12
In and out of the classroom – how pupils were taught 1918-60s
In 1956 the Historical Association celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition, conference and book of articles about its development. Professor of the history of education at King’s College, London, ACF Beales, skimmed through the changes in the classroom over the fifty years:
The bad old days, of 1906, were the days of the ‘conscript army’ in the elementary schools, sprinkled with pupil-teachers who taught all subjects, frequently to classes of over 100; and the ‘professional army in a quite separate and privileged world of secondary schools. They all had chalk-and-talk. But many of them had already the reality (though thank God not yet the label) of visual aids.[1]
This chapter will look at what those aids were and what other ways of teaching there were besides the ubiquitous ‘chalk and talk’. Inevitably the account will be anecdotal and impressionistic. As Professor Beales pointed out, even looking at 1956, the year in which he was writing, it was difficult to know what was really happening across the country in schools.
It would be highly instructive to know how widely the various new developments have in fact ‘taken’. The [HA Celebration] Exhibition is rich in the developments – syllabuses, charting, local and social studies, films, models, all the rest of it. But we none of us know, quantitatively, what proportion of Modern and Grammar Schools use Lines of Development, or teach through Patches, or base one or more terms on the neighbourhood, or have Ancient History anywhere else but in the lowest forms…[2]
It is even more difficult to know what was really happening in schools before this period
Philip Gardner suggests that there were changes in the relationship between teacher and taught in elementary schools between the beginning of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second World War but they were not as great as in the subsequent forty years. During the school board years, 1870 to 1902, the relationship between teachers and parents which he sees as “framed by endemic conflict” gradually changed. The teachers’ principal objective was “to master the perceived fecklessness of working-class parents in conspiring with their offspring to avoid regular attendance at school”, and by the early 1900s the battle was won, with “the principle of regular, sustained and universal elementary schooling passing from policy into popular culture”.[3] This change had enormous implications for the classroom experience of the taught, as did the improved social and professional status of elementary school teachers in the first part of the twentieth century (gained though their improved education and training) which inevitably gave them more confidence. So as classes gradually declined in size there were opportunities for more forward-thinking teachers to move on from rote-learning and other survival techniques.
Teaching aids 1918-60
Many history teachers, it must be emphasised, continued to teach with very little help from aids of any sort, other than blackboards and chalk. Norman Roper (born 1923) described history at a central technical school in south London;
... you had a form master, who stayed with you as you went through, and each form master took a different subject, obviously. And our particular one was a history master. And it was all very formal. As far as I remember you had blackboards which slid out one behind the other. And I don’t know how, but he would enter all sorts of notes and things on it before you started, and then he’d pull the board down and there it was.[4]
Ernie Dodd was born in 1924 and left elementary school at 14. His history teacher’s main aid was a cane:
...when Mr Andrews had a history test, normally 20 questions, if you got less marks in the current test than you had in the previous test you received that number of cane strokes. So everyone tried for about 18 correct answers, that way you had a little leeway as you may not get 20 correct answers every time.
Nevertheless,
... he was a good teacher... he was very political. We used to get him on to current affairs which to us was more interesting than old history. [5]
Kenneth Kelsey, born 1923, enjoyed history at his grammar school but:
there were no visual or audio aids at all. It was you listened to the master, if he had a map over the blackboard you could look at that, but basically you took it in from what he was saying and you read the book and you did your homework and that was it.[6]
However this traditional way of teaching was certainly not common to all teachers in the interwar years. A variety of teaching aids had been available since long before the First World War and many teachers continued to use these even if they did not adopt new methods; indeed lantern slides were used in some schools even after the Second World War. In 1938 60,000 of the LCC’s library of half a million slides were lent to schools every month[7], and the HA maintained its collection for schools to borrow until the 1960s. Enterprising (and well-financed) schools and local authorities invested in more sophisticated projectors – episcopes and epidiascopes which were more versatile and could project postcards and photographs as well as slides. These were used in some schools until the widespread use of computers. ‘Filmstrips’ were widely used after the Second World War; despite their name they were actually a way of projecting still pictures. By 1960 there were about 30,000 filmstrip projectors in use in schools, and about 4,500 filmstrips covering most of the subjects in the school curriculum. They were popular as the strips were cheap enough to be purchased by schools and the projection equipment was comparatively light and simple. Many of the history teachers who completed our survey forms remember using them in the 1950s and 60s.
Duplicating machines had a similarly long history; the ‘gestetners’ and ‘bandas’ used from the 1950s had ancestors dating back to the nineteenth century using mimeography or cyclostyle processes which were a more primitive version of the post Second World War duplicating machines. However although books of guidance for history teachers and teachers’ magazines sometimes advocated duplicating sources or maps there was very little mention of them being used by history teachers in the general literature, and the pupils we interviewed who were at school in the interwar years suggested that other subject teachers made much more use of these early technologies, particularly those teaching geography and book-keeping. For example, Kenneth Kelsey again:
the geography room was well equipped and the method of teaching geography was completely different. I’ve got reams of cyclostyled notes that the geography master distributed, but not for history.[8]
Use of illustrations remained a popular way to bring history to life; in 1930 the Historical Association produced a pamphlet on ‘Illustrations for use in History Teaching in Schools’ which listed literally thousands of available pictures for schools to borrow or buy. Dorothy Dymond, who edited the pamphlet, introduced it by saying, “members of the Association who have supplied evidence of their work agree that the ideal is not the wall picture, which is expensive and cumbersome and does not command individual attention, but the small loose picture which can be put into the child’s own hands”.[9] She therefore particularly recommended postcards issued by museums and “good photographers”.
