junior – lower secondary age and was made up of 7 or 8 boys. (there are no girls of this age at Kilquhanity0. There was an industrious but quiet atmosphere in the room, which was much more like a workshop than a classroom. There were a lot of books around the room, not organised in any way and definitely regarded as ‘tools’. A specimen shelf contained musty copies of Milton’s prose works, maps, a new paperback of King Lear, Huckleberry Finn and a book on archaeology. The centre of the room was given over to a line of trestles for canoe making. Apart from the canoe making rig and the books there was an attractive accumulation of bits and pieces, including two old typewriters.
Each kid was working on something different. One lad was working on the weekly newssheet and another was ambitiously hammering out his autobiography on a typewriter: chapter one, ‘I can remember when I was about six we lived in Camberley.’ Another was writing poetry. He showed me a book of poems he had written; strange, mannered anti-bomb stuff; not really very good. One obviously very backward boy was cutting up and old calendar and pasting it into a scrapbook to make a picture story of a trip down the Bath Road. There were two older boys in the class; one a disabled armless boy who was reading and a sixteen year old boy who was doing a precis as part of a crash programme of study for Scottish A level English Literature. Two American boys were tanning squirrel skins.
John A was walking about encouraging, suggesting and occasionally telling someone to mind his own business and get on with his own work. John A told me that the kids who were making the canoe got all the Maths they needed from the plans. ‘This is their Maths textbook’ he said, holding up a book on canoe-building. One lad was writing up a visit to a local slaughterhouse where he had gone to enquire about buying a hide to cover a drum he planned to make.
There was a break at 11 o’clock for coffee and toast, lessons resumed at 11.30. some of the boys didn’t bother to go for coffee but kept on with their work. After break, two boys who had been on an archaeological expedition on their bikes returned with their findings. One is writing a history of the river valley and showed me the first couple of chapters; beautifully and methodically set out and very thorough.
After lunch, eaten in the staff room, I joined a working party of 4, 13-14 year old boys who were clearing a hedge so that the local farmer could plough closer to his field. They worked fairly hard but were no wildly enthusiastic about the job. I talked to them about the school. 2 were enthusiastic, one quietly and one vociferously so, and one was critical. All three thought that the weekly council meeting was very valuable. One thought that ‘you learn more at an ordinary school.’
Tea was at 4.15, eaten with the kids and the weekly council meeting followed soon after. The meeting is held in the dining room and the whole school, 40 kids and about 6 staff, attends. The kids are aged between 8 and 17. The chairman is Phil, 17 and the secretary is Lois, John’s daughter, 17. The meeting was conducted with more competence and more enthusiasm than most meetings I’ve attended and a determination to both get to the bottom of things and see fair-play was very real.
After apologies for absence – none – the meeting moved on to ‘breakages’. The chairman keeps the meeting going smartly without overriding opinions. Breakages were: a saw blade broken in hedge-cutting. As this was an accident, no fine is imposed; someone says the blade has already been replaced. A plate – again no fine. A broom: it turned out this was broken as a result of horse-play involving a boy, two girls and a water pistol. The matter was quickly debated and at john A’s suggestion, a fine of 3d apiece is imposed. I think that perhaps John A’s word is taken as final, but am later proved wrong.
In one corner of the room the kid who went to the slaughterhouse is burnishing a cow’s horn he brought back from his visit, and in the middle of the floor the two-year-old daughter of one of the housemothers is playing.
The meeting moves on to ‘useful work’ – nothing to report. Next, the Junior common Room report. A cracked beam is reported; john A takes responsibility for repairing it. A kid reports a chair was left near to the fire and caught fire. The two kids who had taken it outside and thrown it into the pond (where it still lay) are rewarded with spontaneous applause.
Next bedtimes. John A’s word is here taken as final; bedtimes are laid down as a fundamental rule – but no one really disagrees.
Next fighting – nobody.
Next pinching: a kid Jem, has lost a pound and is convinced that it has been pinched. This is not certain – he may have just lost it. John A suggests a whip-round to replace it. A fine point of order is raised here by one kid. ‘If we give Jem a whip-round we’ll have to do the same for every kid who loses money! But one kid sticks out for the idea of each kid giving sixpence. A young kid objects; ‘sixpence may be alright for you, but we (the juniors) only get one and six and sixpence is a lot.’ A compromise is reached. Jem is awarded ten shillings out of the fine funds but no precedent is set.
