McLean, Donald

English

Wits Institutional Repository on DSPACE

THE WIND
that blew the Teacher's Hat oil
by DONALD McLEAN
w  HEN 1 was a very small boy 1 attended a very 
large school. The headmaster was, we 
heard, a great scholar, but he had an aloof man­
ner which told us without words that he had no 
interest in our type of humanity. He concen­
trated on the Senior Leaving Examination and 
seldom spared a glance for the beetles, geckos, 
small hoys and other fauna of the junior school 
ground. We would see him walking in the 
senior grounds with a hack as stiff as a poker 
in a suit as hlack as coal. He usually wore one 
of those hard round hats known to us as a ‘hard- 
hitter’ . It was a hat that pressed tightly on his 
forehead and when he took it off a red weal 
remained for several minutes.
I remember the day when the headmaster be­
came aware of our existence. It was a cold windy 
day and my companion, a ragged sharp-faced 
urchin nick-named ‘Frogs’ , because his name 
was Marsh, had blue legs. He never wore shoes 
and stockings because, he said, “ I reckon only 
sissies wear them thin’s” , hut we all knew bet­
ter. The playground talk was “ Frog’s old man’s 
a booze artist an’ he shot through so they put 
’ im in for not payin’s maintenance or some- 
think” . Playing near the high fence that di­
vided the secondary school from the primary, we 
saw the headmaster walking deep in thought in 
the grounds. A gust of wind lifted his ‘hard- 
hitter’ higher in the air to land and bump and 
roll across the junior playground.
Frogs and I, and half-a-dozen others set off. 
Like a pack of hounds we followed that hat 
until it lodged in a garden bed. We all knew 
’ the penalties for walking on gardens so the pack 
' stopped; Frogs and I, more ruthless in sycophan-
Donald McLean is a well-known Australian 
educationist, and head of one of Sydney’s 
tough schools. Editor of NEW HORI­
ZONS IN EDUCATION, the official 
journal of the New Education Fellowship 
in Australia.
In a changing and shrinking world, 
means of communication between 
teachers must be extenddd. There must 
be personal involvement and we must 
"feel the winds of change on the 
flesh of our common humanity."
cy than the rest, rushed on to rescue the dusty 
and dented hard-hitter.
As we stepped over the pansy border, both of 
us grasping the prize, the master arrived, stern 
and straight, “ Hm! My hat I think. What are 
the rules about garden beds?”  His voice sug­
gested the ring of steel and I seemed to detect a 
pungent smell of gunpowder in the air.
“ We are not allowed on ’em, sir, but— ”
“ What is the penalty for walking on a gar­
den?”
“ You get the cane, sir, hut — ”
“ Go to my office boys. I ’m afraid you must 
be punished.”
And punish us he did. Not very severely but 
quite enough to satisfy my not very demanding 
tastes. After the caning he asked Frogs to re­
main while I went back to school. It was only 
after several years that I realised that it was not 
a coincidence that Frogs appeared at school a 
couple of days later in warm clothes and the first 
shoes and stockings we had ever known him to 
wear.
Almost every day, after that incident, the 
headmaster came to visit the Junior School. 
“ Ah! How do you do, my lad? No more gar­
den-trampling I hope,”  or, “ How are your stu­
dies progressing, my boy?”  ‘My lad’ contained 
a gritty grain of reproof, but he used for ‘my 
boy’ a voice that made me think of cocoa and 
warm toast. He began to show more interest in 
our work; he came to hear us read and helped 
our young teacher, by what I know now were 
demonstration lessons. As he was a superb tea-
cher we enjoyed these and school seemed to he 
a better place.
W hen I hear people repeating Mr. Macmil­
lan's apt phrase “ the winds of change” , I think 
of that headmaster and the teachers of Austra­
lia whose hard hats of assumption are being 
blown sky-high by the winds of change.
The wind that blew our headmaster’s hat off 
increased the range of his concern.
Concern is the teacher's motive force.
"To Be is fo Be Related"
^  e live as fully as we relate to other human 
beings and to our environment. The greater 
the number of human beings we accept as fri­
ends and the wider our concept of environment 
the richer we become; the greater the range of 
our concern the stronger our humanity. In the 
past we Australians have concentrated upon na­
tional interests, good examination results and 
our own high standards of living. Suddenly we 
are aware that national interests re(juire a world 
perspective, most of the children of the world 
are denied education, millions live close to the 
starvation level, countless thousands suffer and 
die from diseases that coidd he cured if there 
were enough doctors and medical supplies. And 
