The Best Possible

The papers are again full of what qualifications youngsters should have before training to be a teacher, and then what assessment tests should be applied (and how often) to keep them up to the mark.  Just what is it that we think that teachers should be able to do, and how should they do it?  In a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, written in 1771 but little remembered today, there is the following, touching and evocative description of a school master of yesteryear.  1771 was sixty years before Parliament made its first grant towards the cost of schooling, and ninety-nine years before the Education Act of 1870 established a national system of schools.  How well do we measure up to this description in the 21^st century?

There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school;
A man severe he was and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew;
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day’s disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laughed, with counterfeited glee,
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned;
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declared how much he knew;
‘Twas certain he could write and cipher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around,
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

It is not known if Goldsmith modelled his “sweet auburn, loveliest village of the plain” on any actual place, or the school on one he really knew.  We do know, however, that the most active organisation in England creating schools was the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) set off in 1699 which had established, in collaboration with local well-wishers, literally thousands of small schools of the kind Goldsmith described. 385

See Parts Six and Seven and Actions 5 and 6 of the Briefing Paper

This article is tagged: oliver goldsmith, Schools, teachers.