Next, Bill, one of the teachers, objects to his class being used as a common room.
Next, Jeremy complains about the loss of a pamphlet about the Houses of Parliament. Someone pipes up ‘Who’d pinch that? No -one but Jeremy is interested in politics.’
Next , Kindling. The lad who is in charge of chopping kindling wood complains that when it is kept by the fire to dry for the morning, kids burn it at night to save themselves the bother of going to fetch coal. This incident is typical of the school; dry kindling is burnt, next morning’s is damp, the fire won’t light and the common rooms are cold; a case of taking the consequences.
The baby girl runs about, screaming but nobody takes any notice.
Next, smoking. David was found smoking in the junior common room. He is not an Outsider. (Outsiders are kids old and responsible enough to sleep in the outhouses and Insiders are the youngsters who sleep in the main building.) Insiders are not allowed to smoke. Furthermore, David was smoking amongst younger kids which is again breaking the rules. Some of the younger kids were also smoking.
David looks pale and worried as deliberations continue. He is automatically fined 2 week’s pocket money. Someone says (Jeremy) ‘David is already a smoker, and fining him isn’t going to make any difference.’ Remarkably sane this. There is a proposal from Paul, a teacher, that David has the automatic fine of two week’s pocket money imposed on him, but juniors should be just warned as it’s the first week of term. A kid says that the youngsters should be fined as well; ‘they know the rule.’ This proposal is carried; David, 2 week’s fine, the juniors one week’s.
John A tries to find out how much money David has but he won’t tell. John claims the right to know and says that he will write to David’s parents and find out. David capitulates and tells John, and John advises him to bank it the school bank.
John later tells me that the boy has a background of emotional disturbance. He is much improved but is still anti-social at times. His treatment at the hands of the meeting is absolutely fair and is almost impersonal, or perhaps ‘super-personal’, since the meeting considered David’s personal difficulties. However, I later find out that David tried to get hols of the minute-book and tear out the page referring to his smoking.
Next a lad proposes that the meeting should fine himself 3 week’s pocket money as he saw the smokers and didn’t report them. This proposal is dismissed with humour but without surprise.
Incidentally, there is a dilemma among the staff about smoking. Both staff and kids realise that if staff and the older kids smoke they can’t rightly forbid the youngsters to smoke. Yet they all realise that the young kids will harm their health if they smoke.
Next a kid wants to know if he can use his airgun at school. John A says that a previous air-gunner broke the regulations imposed on him and that regulations were very difficult to frame. Morag, (John’s wife), says that air guns are altogether dangerous and shouldn’t be authorised. One lad proposes that if the kid is allowed to use it, he should be forbidden to fire at live animals. The meeting is divided half and half on this point.
John saves time by suggesting that if the lad writes out his own regulations, he would discuss them with him and present the result to nest week’s meeting. Passed. Immediately, two other kids want to bring their air-guns.
Next, Paul (teacher), complains that dirty plates are being left about by kids cooking their own food. At this point there is a fine, spirited exchange between a 14byear old boy and John A. Both are convinced they are right but he boy does not give way. My neighbour, a lad of 13 who has had his hand up for some time trying to attract the chairman’s attention says ‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ Nobody takes any notice.
Next, menus. Satisfactory and are to stay as they are.
Lastly. Johnny, an 11 year-old American, who expresses himself more effectively than any junior child I have ever heard says he wants to be taken off bell-ringing, a job which involves going round at key times like a town-crier. Someone else volunteers and jobs are changed over.
The meeting breaks up at 6.15 after 1 ¼ hours.
The council meeting illustrates several important points. First, children are both capable of, and keen on organising their own existence. They need adults in their meetings and accept adult wisdom and experience, but they neither need nor want adult authority exercised over them. There are certain, almost inflexible rules laid down by John A, but these affect only health and general physical well-being. Bedtimes, smoking, guns are all instances of the curtailment of the child’s freedom, but none of these are subjects, nor any other, is taboo at the meeting and I do not think that nay child feels that he is being forced to do something with which he disagrees, or is in fact being silently directed by a subtle and external authority; - unless you call the very existence of the school a subtle and external authority – which of course it is.
