1958: The Herald: Article: Unknown Author
No Punishment School
23.12.1958
Head Master Defends ‘No Punishment’ School'
The head master of a ‘no punishment’ Scottish co-educational boarding school where for 17 years the pupils have held weekly council meetings to discuss their affairs and punishments says there is no likelihood of the school closing down as the result of visits by inspectors of the Scottish Education Department.
Replying to recent ‘highly coloured accounts’ of the school in two national newspapers, the head master Mr J.M. Aitkenhead, said at the weekend that it would be a great pity ‘if only the State could have the school, and perhaps tragic if in the field of education there could be no experiments by private individuals, even on a shoestring.’
Fixed Timetable
Mr Aitkenhead said members of the staff and parents of pupils had objected to the implication of ‘lawlessness’ in the article. There was a fixed timetable of lessons and activity, and if a pupil was concentrating on music to the exclusion of mathematics, or vice versa, it was by arrangement. If a pupil was not at lessons at all there was a very good reason, and it was certainly not by whim or accident.
‘We place responsibility on the children for their own behaviour,’ said Mr Aitkenhead. ‘With a weekly council meeting we have a small-scale working model of democratic government. There is no corporal punishment. Swearing, bad spelling, smoking will not call for chastisement, but this is not to say that that we are not concerned with these manifestations.’
‘We are trying to prove that a child can put in a satisfactory schooling as far as the three R’s are concerned, and have far more time for creative activity, more time for free play as distinct from organised games, than is allowed in our State schools today, more time to learn to know himself.’
Referring to the visits by the Education Department inspectors, Mr Aitkenhead said a register was being drawn up of all independent schools in Great Britain, and premises had to comply with regulations in the Education Act. ‘It will be costly and difficult for a small like this to meet the capital expenditure required, though this will not, we hope, be beyond us,’ he said.
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