The Daily Telegraph
Monday 9 January 2012

Schools that dared liberate their pupils

"Sapere aude” (“Dare to be wise”) is the motto of The Manchester Grammar School. It is emblematic of the grammar-school tradition, for several reasons. The first is that it is old: it appears on the coat of arms of Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who founded the school to help the poor boys of Lancashire in 1515. The grammar-school phenomenon is as old as the public-school one. One could argue that public schools began as a mere subset of grammar schools.

The second is that the motto is in Latin. Latin was the mainstay of grammar schools — it is Latin grammar from which they take their name, which shows that their commitment to learning lay at their root. The third is that the school has a motto at all. Comprehensives tend to eschew mottoes, especially Latin ones, as being pompous, elitist, out-of-date. It was of the essence of grammar schools, as this programme eloquently showed, that they tried to inculcate high ideals. Mottoes do this succinctly.

Finally, the words of the motto express a particular spirit. The concept of wisdom depends on some high, ancient and demanding exterior standard. It is not about self-fulfilment (though it may bring self-fulfilment in its train), but about something beyond self. To tell people to “dare” to be wise is to imply that the search for wisdom requires courage and involves difficulty.

It does, and it did so particularly for all those children, a quarter of the pupils in the first half of the 20th century - including the future prime ministers Edward Heath and Margaret Roberts (Thatcher) — whose parents could not afford to send them to grammar schools without state or county scholarships. For them to “dare to be wise” was also to dare to rise beyond the social sphere in which they had grown up. In most cases, this was done not in despite of their parents’ wishes, but in accordance with them. Across the generations there was a culture, to use a Victorian word, of improvement.

Although this programme (the first of two) pointed out the shortcomings of grammar schools, the thrust of its message, conveyed through the mouths of men and women, now old, who attended them before 1950, was overwhelmingly positive. Even when they described hardships and stresses — exams on which so much depended, homework done in the bathroom because it was the only warm place in the house away from the noise of the gramophone — they did so with a dignity and articulacy which showed that they had been well educated.

One of the most attractive was a very old man called Geoffrey Stone, who won his place at The Manchester Grammar in 1929. He put on his old mortar-board to show what it had been like to be a prefect. He had been kept on at the school by bursaries after his father had lost his job. At the end of his war service, he was offered a job in the Foreign Office. This was a rare achievement for a man of his background at that time. Mr Stone considered the situation, however, and decided, selflessly, that this would not be the best use of his talents. He became a teacher, and eventually, the headmaster of a grammar school in Derbyshire. Mr Stone “dared to be wise”, even when it might have been against his own interests.

Part two of the programme will be on Thursday 12 January 2012 at 9 pm

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