Elwyn Richardson: Lessons to be learned (10)

‘In the Early World’

Man alone, misunderstood, unappreciated?

Richardson saw himself as a man alone in education, misunderstood and unappreciated. This view of himself was evident at Oruaiti and became stronger as the years went on, as did the bitterness that accompanied it. I stated in posting 1, it was a view similar to Ashton-Warner’s, and seemed to be part of the motivation they needed to carry through with their education ideas. This posting will consider Richardson’s ideas about himself, others, and the education system; then whether he was, indeed, a man alone.

In his final book (‘Into a Further World’), Richardson makes a farewell statement. It is a sad one, suffused with grievance, regret and bitterness. Most of his problems, says Richardson, ‘have been because I am different from the usual kind of person one would expect to find at the village school. (He was referring to his own school years on Waiheke.) After describing his woes there, he adds bizarrely ‘I must not complain.’

Following two years doing a science degree, he describes how he ‘fell into the void’ following his parents divorce. There follows an account which, for me, was reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in ‘Crime and Punishment’. ‘… I ended up on my own in a squalid single room, beside a toilet used by 25 people, in an apartment house below Grafton Bridge. … I floundered and sank into the squalor of mere existence.’ Richardson could, of course, have valued these experiences as having a silver lining – by making him a different person, it gave him a different view of the world, which he used to sublime effect at Oruaiti. But Richardson is heading in another direction. He says he gained some recognition for his work at Oruaiti, but he ‘found that it was difficult, and often impossible to be held with reasonable respect, because I do not have a recognised qualification.’ The sense of grievance and inadequacy about this perceived lack of qualifications is important to understanding Richardson. From my point-of-view, while I  respect university developed education knowledge, Richardson could just as well have rejoiced in his lack of qualifications being important to the freshness and vitality of his Oruaiti insights.

In an extraordinary dedication in a minor publication (‘The Wonder of Child Reality’), Richardson writes ‘This book is dedicated to black men, to brown and to yellow men, to red and white men, but especially to little grey men wherever they may be all over the world.’ This is one of a number of references he makes in his writings to ‘grey men’ – that is, people in the official education system. He had a long memory for every little hurt. ‘I was told once by a school inspector,’ says  Richardson,’ that it had taken me an inordinant time to find out very little.’

Yet, how well did the official system do by Richardson. There was the significant amount of advisory support (referred to in the previous posting). There is further significance in this support when it is appreciated that it was provided by renowned arts people. A clear signal that the official system appreciated the arts and the direction Richardson was taking. Clarence Beeby, the Director of Education, even visited Richardson at Oruaiti to see what was going on, and to give encouragement. When Richardson was finding it difficult to get into an American university because of his lack of qualifications, George Parkyn, Director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, vouched for him. And crucially, Parkyn’s organization, using government money, undertook in 1964 a prestigious publication of ‘In the Early World’. John Melser from the Council of Educational Research provided an insightful and gracious foreword. Richardson, however, was already intent on settling into a laager. He asked Parkyn to seek from his Council ‘“some kind distinction” for me, in order to protect the Oruaiti ethic from undue criticisms which might be based upon my lack of a completed qualification.’ (This is cringe inducing.) I suspect Melser’s foreword was the Council’s response to that request. ‘30 years after Oruaiti’, Richardson says (a little dart, I think), Richardson was given a Distinguished Merit Award by teachers, and in 1989 a Queen’s Service Order. The Council formally acknowledged Richardson’s contribution in 2001, and in the same year re-published ‘In the Early World’. Richardson seems to have been well recognised by the official system. I suspect, however, that Richardson really wanted the officials to formally launch campaigns to promote and fix the Oruaiti values into the school system.

Richardson continues his story with references to his three years at American universities. He had to put up with ‘serious public insults’, says Richardson, but ‘never from’ students.  They ‘came from the teaching staffs of the institutions where I was teaching. The feeling of those insults remains with me to this day.’ He was invited by one university to do a doctorate. This is speculation on my part, but I suggest Richardson would have found relief in what seems to have been a pretext to return home.

Richardson returned to his Auckland school. In a revealing and sad comment he says that ‘I continued actively to experiment but did not extend a great deal of the philosophy into the school at large.’ Richardson found what all people find who want to change the values and practices of teachers, that it takes time and extraordinary patience.

Was Richardson a man alone in the developmental-style, child-centred programme he ran at Oruaiti? It is clear from what is stated above that the leadership in the official system recognised the value of what Richardson was doing, and encouraged him. Noeline Alcorn in her book ‘To the Fullest Extent of his Powers’ says Beeby never lost his enthusiasm for small scale innovations … he visited Elwyn Richardson’s sole charge school at Oruaiti, and came away impressed with the creative work his students produced.’

As for Ashton-Warner he ‘discussed Ashton-Warner’s readers’ with a senior officer.’ Alcorn then makes a statement I consider a key to understanding Richardson and the education context within which he worked: ‘Both Richardson and Ashton-Warner he (Beeby) would claim worked within a primary system sympathetic to their ideas and informed by Deweyan progressivism.’ I would qualify Beeby’s statement by saying that it was a sympathetic system at the highest levels, but patchy at other levels.

