when sanderson first came to oundle his ideas seem to have differed from the normal scholastic opinion of his time mainly in his conviction of the interestingness and attractiveness of real scientific work for many types of boys that the established classical and stylistic mathematical teaching failed to grip. he developed these new aspects of school work, and his earliest success lay in the fact that he got a higher percentage of boys interested and active in school work than was usual elsewhere, and that the report of this and the report of his wholesome and stimulating personality spread into the world of anxious parents. but it early became evident to him that the new subjects necessitated methods of handling in vivid contrast to the methods stereotyped for the classical and mathematical courses.

[pg 46]

there have been three chief phases in the history of educational method in the last five centuries, the phase of compulsion, the phase of competition, and the phase of natural interest. they overlap and mingle. medieval teaching being largely in the hands of celibates, who had acquired no natural understanding of children and young people, and who found them extremely irritating, irksome, or exciting, was stupid and brutal in the extreme. young people were driven along a straight and narrow road to a sort of prison of dusty knowledge by teachers almost as distressed as themselves. the medieval school went on to the chant of rote-learning with an accompaniment of blows, insults, and degradations of the dunce-cap type. the jesuit schools, to which the british public schools owe so much, sought a human motive in vanity and competition; they turned to rewards, distinctions, and competitions. sir francis bacon recommended them justly as the model schools of his time. the class-list with its pitiless relegation of two-thirds of the class to self-conscious mediocrity and dufferdom was the symbol of this second, slightly more enlightened phase. the school of the rod[pg 47] gave place to the school of the class-list. an aristocracy of leading boys made the pace and the rest of the school found its compensation in games or misbehaviour. so long as the sole subjects of instruction remained two dead languages and formal mathematics, subjects essentially unappetising to sanely constituted boys, there was little prospect of getting school method beyond this point.

by the end of the eighteenth century schoolmasters were beginning to realise what most mothers know by instinct, that there is in all young people a curiosity, a drive to know, an impulse to learn, that is available for educational ends, and has still to be properly exploited for educational ends. it is not within our present scope to discuss pestalozzi, froebel, and the other great pioneers in this third phase of education. nearly all children can be keenly interested in some subject, and there are some subjects that appeal to nearly all children. directly you cease to insist upon a particular type of achievement in a particular line of attainment, directly your school gets out of the narrow lane and moves across open pasture, it goes forward of its own[pg 48] accord. the class-list and the rod, so necessary in the dusty fury of the lane, cease to be necessary. in the effective realisation of this sanderson was a leader.

for a time he let the classical and literary work of the school run on upon the old competition-compulsion, class-list lines. for some years he does not seem to have realised the possibility of changes in these fields. but from the first in his mechanical teaching and very soon in mathematics the work ceased to have the form of a line of boys all racing to acquire an identical parcel of knowledge, and took on the form more and more of clusters of boys surrounding an attractive problem. there grew up out of the school science a periodic display, the science conversazione, in which groups of youngsters displayed experiments and collections they had co-operated to produce. later on a junior conversazione developed. these conversaziones show the oundle spirit in its most typical expression. sanderson derived much from the zeal and interest these groups of boys displayed. he realised how much finer and how much more fruitful was the mutual stimulation of a common end than the vulgar effort for[pg 49] a class place. the clever boy under a class-list system loves the shirker and the dullard who make the running easy, but a group of boys working for a common end display little patience with shirking. the stimulus is much more intimate, and it grows. jones minor is told to play up, exactly as he is told to play up in the playing field.

in the summer term the conversazione in its fully developed form took up a large part of the energy of the school. says the official life:

'all the senior boys in the school were eligible for this work, the only qualification necessary being a willingness to work and to sacrifice some, at least, of one's free time. there was never any dearth of willing workers, the total number often exceeding two hundred. the chief divisions of the conversazione were: physics and mechanics; chemistry; biology; and workshops. a boy who volunteered to help was left free to choose which branch he would adopt. having chosen, he gave his name to the master in charge; if he had any particular experiment in view, he mentioned it, and if suitable, it was allotted to him. if he had no suggestion, an experiment was suggested, and he was told where information could be obtained.[pg 50] as a general rule two or three boys worked together at any one experiment.

'some of the experiments chosen required weeks of preparation; there was apparatus to be made and fitted up, information to be sought and absorbed, so that on the final day an intelligent account could be given to any visitor watching the experiment. this work was all done out of school hours. four or five days before speech day, ordinary school lessons ceased for those taking part in the conversazione; the laboratories, class-rooms, and workshops were portioned out so that each boy knew exactly where he was to work, and how much space he had. the setting up of the experiments began. to any one visiting the school on these particular days it must have seemed in a state of utter confusion, boys wandering about in all directions apparently under no supervision, and often to all appearances with no purpose. a party might be met with a jam-jar and fishing-net near the river; others might be found miles away on bicycles, going to a place where some particular flower might be found. three or four boys would appear to be smashing up an engine and scattering its parts in all [pg 51]directions, while others could be seen wheeling a barrow-load of bricks or trying to mix a hod of mortar. gradually a certain amount of order appeared, some experiments were tried and found to work satisfactorily, others failed, and investigation into the cause of failure had to be carried out. as the final day approached excitement increased, frantic telegrams were sent to know, for example, if the liquid air had been despatched, frequent visits to the railway-station were made in the hopes of finding some parcel had arrived; sometimes it was even necessary to motor to peterborough to pick up material which otherwise would arrive too late. a programme giving a short description of the experiment or exhibit had to pass through the printer's hands. at last everything would be ready; occasionally, but very seldom, an experiment had to be abandoned or another substituted at the last moment.'

the year 1905 marked a phase in the co-operative system of work on the mechanical side with the machining and erection of a six-horse-power reversing engine, designed for a marine engine of 3500 horse-power. castings and drawings were supplied by the north eastern marine [pg 52]engineering works. the engine was a triumphant success, and thereafter a number of engines has been built by groups of boys. concurrently with this steady replacement of the instructional-exercise system by the group-activity system, the mathematical work became less and less a series of exercises in style and more and more an attack upon problems needing solution in the workshops and laboratories, with the solution as the real incentive to the work. these dips into practical application gave a great stimulus to the formal mathematical teaching, for the boys realised as they could never have done otherwise the value of such work as a 'tool-sharpening' exercise of ultimately real value.