Secondly, the council meeting demonstrates the kid’s tolerance and sense of fair play. Tolerance depends not on age and authority, but merely on membership of the school. Older children respect younger children and small kids respect adults all in the same way. Also, a kid like David the smoker, who is suffering from some emotional upset finds a special, unsolicited understanding from the rest of the kids.
None of the meeting’s judgements was either harsh or arbitrary, and occasionally they showed an understanding that would have done credit ot a magistrate. Jeremy’s understanding of the futility of pointlessly repeating a punishment is an example of this – and Jeremy himself was wildly neurotic.
Lastly, the council is a very real exercise in democracy and taking the consequences of one’s own actions. In these respects it is worth fifty discussions in the formal atmosphere of the classroom about subjects which either have no bearing on the child’s life or matters where the decision of the meeting will have no effect.
No kids at Kilquhanity can nurse grievances. Anything at all can be raised and be sure of getting a fair hearing.
Next morning, I went with the useful work party who are responsible for the farm. The school has two cows, three calves, two sows and their litters and assorted chickens. A young member of staff supervises the farm work and he has three kids to help him. (incidentally, he is an ex-bank clerk who picked up farming as he went along.) The team was mucking out, feeding and milking in what seemed an efficient and workmanlike fashion. The farm just about breaks even and is operated mainly for its benefit in giving children experience, but not in any ‘careers’ sense.
It is a principle of the school that exams are ignored until two terms beforehand, and then on the implementation of a crash programme of selective learning, the candidate usually gets through. Kids don’t take exams unless they want to so the usual initial resistance to learning is non-existent.
Academic studies at the school are very casually and apparently unmethodically pursued. The scheme wouldn’t stand up to a very critical analysis by a Dien’s Apparatus enthusiast or a programmed learning expert, but it seems to work. All the kids can, and what is more important, do read. Their self-expression is excellent, their independence and ingenuity fine and they seem happy.
I talked to two girls who are leaving in the summer, one of them John A’s daughter. Both hoped to do something creative, (although they didn’t put it like that); one wanted to go to drama school and one didn’t know what she wanted but was keen on pottery and drawing. Both were pleased with the education they had received at Kilquhanity and both had what seems to be the biggest characteristic of Kilquhanity kids – an enthusiasm and vitality and a complete naturalness.
John A’s daughter had spent all but one year of her education at Kil. The odd year was spent at Monkton Wyld school. She didn’t like it, saying that it wasn’t as happy a place as Kil. At the Monkton Wyld council meeting, she said that young kids were expected to give up their seats to older kids and all the staff sat in a row. ‘don’t you think that is peculiar? – expecting young kids to be more considerate than older ones’. This instances of maturity of thought common among the older kids at Kil.
In the afternoon, I went to a woodwork class. Here again I saw a typical Kilquhanity situation. A kid, aged about 11, was making a chess-board. He had marked out the squares on the plywood. John A suggested a beading around the edge and worked out with the kid how much wood was needed – an impromptu maths lesson, and then the kid went with his friend up to the village to buy the wood. I found out later that this kid had come to Kilquhanity as a backward boy who had been overshadowed by a younger but brighter brother at their local school. Both brothers finally came to Kilquhanity, but both co-exist quite happily, with Johnny, the backward one, making up leeway apace.
Other kids were making model boats – a perennially popular topic – and another was carving a bowl from wood (walnut) cut from Kilquhanity’s own ground.
Outside, a group of seniors were driving an old van about at breakneck speed with one lad hanging on the back.
At 6.15 there was a special council meeting. This was called following the theft of a stop watch from one of the kids. Although I thought this meeting valuable, it got into deep water and was obviously seriously considered by the staff, and the older kids. Without going into details the situation was that the meeting was convinced that 2 of the boys were responsible for the theft, possibly for a joke. As one kid whispered to me, ‘its an open and shut case.’ Now the two suspects stoutly maintained their innocence and the meeting could not reach a conclusion. Someone suggested that all the kids who had access to the watch should contribute towards a new watch. (I should have mentioned that John was unanimously elected chairman of the meeting) This suggestion, the contributions, brought a passionate outburst from an eleven-year-old New York kid – ‘I wouldn’t pinch my best friend’s watch, for Chrissake!’ This was extremely effective, and obviously true, and the suggestion was dropped.
