Memories of P.N.E.U Education with Pat Farrington

Memories of Shamrock House PNEU School, N. Nigeria, 1951-4    

Pat Farrington was born in Hampshire, UK, in 1943.  After the war, in 1947,  the family went to Nigeria with her geologist father where in 1951 he set up a PNEU school for the families in the company he worked for. These memories are from the three years she spent at this school, 1951-4, after which she and her brother went to boarding school in England.

After going to Bristol University, 1962-5, Pat worked in educational publishing, then as a print editor at The Open University, followed by three years as an infant teacher in London and then, for nearly twenty years, as a director/producer for BBC Schools Television.  After taking early retirement, she worked for a charity bringing writers into schools on residencies.

Pat has had three poetry pamphlets published and a number of articles.  

She has two dear grandchildren with whom she can share stories about childhood in Africa.

The Charlotte Mason Institute is honored to publish these fascinating memoirs which describe Pat's experience at a PNEU school a few decades after Mason's death.

‘Every lesson was a discovery’

This is a love letter to the best three years of my education.  Nothing ever came near it again, as our PNEU school treated us as persons, very unusual for the time, encouraged us in critical thinking on books and, most importantly, gave me a real love of learning that has stayed with me for life.  A friend who was in the same class as me, Chris de Souza (b. 1943), has described our education there as: ‘Every lesson was a discovery’.  A child cannot ask for more from a school.

This is a love letter to the best three years of my education.  

For me, it was three years of enlightenment, in between periods of educational darkness: a repressive American missionary school in Nigeria for two years beforehand and two repressive and sub-standard boarding schools in England afterwards.

Reflections on Philosophy

I have now read a very good dissertation called ‘Savages or citizens? Children, education and the British Empire, 1899-1950’ by Rachel Ann Neiwert (2009), University of Milwaukee, which looks at the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason (1821/2-1923), founder of the  Parents National Educational Union and how PNEU worked in practice for children in the British Empire.

Reading this, it is now much clearer to me what the educational philosophy was behind our education. It was based mainly on Rousseau’s idea that every child deserved a liberal education because they were an individual, in a sharp break with the traditional Benthamite utilitarian view of education which regarded a child’s mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ or empty jug (take your pick).

In the liberal education envisaged by Charlotte Mason with added ideas from Montessori, the teacher learns alongside the children and no corporal punishment is allowed.  Children have agency and are encouraged to be active learners.  They are fed the best ideas, ‘mind food’, from reading books on which they could make up their own minds as it was believed they had natural powers of appreciation.

There is also a very different approach on learning facts; no Gradgrind there, as knowledge, enquiry and concepts are regarded as being more important than facts.  And, crucially, a space is made for children have ‘agency’ and  to create their own relationships between ideas, people and places in the past and the present in a positive learning environment.

It was not, strictly speaking, child-centred, as there was no question of a child bringing in a feather and the teacher doing a topic on flight, though we did bring in things we had found for our Nature Table which were discussed.  PNEU had a tightly-constructed, subject-based curriculum devised within the framework of Christian imperialism; it was not project-based or inter-disciplinary.  However, it could be said to have the seeds of a child-centred approach, because, as mentioned earlier, we were treated as persons and our opinions on books listened to.

It would be interesting to know where and how the balance was struck between enquiry and facts/skills, but the Milwaukee dissertation does not address this nor does it address the striking contrast in the title between ‘savages or citizens’...  However, the main break from the past was  seeing children as persons in their own right grappling with new ideas and trying to make sense of the outside world through the medium of books.

Beginnings

My father was a geologist for whom Africa was Paradise, so after WW2 in which he had organised the geological maps for the invasion of Europe, that’s where  he went off to be Chief Geologist on the biggest tin mine on the Plateau in N. Nigeria.  We joined him in 1947, when I was aged four.

I had a few days of nursery experience, but no formal education until I was six when I followed my elder sister, Diana (1940-1989) to the only school in town, run by American missionaries, where I stayed for two years, 1949-1951.  It was indeed a bizarre place, where you drove through the gates into a little patch of the United States of America, where a six-foot Stars and Stripes flag dominated each classroom, treated as a sacred object, we added up in dollars and cents and played baseball chased by the school’s pet ostrich…and the teachers flicked you hard on the ear if you weren’t paying attention.

