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By Root 1745 0

Where did that resistance of his come from, that refusal to accept that the end goal of education should be to form him in some predetermined image, who would otherwise have no form but wallow instead in a state of nature, unsaved, savage? There can be only one answer: the kernel of his resistance, his counter-theory to their Kuyperism, must have come from his mother. Somehow or other, either from her own upbringing as the daughter of the daughter of an Evangelical missionary, or more likely from her sole year in college, a year from which she emerged with no more than a diploma licensing her to teach in primary schools, she must have picked up an alternative ideal of the educator and the educator’s task, and then somehow impressed that ideal on her children. The task of the educator, according to his mother, should be to identify and foster the natural talents of the child, the talents with which the child is born and which make the child unique. If the child is to be pictured as a plant, then the educator should feed the roots of the plant and watch over its growth, rather than – as the Kuyperians preached – prune its branches and shape it.

But what grounds does he have for thinking that in bringing him up – him and his brother – his mother followed any theory at all? Why should the truth not be that his mother let the two of them grow up wallowing in savagery simply because she herself had grown up savage – she and her brothers and sisters on the farm in the Eastern Cape where they were born? The answer is given in names he dredges up from the recesses of memory: Montessori; Rudolf Steiner. The names meant nothing when he heard them as a child. But now, in his readings in education, he comes across them again. Montessori, the Montessori Method: so that is why he was given blocks to play with, wooden blocks that he would at first fling hither and thither across the room, thinking that was what they were for, then later pile one on top of the other until the tower (always a tower!) came crashing down and he would howl with frustration.

Blocks to make castles with, and plasticine to make animals with (plasticine which, at first, he would try to chew); and then, before he was ready for it, a Meccano set with plates and rods and bolts and pulleys and cranks.

My little architect; my little engineer. His mother departed the world before it became incontrovertibly clear that he was going to become neither of these, and therefore that the blocks and the Meccano set had not worked their magic, perhaps not the plasticine either (my little sculptor). Did his mother wonder: Was it all a big mistake, the Montessori Method? Did she even, in darker moments, think to herself: I should have let those Calvinists form him, I should never have backed him in his resistance?

If they had succeeded in forming him, those Worcester schoolteachers, he would more than likely have become one of their number himself, patrolling rows of silent children with a ruler in his hand, rapping on their desks as he passed to remind them who was boss. And at the end of the day he would have had a Kuyperian family of his own to go home to, a well-formed, obedient wife and well-formed, obedient children – a family and a home within a community within a homeland. Instead of which he has – what? A father to look after, a father not very good at looking after himself, smoking a little in secret, drinking a little in secret, with a view of their joint domestic situation no doubt at variance with his own: the view, for instance, that it has fallen to him, the unlucky father, to look after the grown-up son, since the son is not very good at looking after himself, as is all too evident from his recent history.

To be developed: his own, home-grown theory of education, its roots in (a) Plato and (b) Freud, its elements (a) discipleship (the student aspiring to be like the teacher) and (b) ethical idealism (the teacher striving to be worthy of the student), its perils (a) vanity (the teacher basking in the student’s worship) and (b) sex (bodily intercourse as shortcut