The meeting adjourned inconclusively. The possible harmful effect of the meeting was that two possibly innocent boys were suspected of a crime of which nobody could prove their guilt. This is of course bad, but is it worse than the often arbitrary and unjust punishments dished out in most conventional schools from time to time? On the credit side is the openness of the whole proceedings and the intimacy of the relationship between kid and kid – it wasn’t as if the accusers were remote from the accused. Any way, the matter was soon forgotten and no grudges seemed to be borne. Significantly enough, the principle of theft was more important to all concerned than the expensive watch – in fact, the kid who lost the watch didn’t say much and didn’t seem too concerned.
The weekend was even more casual than the weekday with meals arranged to fit in with various expeditions. John A is firmly convinced that kids do not need, and should not have, very much pocket money, and to this end he limits junior kids to one and six a week and seniors to two and six, with a supplementary fund for special purposes. He feels that his school should stand against the affluent society and reaffirm the value of personal resourcefulness and ingenuity. ‘It is easy to go out and buy an electric drill’ he says, ‘but the kids appreciate what they have made much more if they have used rudimentary tools’.
This theory looks absurd if pushed to its logical conclusion, and the school evidences many inconsistencies, like john’s enthusiasm for replacing rasps and planes with Surforms in the workshop, but he makes a good point and his ideals are reflected in the often brilliant ingenuity seen about the place, whether it is in an ambitious project by the seniors or the cunning shown by newly-arrived junior in lighting fires. John took me to a nearby Loch to show me his pride and joy, a dugout, outrigger canoe, built entirely by the kids.
The school spends a lot of time camping by the Loch, and John took me to their favourite campsite. Last summer, when the kids were working on the dugout they made their home here, constructing shelters out of dry-stone foundations and bracken roofs. The dugout is a triumph of ingenuity and perseverance. It started life as a pine tree at Kilquhanity. The kids and an enthusiastic teacher (the idea, I think came from the teacher), cut it down and hollowed it out – a job of immense labour – and then lashed an outrigger to it. The boat is faithful to its type, using no glue or screws – just poles and lashing.
The boat was carted down to the Loch some six or seven miles away and camp was set up for its trials. As a keen dinghy sailor I know that the problems involved in making and sailing a boat of this type are formidable – rather like building a bicycle, right from scratch which performs safely and efficiently without handlebars. After much trial and error, the boat was made to sail adequately and seems to me a measure of the capabilities of kids given the environment of a place like Kilquhanity. It took immense physical labour initially and great tenacity when the scheme looked like failing.
The scheme scotches any notion that free kids haven’t any staying power, and who would doubt the educational value of learning geography, history, woodwork, sailing theory and plain hard-graft all at first hand? Many would, of course, as schemes like this cut right across conventional timetables. You can’t expect to drag a kid away from his canoe, give him a week’s unrelated timetabling and expect him to go back to it next week with the same enthusiasm. It requires an absolute faith in the value of the kid’s self-determination.
When I stood with John on the knoll overlooking the ruined campsite and the still and perfect loch, he said that what kids got from the situations like his couldn’t be written down properly. It wasn’t in or from books, it had nothing directly to do with learning to earn a living; it was perhaps more ‘learning just to live’. He said, ‘It does their souls good.’ Finally, Kilquhanity is beyond theories. ‘Freedom’ as defined at Kilquhanity is as limited as anywhere else, but John A has taken Herbert Read’s definition of education; ‘the generation of happiness’ and has built a community producing happy people.
As I left, at about 7pm, the farm team were in the byre doing the evening milking, and as I walked passed the Junior Common Room in the Log Cabin, smoke was billowing from the windows and kids were shouting instructions and counter-instructions to each other as they coped with a blocked-up chimney.
The following single page article by Aitkenhead was printed on the inside of the back cover that ended Michael Bartholomew's article.