My Dad rightly thought this was not good enough and, as Assistant General Manager of the company at the time, managed to persuade the Company Board in London that the employees’ children needed a more appropriate education.  Quite quickly, a suitable building was found, approaches made to the PNEU in Ambleside and a teacher called Mrs Davidson found,  the wife of one of the mining engineers, and the company school was set up in 1951 called Shamrock House School.

Shamrock House School

It was like a village school, averaging two dozen children aged 5-11 taught in one room, which took considerable skill and dedication.  Fortunately, Mrs Davidson was the right person at the right time, a white-haired late middle-aged lady who was always calm and organised.  She looked like Jung’s Wise Old Woman.  

I do not know if Mrs Davidson was a trained PNEU teacher or learnt on the job, but what Chris and I are certain about is that she was an extraordinarily good teacher, managing the tricky job of differentiation with such a wide age group.  I never remember any discipline issues, even for my naughty little brother, John (Richard) (1945-2018).  She somehow managed to inspire a love of learning in a very broad curriculum with a mixture of class teaching and exposition, storytelling and individual and group work.

When the boys my age went to prep school at the age of eight, I was left on my own for three years, learning to work on my own, which meant a lack of friends my own age but was good practice for later on at university.

Shamrock was set up as a weekly boarding school, in order to be fair to the children who lived up to 30 miles away.  That meant that, in some senses, we became like a large family group, especially as all our Dads worked for the same company.  Us four Farrington children  lived about 200 yards away, but we all boarded, including my dear little sister, Helen (b. 1947) who was only five at the time, far too young.

Those of us who’d been at the American missionary school were very relieved not to be outsiders any more nor have to pledge daily allegiance to the United States of America.  We felt as if we’d come home.  Indeed, the PNEU model was the ‘school as home’.

There were no African children in the school, as education was not mixed in West Africa at the time, so we missed out on their company and any real understanding of their cultures or any study of African history, religions or geography or stories.  The PNEU intentionally placed us in an English bubble, training us to become patriotic and religious English citizens, but this only worked up to a point. We knew something about African customs, spoke pidgin English and some Hausa and thought of ourselves as being ‘at home’ in Africa. I remember thinking how odd it was that at Christmas bits of cotton wool were glued on the windows of the dining room, which then wouldn’t come off properly, leaving bizarre wisps of pretend snow in a sub-tropical country for the rest of the year.

The PNEU Curriculum

The PNEU curriculum sent out from England was very wide ranging for the time, for example, unusually, we did history of art from the age of eight: it was called ‘Picture Study’.  I remember so vividly the 30 or so postcards sent out from England of the best paintings in Europe and poring over the luxuriant detail of a world that was so far away in time and place, understanding a little of the subject matter, but not much of the layers of symbolism, of course.

Memories of these postcards have stayed with me all my life and it is a thrill to find the original paintings in galleries: what I have dubbed a ‘postcard moment’.  I took my younger sister, Helen, to the Rembrandt exhibition in London some years ago, and she stopped at the entrance to the last room looking intently at the ‘Man with a Golden Helmet’ and I knew she was having a ‘postcard moment’, too.  In Berlin, ten years ago, for example, I saw the Corot landscape I’d liked so much, a view of Avignon, and recently Raphael s ‘St George and the Dragon’ and it was a delight to examine the originals in all their glory.  In all, I have probably seen the originals of about twenty postcards, collecting them in my head, as it were, and savouring the golden moments from the past.

I also now remember learning about Leonardo da Vinci, not just his paintings, but also his engineering projects, like man-powered flight with wings and prototype tanks, someone lauded as the first and best ‘Renaissance Man’, so he became my hero.

In Maths, the older children, us escapees from the American missionary school, were very glad to do Arithmetic in pounds, shillings and pence.  I remember chanting our times tables, so rote learning was still part of our education in those days, of course, but it’s necessary for some things.  I’m quite sure we did examples in Arithmetic using everyday life.  I enjoyed Maths quite a lot, because the answers were either right or wrong, and nearly always rows of ticks, I’m glad to say, because we were so well taught, even long division.  We had a session on the timetable called ‘Mental’, in which quickfire questions were asked on arithmetic, which I remember as being a bit stressful but quite fun.  I don’t think the Maths teaching went far enough, but I do remember liking Pythagoras and his ‘pi’…

Under the heading of ‘Recitation’, we learnt poetry by heart, but only after listening to Mrs Davidson’s rendering of the poems many times.  Simple poems like John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, which had a rousing beat.  We especially liked chanting the last verse: ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack/Butting through the Channel in the mad March days/With a cargo of Tyne coal,/Road-rails, pig-lead/Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays‘, usually shouting out the last line.  I also remember enjoying Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ with its mesmerising beat and some insight into what seemed like a romantic new culture.

