Preshil school in 1980

My report - written in 1980 - to the AME School staff about a visit to Preshil

The visit

I spent three full days of last week at Preshil in Melbourne, an independent school which has been going now for 49 years. Some of those involved in the setting up of the AME School here in Canberra were inspired by the example of Preshil.

I arrived on a Monday night, in time for a meeting on writing throughout the school. Over the three following days I visited all the Primary classrooms and some of the secondary ones. I observed the many different different activities that make up an elective programme. (This elective programe embraced all children in the school from 10 years old upwards). I sat in on the weekly staff meeting on Wednesday afternoon (which went from about 4 to 6 pm). And I spent a lot of time talking with Margaret Lyttle, who’s been head of the school for about the last 30 years.

It was an unforgettable three days, and much more stimulating than I had expected it to be.

Margaret Lyttle

The first thing that struck me was the influence of Margaret Lyttle's personality on the school. Meetings are dominated by her, and the primary school and parts of the secondary are strongly influenced by her ideas, her style and her personality. Morale (a sense of security and purpose, of belonging to something worthwhile) is high amongst those teachers who feel they are appreciated by Margaret. During the time I was there she made many comments in writing and at staff meetings that implied that not everyone was working in a way compatible with the essential aims of Preshil.

All of the teachers with whom I spoke had a deep admiration for Margaret. They talked of her experience, how well she knew the kids and how helpful she was when a kid had some kind of problem. They talked about what a wonderful teacher she was, and urged me to attend one of her English classes.

The school’s philosophy is continually being expressed by Margaret, in writing (annual reports, notes for parents, weekly newsletters to teachers), and every day in meetings, when talking to teachers, visitors and kids. During the time I was there I heard her talk passionately about the place of human relations courses in a school, the effect of separation of young children from their mothers, English and social studies, exams and secondary education, and many other things..

The philosophy is written down in many different forms. Here are some quotes from a document given to prospective parents.

Because society is made up of individuals and depends on the quality of their relationships with each other and their understanding of their environment, and because the quality of maturity needed has its roots in early experiences, Preshil is concerned with the needs and readiness of children and with what makes the inner child.

In their growing up children must be free to live as individual children now, to live confidently and happily at the age at which they are, to enjoy what they do and the present, to learn from their envirorment with the stress on discovery and creative activity, to face problems and difficulties. At Preshil considerable thought is given to these needs and together parents and teachers strive to provide a climate in which secure relationships are made. In an atmosphere of friendliness children grow and learn, attitudes are formed and skills acquired.

In its work, Preshil stresses the pattern of child development initiated by Freud, and it structures its organisation and programes in the light of this knowledge: that for growth to maturity, children of all ages need to be contained in varying degrees, according to their stages of development, and that there must be a flexible pattern to which they are committed, even while they share in its making and in altering it from time to time, with the final decisions being made by the responsible adults. It knows that there is a need to make demands while accepting and understanding difficulties, to lay stress on some need to conform to accepted patterns, to reach out to goals and expectations, to help the child to stretch beyond any difficulties while, at the same time, we understand, accept and/or explain these.

Children with trust in themselves and other people will be joyful in their relationships and this will show in their concern for others and for their environment. Anger and aggression stem from uncertainty, from a feeling of inadequacy and rejection, and the roots lie in early childhood experience.

To promote further growth we at Preshil demand high standards and encourage children to see themselves as continually striving. The child must be able to see himself as a person who is worthwhile, competent, 'good', because a positive self-image is as indispensable to him as a child or an adolescent as it is to anyone. Goals must therefore be set and children fully stimulated to make use of their intelligence, so that they enjoy learning, creating and inventing. Where there is a tendency to stand aside, opt out, or waste time in futile fooling and/or irritation of others, these symptoms must be carefully examined to see what help is needed and the children concerned must be given a firmer pattern in which to operate.

I didn't see one of her English classes, but I saw her as part of the team of teachers of the sixty eight 10- and 11-year olds. She spoke at some length to them as a whole group (despite having nearly lost her voice on Wednesday), about play making, colonial Australia, and the difference between English and Social Studies.

