Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill by Gervase Phinn

rose from her chair, like a queen from her throne, to make herself a cup of coffee.
    Had I had the power, I would have taken the woman and her chair and left her in the playground. No children, however ill-favoured, damaged or badly behaved, should be written off by a teacher. Children are too precious to be tarnished by such sour empty critics who expect little of their charges and tarnish them with a rusty cynicism. As Bishop William Temple wrote:
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    Until education has done far more work than it has had an opportunity of doing, you cannot have society organised on the basis of justice . . . Are you going to treat a man as what he is, or as what he might be? Morality requires, I think, that you should treat him as what he might be, as what he has it in him to become . . . That is the whole work of education. Give him the full development of his powers; and there will no longer be that conflict between the claim of the man as he is and the claim of the man as he might become.
    The Point of Education
    One of my favourite quotes about the very purposes of education is contained in a letter which Haim Ginott, when he was principal in an American high school, sent to every new teacher to help him or her understand the school’s ethos:
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    Dear Teacher
    I am the victim of a concentration camp. My eyes have seen what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is this: help your students to become humane. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and mathematics are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.
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    At a time when the Government seems obsessed with league tables and targets, SAT results and risk assessments, OFSTED inspections and ceaseless teacher evaluation, and intent on covering schools with a snowstorm of paperwork, it is good to know that some schools go beyond the statutory curriculum, involve the pupils in exciting and innovative projects and endeavour to do what Ginott exhorts – to help young people to become more compassionate and caring.
    I was asked to launch the splendid book Ending the Slave Trade with William Wilberforce of Hull at the Hull Street Life Museum. Supported throughout by the writer and lecturer John Haden, the children at St Nicholas Primary School researched, wrote and illustrated their own accounts of the slave trade, and narrated the story of the life and work of the city’s most famous son. In undertaking such a project, they gained a real insight into the dreadful trade and learnt about the part Wilberforce played in bringing it to an end. They also learnt that slavery is still big business around the world (there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic trade) and that slavery does not just exist in far-off places like Brazil, where children are sold into servitude, but that there is people-trafficking in this country.
    At the launch, teachers, parents, education officers and invited guests listened in silence as the children sang a selection of traditional slave songs and laments. They heard about the horrors of this shameful trade and of the courage, dedication and persistence of William Wilberforce, who spent his life working for its abolition. It was an immensely powerful and moving experience.

‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’
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    Schooldays
    â€˜George, Don’t Do That!’
    On a visit to the Doncaster Civic Theatre, my wife Christine and I lost ourselves in a wonderfully nostalgic evening filled with a gentle humour we so much enjoy. Caroline Fields, from the BBC Radio 2 programme, Friday Night is Music Night , delighted her audience with sketches and songs written and once performed by the