Film in schools
By the 1920s the value of lantern slides in teaching history (and other subjects)had long been accepted but that did not prevent the use of film being controversial. As early as 1919, Birmingham LEA decided to hire cinemas to show educational films to its pupils[10] but many educationalists were unconvinced, and by the mid 1920s there was considerable debate about the value for teaching of the ‘cinematograph’. Various committees sought to find out how far film was used in education; one of these, the Imperial Education Conference (representing educationalists across the Empire who met for conferences in London every few years), set up a committee, chaired by Lord Gorell, to look at the issue. Its 1924 report concluded that, “more use is being made of the cinematograph in connection with educational purposes than has been generally known” either in schools, or in ‘picture-houses’ where special screenings were provided for children. On the whole the report was positive about the potential for film in education in general although more dubious about its use for history which it felt might be better served by the ‘magic lantern’. The report also felt that many questions remained to be answered about the practical dilemmas of how film should be used by schools.[11]
Teachers’ associations were divided over the use of film in history teaching. GT Hankin, an HMI and prominent member of the Historical Association who was an enthusiastic advocate for all the ‘new media’ of the time ( see below for his important role in school radio broadcasting)[12], persuaded the Historical Association to set up a Cinema subcommittee in 1923 and went as far as publishing in History magazine his own scenario for an educational film which would deal with woollen manufacturing in Yorkshire.[13] A dry comment in the journal said: “we do not believe that real history could ever be taught be such means; but the historical imagination might be awakened, and a certain amount of useful information acquired”.[14] On the whole the historical establishment remained unconvinced: Professor Pollard was quoted doubting “the demand for illustration in schools – even the cinema. They are alright in their own way so long as you remember that you cannot make visible to the eye the really vital things. You can portray the King, but not the monarchy”.[15] Although whether elementary school teachers of under 14 year olds were able to convey the concept of ‘the monarchy’ to their pupils by any means is doubtful. The debate which followed the showing of a League of Nations film ‘The Star of Hope’ at the Historical Association AGM in 1926 was largely negative although GT Hankin did his best to keep the discussion constructive.[16]
The real drawbacks remained the lack of equipment in schools to show films, and the lack of suitable films. In 1930 only 268 schools had cinema projectors[17] and seven years later the estimated figure was still only 657 to 1000, (figures vary). In 1931 a report commissioned by the Historical Association into the value of films in teaching history was largely favourable and gradually there was more interest and support for film; however there were still very few appropriate films – in 1937 the British Film Institute’s list of educational films contained twenty eight historical ones out of a total of 2,250 for all subjects.[18] As far as equipment was concerned, support from the Board of Education began to change the situation, at least in regards to projectors: in 1937 it announced it was encouraging the use of film and offered a 50% grant towards equipment. By early 1940 the number of projectors in schools had doubled.[19] As with schools radio, the War was to prove a boost for schools film; film generally, like radio, proved enormously valuable for the war effort in terms of instruction as well as entertainment for a rationed population. Educationally, film shows proved useful as a way of bringing information and novelty to schools which were short of teachers and overcrowded with evacuees. A respondent to our survey described her school:
It was war-time and spare cash for schools was almost non-existent, but if there was a film at the cinema depicting an event relevant to the curriculum, we were taken, eg when we reached William Pitt there was a film about his life produced at that time, which we all saw together and discussed in school. (female, born 1927, attended grammar school) [20]
Admittedly she is quite unusual – most respondents make no mention of ever seeing films except ‘Henry V’ which was more for English than History.
In 1945 HE Dance of the Board of Education is reported saying the Ministry hoped shortly to have 20,000 projectors in schools and 150,000 in ten years time.[21] In fact in 1960 the Yearbook of Education suggested the number of schools in 1960 with projectors (and some schools might have several), was over 11,000. By then the Educational Foundation for Visual Aids, which was established in 1948 by the Ministry of Education in conjunction with local authorities, had a catalogue listing about 6000 films and filmstrips made specifically for teaching purposes. It held copies of all of them and by 1958-59 it was making 60,000 loans of films to schools every year.[22]
Schools radio
In 1924 John Reith, the ‘general manager ‘ of what was then the British Broadcasting Company Ltd[23], appointed JC Stobart, an HMI at the Board of Education, to be Director of the BBC’s new Education Department. Under Stobart’s leadership (he died in 1933), “between 1927 and 1933 a most successful system of schools broadcasting was devised by the BBC which soon became the envy of educationalists in every other country”.[24] Over its first fifteen years it became increasingly popular: “in 1927, at a generous estimate, 3000 schools were listening to the BBC’s schools broadcasts in England and Wales, as against 220 in late 1924: at the outbreak of war in 1939 the figure had risen to 9,953.”[25] A Central Educational Advisory Committee, with representatives from various education associations across the country, was appointed to guide the department. Schools broadcasting was initially run from local radio stations with their own local committees; in 1925 ‘educational transmissions’ went out from eight ‘main stations’ and four ‘relay stations’. These generally provided their own weekly programme; in autumn 1925, the Leeds relay station had, “Fridays from 3.30 to 4pm to pupils of the ages from 10-15 years. Talks will be given by Leeds University speakers on History and Travel”.[26] A year later Charles Quennell, the architect and co-author with his wife Marjorie of extremely successful illustrated social history books, gave a series of thirteen talks on ‘Everyday Life in Wessex in Ancient Times’ for Bournemouth Radio. The following year he and Marjorie gave a more general series of talks which were broadcast nationally.