The kids were enthusiastic about being in her English or reading groups, and many students from throughout the school brought things they'd written or made to show her. One boy, who didn't seem the weepy kind, was on the verge of tears when she ticked him off for something - she then talked to him for a further 10 minutes until he’d regained his composure.

Margaret is the voice of Preshil. There is some staff disagreement over some details, and some impatience with Margaret's Freudian psychology. I heard some criticisms of the way meetings are run, and particularly about the way she perceives and handles the secondary staff. There was nevertheless a very strong feeling (except sometimes in Margaret herself, who a couple of times spoke as though she battled on but was often ignored) that the sense of direction and the inspiration came from Margaret.

Margaret obviously loves the company of the young staff. They share insights about children, plan together, discuss issues and common projects in a much happier way than we do. Staff meetings are less organised, more discursive and anecdotal, than ours, and some of the teachers feel frustrated about this. Others are left out, or are the butt of some of Margaret's acid asides. But on the whole the meetings are more alive and warm than ours at the AME.

The curriculum

Margaret's own academic bias was reflected in the primary classrooms I visited. The language, play making and social studies curricula were rich and creative, while the maths was an individualized programme, usually taken from text books and put onto stencils, and almost exclusively arithmetic and usually in the form of sums. There were next to no mathematical problems, and not many concrete materials. There was no evidence of any experimenting on science-type things, though there were plans for some next week as a result of watching an interesting T.V. science programme. Painting, model building, and the like were not part of what was available for the kids all the time, unlike in our primary school, but resources were there and were used during specified time-slots during the week.

The range of electives offered to the 10 - 18 year olds was impressive. During the course of an hour I visited two music groups (one playing recorders, the other improvising with percussion instruments and recording what they were doing), and saw kids working with wood with a carpentry teacher, building a roof extension onto a forge they've got, making mud bricks for a mud-brick hut, building a wattle-and-daub hut – and I heard about other activities that included programming the school computer, skiing preparation, looking after animals.

The making of a large scale play

The 10/11 group where I spent most of my time was in the early stages of producing a large play, a Preshil tradition going back at least 30 years. Margaret and others described to me how it is something that comes entirely from the children. It is often inspired by some aspect of the social studies curriculum, and time is given for the kids to work on it in school. The adults shared material about colonial Australia (the theme of this year's play),and organised excursions and lessons around the theme. But it was the kids who decided what they would work on in small group plays, and it’s they who will plan and make the costumes, back drops and props. They elect from their number a stage manager and other organisers.

I was told that, later on in the year, the play will take over many other aspects of the curriculum, with just some maths going alongside it.

Comparing Preshil and the AME School

The kids seemed highly intelligent, secure and happy, but I felt that overall there was less emphasis than at the AME on their being active in their education, and more emphasis on kids soaking up things from the rich environment in which they worked. The kids sat around in large groups for more time than I'd feel comfortable about. They discussed things in large groups, and had things (often very interesting, but not always, and not for all kids) read to them.

Margaret made a comment at one of the staff meetings about the evils of corpartmentalising education, but I felt that in the areas I visited there were very distinct separations between different aspects of the curriculum. The arithmetic wasn't connected to anything, and I saw none of the kind of mathematically-based problem solving that's a part of the primary at AME. The spelling the kids did had no connection with what the kids were reading or finding out about, and other things that might have been a part of a more integrated approach – music, painting, experimenting, model making – had their own time-slots, and were often (but not always) unrelated to each other. Looking at the education they were getting through what I imagined would be the eyes of a 9- or 10-year-old Preshil kid, school was a collection of often very interesting but unconnected subjects which followed each other in an unpredictable way.

I think we make a bigger effort to build our curriculum around what children are doing and thinking about at ary given time. We spend a lot of time helping then to explore what they want to explore, and in this sense I think we are more ambitious than the Preshil teachers. We are trying to do something which is more difficult, partly because we have to spread ourselves more thinly and partly because the skills a child needs to follow through something of his or her own are more complex than the skills needed to respond in a clearly understood way to a teacher-initiated activity.