these things concern us as immediately as Frog’s 
blue legs concerned his headmaster.
One of the changes of most significance to 
teachers is the new conception in Asian and 
African countries of education as the key to the 
solution of many problems of food supply, healtli 
and industrial development. But before we can 
prepare our pupils for this new world of chang­
ed human relationships we have to cliange our­
selves.
We Australian teachers have, in general, con­
sidered that we were doing pretty well by tlie 
children of our country and little more could 
he expected. After all education is free, coin- 
pulsorv and secular so everything is fine. But 
we have been somewhat shaken in recent years 
by figures like these:
"It has been estimated that there arc sonic 
860 million children and youths in the world 
between the ages of .T and 19. Of this popu­
lation, only about .10 per cent are enrolled in 
primary schools and about 7 per cent in secon­
dary schools and higher institutions. The 
remaining 6,3 per cent are not enrolled in any 
kind of school. Furthermore, this school-age
population is now increasing at the rate of 
between 1.5 and 20 million each year and by 
1970 will probably reach a nnmher well over 
1.000 million.”
—  UNFSCO Chronicle, Jan.-Feh.. 1959. 
The Karachi Plan
Anyone who appreciates education must feel 
involved in that silent tragedy, and relieved to 
read of the Karachi Plan.
Fifteen Asian countries, at a Conference in 
Karachi, drew up a plan to provide, within 
twenty years, universal primary education for all 
children in the following countries: Afghani­
stan, Burma. Cambodia, Ceylon, India. Indone­
sia, Iran, Korea, l.aos, Malaya, Nepal, Pakistan, 
Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The magni­
tude of this task is staggering. Now. in 1961, 
there are roughly 130 million primary school age 
children in these countries of whom about 65 
million ilo not attend school, hut Asia’s annual 
population increa.se is such that by 1980 there 
will he approximately 237 million such children.
Africa has similar problems which Une.sco 
is trying to solve under the Fxpanded Pro­
gramme of Technical Assistance. But Afri­
can and Asian countries are not wealthy. W here 
are they to find the necessary teachers, build­
ings, hooks, eejuipinent, training colleges, mon­
ey? Most of them have an agricultural econ­
omy and no industrial revolution, similar to 
that which has made universal education neces­
sary and practicable elsewhere, has occurred.
This is a means for practical excrci.se of every 
teacher’s concern. Teacher in South Africa will 
no doubt find their own ways of helping depriv­
ed chiidren.
The liducation Committee of the Australian 
Une.sco Committee is trying to discover ways 
and means by which Australians can help to 
advance the Karachi Plan. One way in which 
this could he done is through a world-wide org­
anisation of teachers, and others, to he called, 
let us .say, “ Friends of Unesco” . The organi­
sation’s general aim would he to ])rovidc chan­
nels of communication between teachers in 
prosperous countries and those of under-privi­
leged countries. Through the Une.sco Gift Cou­
pon Plan children would help other children 
and schools would adopt special .schoeds. At 
present some organisations ])roinote Unesco’s 
work hut the Friends of Unesco woidd he indivi­
dual teachers organi.sed for this single purpo.se
of correspoudiiig with teachers in other coun­
tries, discussing their prohleius, encouraging 
them, sending hooks and stationery, offering 
genuine personal friendship on a teacher to tea­
cher basis.
The members would need some sort of cen­
tral clearing house, possibly Unesco head([uar- 
ters in Paris. Their pledge could be a simple 
promise to write regularly to at least one teacher 
in another country and to teach their pupils 
about the work of U .N.; their privilege of mem- 
hership could he the right to have Unesco infor­
mation material, and their l)adge, the lamp 
‘■from which all the world's lamps can he 
lighted” .
Involvement and concern are personal, we 
cannot feel them satisfactorily through the thick 
administrative layers of, for example, a teach­
ers’ union, a government department or a learn­
ed institute, we need to feel the winds of change 
on the flesh of our common humanity and to 
let our restrictive hard-hitter head-covers blow 
far out to sea, while we give a little more atten­
tion to children who are not in the examination 
class and not of the same skin colour as our­
selves.
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The wind that blew the teacher’s hat off

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The wind that blew the teacher’s hat off

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