Then there were far more difficult poems like Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ starting off with the rousing first verse: ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium/By the Nine Gods he swore/That the great house of Tarquin/Should suffer wrong no more’.  Looking at it now, I’m sure we skipped 70 verses to the last one…  I’m very glad we learnt poems by heart, with a strong metre, as this was useful in writing lyrics much later on for BBC Schools Television when I worked there making programmes for pre school children and those in primary schools (1977-1996).

English was a key subject, of course, with our opinions on the books valued.  It was my favourite subject, as I was an avid reader: ‘Me and books against the world’…  I especially enjoyed fairy and folk stories, which I’m sure were from Andrew Lang’s collections.   We definitely read ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and ‘Piers Plowman’, in what must definitely have been abridged editions.  In ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, the cadences of the Biblical language and ideas like the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Celestial City made a big impression in a literary way but the beliefs behind it made no dent on a child whose Dad was an atheist, Mum an agnostic and local African nanny an animist.

We had a small school library and I lapped up pretty much every book. I was misled by school stories from writers like Angela Brazil, whose highly fictionalised picture of exciting boarding school life was not borne out in any way in my later experience of them when my brother and I actually went to boarding school in England in 1954.  Midnight feasts were soggy biscuits in the dark.

Grammar was taken seriously, so we spent quite a lot of time, I remember, ‘parsing’ sentences into their constituent parts, something that really helped me later on when I became an editor in publishing early in my career.  Composition was important, but the only topic I remember was the classic ‘Day in the Life of a Penny’.  Oddly, I don’t remember writing any stories of my own and I think, looking back, that creativity wasn’t encouraged as much as it should have been. Spelling was checked through dictation, probably the hardest thing we did.

We were taught handwriting using the Marion Richardson method of beautiful italic writing, using the three guidelines.  We did endless practice of letters which I enjoyed, treating it a bit like an art form, which it definitely isn’t now, seventy years later.

Geography was done with practical work like making a scene of a lake and hills out of papier mâché to illustrate contours.  We much enjoyed the ‘messiness for a purpose’ and also the learning that came out of it.  Contours have been a big thing ever since... Much of our learning had a practical  basis, ‘learning through doing’, which was later to become the bedrock of primary education from the 1960s onwards.  PNEU just got there first.

History was nearly all British history, of course, given the time and its stress on national sentiment and the Empire, but I vaguely remember something on Ancient Greek history, probably Lang’s ‘Tales of Troy and Greece’ and some memory of Norse tales and Valhalla and possibly  ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ when I was older.

Like all British children in the first half of the 20c, our history was based on ‘Our Island Story’ by H E Marshall (first published in 1905), was a series of stories about great men in Britain, mostly kings, even if sometimes they burnt the cakes.  It glorified the Empire, of course, as people did in those days, but to our childish ears, it was comforting to learn that the English always won the battles, except for the unfortunate Battle of Hastings when it was very bad luck (not to say unsportsmanlike) that Harold got an arrow in his eye….  I doubt very much if the PNEU style critical reading applied to English was seen as appropriate in our history teaching.

Seeing a globe with a quarter of the land surface coloured pink was not good for us, clearly, but in all honesty, at the time made us feel proud.  Looking back on this makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Unusually, we were taught Latin from the age of eight, chanting verb tenses loudly, ‘amo-amas-amat’, for which I am very grateful, not least now being able to guess word meanings in Romance languages.  I wish I could decipher more than the key words in a tomb inscription in Latin, but it’s all too long ago.  However, so many years of Latin helped me get onto a Spanish Honours course at Bristol University (1962-5) with only three years of study, instead of the seven you’d expect for French.

We even learnt basic French, too: ‘Madame Souris et sa famille’, what a book, with wonderful line drawings which made me think that France was the most exotic place on Earth with wonderful cafes and lively street scenes (focussing on food, as seen from a mouse’s point of view, of course).  How progressive was that in a primary school in the 1950s.