It's also more difficult because kids' perceptions of their interests are clouded by their social needs and relationships, and they're looking for security just as much as they are looking to extend their knowledge or skills in a particular area. Perhaps in this the Preshil teachers are more in touch with the needs of the kids. There's a more secure and relaxed atmosphere in many of their primary rooms. But it's at the cost of a degree of personal excitement in their learning that we at the AME at least strive for.

I would imagine that the excitement is very evident as the 10/11 play begins to take shape and to dominate each day. And no doubt there is excitement for those who get a lot from the individualised arithmetic, or the colonial Australian theme, or an elective, or writing stories, or English groups. But there's not really time for the many who need it to get into something before it's time to change activity, to go off to an elective, or to a science programme on T.V. or a German class, or...

There are exceptions everywhere, and all of this is as a result of a superficial look. Some 9-year-olds, for example, are digging mines, and have been for days, and are finding all sorts of interesting things. This is a longer term activity which is obviously very close to what interests them most.

I found it very difficult, while I was there, to weigh up the pros and cons of this difference of approach. I felt uncomfortable with the compartmentalisation, and the degree of teacher-initiation of tasks at Preshil, but I was at the same time deeply impressed by the secure atmosphere, the warmth of relationships between adults and children, the orderliness of many of the rooms. And I was conscious of the problems that we experience in pursuing our more adventurous, more demanding aims.

Another difference, and one that I felt more clearly about in our favour, was in the degree to which camps and excursions are an important part of the school. They do much less than we do. Margaret feels that primary children are too young to go away much, except on day trips, and in this we would feel that she is over-protective. There is a Preshil camping club, but going away is not an integral part of the curriculum as it is for most of the AME groups.

There were clearly serious problems between the secondary and primary parts of the school, and there was a lot of discussion about this while I was there. Many primary teachers felt that many secondary teachers were interested in subjects, and didn't understand children. There was concern expressed by primary teachers about the effect of external exams on the secondary curriculum. The problems between the two sections were deeply felt, and it wasn't easy to see how they might be resolved, given the very different perspectives of the two groups and the apparent identification of Margaret as part of the primary side of the argument.

I felt there was a fundamental difference in the way the two schools - AME and Preshil - perceive themselves. Margaret, I thought, felt Preshil to be a part of a tradition which included, for brief periods, other independent schools like Melbourne Girls Grammar in the early sixties. She talked about children coming from and going to other independent schools like Scotch and M.L.C., while we are uncomfortable when people see us as being of the same kind, but with different emphases, as Canberra Grammar.

I felt also that, while we make an attempt to discuss and prepare kids for the modern world, there is a part of Preshil that sees itself preserving some of the important values of a world that has been eroded by the mass media, camercialism, trivialisation, working mothers. The stories that were being read to the kids were almost all at least 30 years old, and many older than that. The discussions, especially on the night when the staff talked about writing throughout the school, had an 'old-world' feeling about them. I often had the feeling that being at Preshil was like being in another world, secure and full of wonderful people, led by one of the three most impressive educationalists I have known. As with so many of the ideas and issues that my visit aroused in me, I couldn't work out whether the security of it all was the best preparation for the world the children would one day have to enter, or whether some of the attitudes Preshil encouraged were outdated. Certainly I felt that the child centredness of the place, the warmth of the relationships and the diversity of interests and skills amongst the staff were wonderful advantages for the children. But I wondered, and came to no conclusion, whether some of the children (and particularly those whose grandparents had sent their children to Preshil) would find the world outside a bit confusing, a bit fast, a bit threatening.

No matter what the answer to that is, I felt stimulated and enriched by ny contact with Margaret, and the rest of Preshil. I hope that our two schools can develop stronger links, and that teachers and children can regularly visit each other. I felt that we have something to gain from the understanding that we are not alone, but a part of an important tradition. Looking at Preshil, talking to Margaret and reading what she has written about its raison d'etre, has helped me to understand better what we're trying to do at AME, and to see more clearly ways to do it.