Free The Complete Pratt by David Nobbs

started with a hymn and a prayer. Then they did painting and drawing. Henry’s paintings were beautiful in his mind, but ghastly messes by the time they reached the paper. The younger children moulded plasticine and the older ones carved wood. Sometimes they would dance and even sing, quietly, so as not to disturb Miss Forrest’s class. Sometimes they would dress up and perform little plays. Most of the class liked this part of the day, but Henry was doubtful.
    There followed a bad time. This was the break. The playground was divided sexually by a tall wire fence. Miss Candy had argued against this. ‘Put them in cages and they’ll behave like animals,’ she had said. ‘Put them together and they’ll behave like animals,’ her superior had retorted. Henry didn’t like the break because it exposed him to the bullying of
his
superiors. His tobogganing had not transformed him into a hero overnight. It had to be weighed against the puddle. It wasn’t certain yet whether he was to be counted as an evacuee or not. More evidence was needed before judgement was passed on him.
    After the break there came the best part of Henry’s day – the lessons. They learnt reading and writing, and the basics of arithmetic, and he proved good at these things.
    Dinner came next. The risk of bullying was less great than in the break, because many of the children went home. On the wall of the playground, however, a goal had been marked in chalk, and here football was often played. Henry had nothing against football, except that he couldn’t play and always got hurt. There were also three stumps chalked against the wall, and when the summer came Henry would learn that his lack of talent extended to cricket also. These perils, when added to the lingering threat of brawn, made dinner a dangerous time.
    In the afternoon, they applied their arithmetic, and their reading and writing, to various practical ends, like running a shop, or planning the farming year, or holding auctions, or even, as they got older, writing a local children’s newspaper.
    We have seen Miss Candy from the outside, a shapeless, greying motor-cyclist with an excess of chins, hair in unfortunate places, and a distant hint of the porcine in her features. Come with me now on a journey into the interior.
    Miss Candy had always known that she would be a teacher. She had believed that she would be a good, perhaps even a great teacher. She was steeped in educational theory. She identified with those two alliterative lady educationalists, Maria Montessori and Margaret McMillan.
    It was because of the influence of Maria Montessori that there was no rivalry in Miss Candy’s class. Each child went at his or her own pace. There were no rewards. Punishment was reserved for naughtiness and breaches of communal discipline, and was never used as a weapon against the slow-witted. The communal discipline included tidying up the classroom before going home. Miss Candy believed that Maria Montessori, the great Italian, would approve, if only she could ever see Miss Candy’s class of five-to ten-year-olds at Rowth Bridge Village School.
    Being herself from Bradford, it was natural that Miss Candy associated herself even more closely with Margaret McMillan, who did much of her best work in that city between 1893 and 1902. Margaret McMillan believed that many schoolchildren went through school life using only a minimum of their powers and expressing only a fraction of their personalities. She believed in the importance of nursery schooling, where children could be given adventure, movement, dancing, music, talking, food and rest within the school environment. Extracts from her writings hung on the wall of Miss Candy’s bedroom. ‘You may ask why we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. For education must grow out of nurture and the flower from its root, since nurture is organic.… Much of the money we spend on