Religion was taught to me for the first time (it was not allowed in the American missionary school because of the separation of Church and State), but just through the stories.  I enjoyed the drama of  Daniel and the Lions’ Den, Jonah and the Whale and Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours, for example, but was oblivious to any beliefs that went with them.   There are almost no photos of our schooldays, however, I do have a photo of myself dressed up in a sheet and headband, as the Angel Gabriel, in what was called a ‘tableau’ back then.

Under the heading of Natural History, Botany was taught well, as I remember to this day doing a diagram to show photosynthesis and labouring over water colours of flowers where we had to observe very  closely the structure of leaves, flowers and stems.  As Mason said of this activity: it was ‘to see truly’.  We had a Nature Table on which we put our finds on nature walks, but there were no books that I remember in which to look up West African plants, insects and birds, only English ones, but we knew most of them anyway.  

Also, there was a bit of Biology, as I remember fondly my diagram showing an amoeba splitting… but no Science, that would be expecting far too much of primary education in those days.  However, combined with no Physics or Chemistry in my boarding school back in England, this has left me with very serious gaps in knowledge.

Crafts were fun and I remember a lot of raffia work, making place mats, for example.  We did sewing, too, and Chris de Souza confirms that the boys were included.  We made simple things like bookmarks using cross stitch as decoration.  We learnt all the main stitches, like back stitch, blanket stitch and chain stitch, together with button holes and darning, of course, all useful for later life.  I still enjoy mending and saving clothes.

PNEU teaching methods were way ahead of their time, particularly the use of ‘Narration’, where the teacher called on random pupils after a class session on English, History or Geography and asked the child to summarise what they’d learnt and what was new to them.  To this day, I still look for the key sentence in a newspaper article. The skill of summarising key points has been immensely useful in my working life. I have no idea why educationalists never picked up on the idea of Narration as a key teaching tool, one that keeps children properly listening as narrators are picked randomly from the class.

I’m sure we did some singing, certainly hymns and carols at Christmas, but I don’t remember any other music classes.

Outdoors, we did some form of PE, maybe Drill, I guess, but also competitive games, like running.

There were exams twice a year, with the papers sent to England for marking, but I don’t remember any stress.

We liked wearing our little grey felt PNEU hats and chanting ‘I can, I shall, I ought, I will’, though not all took this very seriously.

Looking Back

A PNEU education was a most progressive approach for the 1950s, even though it went hand in hand with children abroad being ‘taught to be English’ and proud to be part of the British Empire.  We ended up, not saying we were African, as Kipling said he was Indian, but with a divided identity.  PNEU had not reckoned with the power of a childhood home in another country.  No amount of academic input could overcome the dissonance in belonging to one physical space (though, sadly, very little shared cultural space) while vaguely identifying with a distant place called ‘Home’, experienced only through books and reminiscences of parents and sparse memories of my own.

Africa was in our souls even though our parents were not born there.  We grew up hearing the drums communicating between villages, trying to play local musical instruments, given leather-bound talismans (which we were not allowed to keep), hearing Hausa being spoken and understanding the power of the jujuman  through our very young local nanny who understandably had no other means of controlling us.  

I had only three memories of England up to the age of four before leaving in 1947 and so, after seven years away until 1954, discovered that the rose-tinted picture of the country instilled in me was unrecognisable in the small, grey, cold and unwelcoming country called ‘Home’, still suffering the after-effects of the war, so this bit of PNEU conditioning didn’t work. (The woolly apple arriving after two months at sea should have warned me.) But, ah, the important thing to my brother and I was that sweet rationing was lifted in 1954…

There were only a few other downsides, such as the downgrading of Science and Maths in favour of English, History and Geography, being good at encouraging critical thinking about fiction but not original ideas, critical thinking or creativity and, most damagingly, being in such an over-privileged English bubble in the old Empire, though that was hardly surprising in the 1950s.

Three Golden Years

But we were so lucky to have three golden years of progressive education in a villagey kind of school, our families all known to each other.  It was a bulwark against becoming a cog in the machine when we went to boarding school back in England from 1954.  We carried with us so many good things like the child acting on the idea, a sense of ourselves as persons with our own opinions and some character training which helped us become resilient.  When a History of Art teacher dug her fingers into my shoulder at age 14 and told me to have no opinions of my own,  at least I knew she was wrong.  How lucky was that to have some independence of mind in an era of mind-numbing conformity in the 1950s.

"We carried with us so many good things."