There is a myth about the extent of developmental practice in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I use the expression myth to connote a self-defining story told by a group to itself, about itself.  However, as an ideal, the developmental had its genesis then, took some hold then, and is still influential today. It was an ideal fostered from the top, slow to make headway in the full range of classrooms, but gradually informed practice. The developmental philosophy is part of our primary school tradition, but is, and always was, more in our aspirations than our classrooms. This is not a university essay so I can use evidence gathered in an anecdotal and personal way. First, I was a pupil in the ‘40s and though I recall kindly practice, I cannot recall developmental practice. I was a teacher in a number of schools in the ‘50s and ‘60s, even one in a country school not far from Oruaiti. In the ‘60s to the mid-‘70s I visited a large number of schools as a lecturer. How widespread was advanced developmental practice? In junior classrooms in the ‘50s and ‘60s, especially first year classes, it was quite widespread. In those years, on many occasions, I can remember being informed in awed tones how such-and-such junior teacher ran a wonderful developmental programme. They were primary school heroes. Developmental classrooms were uncommon in classrooms above the juniors. I do, however, have a demur from the thesis I am putting forward. Developmental classrooms might not have been widespread, but developmental techniques became so. A key characteristic of developmental is time – time for children to work things through. And in providing this time the programme is broken up so that it serves better the learning needs of children. For instance, many New Zealand teachers have for long readily allocated a large part of a day, even a few days, to art or science, or whatever they wanted to pursue with continuity. In my view, the book-based, highly differentiated, ‘I can read’, balanced reading approach is an outcome of the developmental ideal. There are a number of other developmental techniques I would suggest as outcomes, for instance, integrated learning, learning centres, and contract learning. While developmental classrooms might not have been common in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the important point was that there was available to teachers a considerable degree of freedom to determine their own direction – most might not have pursued developmental rigorously, but it was liberating to feel they could do so if they wanted to, or to pick and choose if they wanted to. It is clear, though, from reading Beeby, and from other evidence, that many teachers were resistant to, and suspicious of, change.

Beeby in his autobiography ‘The Biography of an Idea’ wrote that neither new curricula nor freedom from official restraint were sufficient to induce teacher change.

‘ … we had to devise methods of stimulating the liveliest teachers to experiment with novel methods on their own account, or to join together in groups of their own making to break new ground. We had to make teachers feel that the department expected change of them, that it had a clear idea of the general direction the changes should take, that it would condone honest failures and that their successes would be of value to the committees working on new curricula’ (p.140).

The 1940s under Peter Fraser as prime minister, and Beeby as Director of Education, were a time of extraordinary education ideological change. A number of social, political, and cultural developments contributed to this. Under a new government, New Zealand had come through a depression, which required it to turn in on itself to survive. Now New Zealand was looking outward again, but now more confidently. And education was looked to, to give its young a better life. The country had gone through one world war, and was going through another, with the inevitable surge in patriotism. There was a sense of an opportunity for a new beginning.

The country was experiencing heady economic and social change – education, that sensitive barometer, was inevitably part of this. It would be wrong, though, to attribute this golden period in education leadership exclusively to such immediate events, and to events outside education. A reader of New Zealand history will find that many of the education changes can be linked back to the inspirational work of George Hogben around the turn of the century, leading through to the remarkable ‘Red Book’ which showed the influence of the ‘new education’ movement. The developer of that syllabus, T.B. Strong, wrote that the syllabus allowed teachers ‘new freedom … to organise their teaching in any way that most appeals to them …’ (I know I will be testing the patience of many readers by continuing with this historical consideration of the context within which Richardson functioned, but my fierce resistance to some of the changes under Tomorrow’s Schools arises from my affection for, and sense of rightness of, the ideological underpinnings that became evident in this period.)

New Zealand was ready to be set alight by that amazing education phenomenon, the New Education Fellowship Conference of 1937. Overseas and local speakers addressed the conference, then the speakers moved around the country speaking to packed halls and amidst great excitement.  Beeby says some of the occasions ‘had the flavour of the old-fashioned Methodist revival meetings …’ (p.106). Clearly, the education leadership was seeking change, but Beeby was continually giving thought to how to convince teachers to respond in kind. ‘Was the resistance “in the teachers” own minds, or somewhere in the structure of the system, which we could modify?’ (p. 130). The answer, is of course, in both, but also in general conservative social values. While teachers might have been slow to act on the freedom offered, many did take advantage of it to some extent, and as part of our education tradition and mythology, are still doing so today.

All parts of the curriculum were revitalised, but especially pertinent to Oruaiti was the focus on the arts and crafts. Beeby describes, for instance, how halls throughout the country were put to use as arts and crafts centres. Spinning and weaving, and clay were emphasised, one of the reasons being that in the wartime shortages that prevailed, materials could be found for them. Beeby describes how Sam Williams, an adviser, set up a hall, borrowed spinning wheels and looms, made hand spindles, gathered wool from barbed wire fences, and dug for clay. Drama was also a focus. Beeby describes how Williams used his theatre experience to make puppets and organise shows. Beeby says that the ‘introduction of drama, like Smithells’ stress on the aesthetics of physical education, gave emotional depth to his teaching’ (pp.142-3).

As far as the leadership of education is concerned, Richardson was not a man alone, misunderstood, or unappreciated. He might have engendered some suspicion in education generally, but that is the nature of advocating for, or representing, education change. More important was that far from being the outsider, Richardson, in his Oruaiti years, was the epitome of the official ideal.