LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 2

       October

       A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?

      The leaves are turning, the wind is gusting and I arrive in the office having lost yet another umbrella. As October starts, the academic year is well underway, corridors are humming with conversation and everyone is settling into the familiar rhythm of the term. In the admissions department, thoughts are already turning to next academic year, this being the month of open days for families considering applying to the school, so it’s time to brush up my speech for the prospective parents. It’s also the annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral, known as Colet Day, held jointly with St Paul’s Boys’ School, where each year we celebrate our foundation. Two reasons for me to be reflecting on John Colet’s vision for education, the case for single-sex schools, the education of girls in particular and what happens when girls will not be girls: in other words, the wider issue of gender identity schools are facing today.

      Dean of St Paul’s, member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers and pioneering educationalist, John Colet used the fortune he inherited from his father to found St Paul’s boys’ school in 1509. At this time, the height of the Renaissance in England, Colet counted among his friends the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who assisted both with writing textbooks and a Latin grammar for the school and with appointing staff. Colet also knew Thomas More, another progressive thinker and advocate of the education of women – his own daughter Margaret Roper becoming a distinguished classical scholar and translator. Amongst the early high masters of St Paul’s was Richard Mulcaster, appointed in 1596, who wrote extensively on education, advocating proper training for teachers and the development of a curriculum determined by aptitude rather than age. He too thought women should have access to formal education, including attending university. Another contemporary, Robert Ascham, became tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and was the author of The Scholemaster, published in 1570 after his death and which, as well as being a treatise on how to teach Latin prose composition, explored the psychology of learning and the need to educate the whole person. These were forward-thinking men. Widely travelled himself, Colet believed that education generally and his school in particular should be for the children ‘of all countres and nacions indifferently’ and that it should, as the humanists of the Renaissance believed, concentrate on developing the life of the mind through the study of Latin and Greek and the scholarship of antiquity, all of this becoming more achievable with the advent of printing. Colet was ambitious for his school as an institution of learning but also as an instrument of social change. Given this and the cultural climate in which the school was founded – a time of burgeoning exploration, discovery and scholarship – it is perhaps surprising that it took another 400 years for the Mercers’ Company to establish a girls’ school. But in 1904 they did, and as I was fond of telling prospective parents, by the early twenty-first century, we had more than made up for the time lost, the two schools by then equally established and known for their breadth of education and academic excellence. As a result of a developing bursary programme, they were also no longer just the preserve of the wealthy, but educating a widening range of bright children from across London, reflecting the cultural diversity of a capital city.

      To the contemporary Paulina, with her characteristic wit and taste for unexpected juxtapositions, John Colet is part embodiment of her love of tradition and part teen icon. Colet’s unblinking black bust, staring straight out and dressed in austere sixteenth-century clericals, presiding over the long, black-and-white chequered corridor known as ‘The Marble’, often appears in the background of selfies, with added sunglasses or perhaps a Father Christmas hat. ‘John Colet rocks!’ the girls exclaim with affectionate irreverence. And Colet’s legacy is extraordinarily alive in the two schools today, where his vision finds fresh and contemporary expression. I feel sure that the addition of the girls’ school is something of which he would have wholeheartedly approved.

      Colet Day itself is a high point in the calendar anticipated with great excitement. The vast cave of St Paul’s Cathedral with its unnerving acoustic (open your mouth and you think you are singing on your own – very disconcerting) is packed with proud parents and in the front rows, under the echoing dome, the two schools sit, flanked by their tutors. A monumental rustling as the organ swells and the service begins, the clergy processing and everyone rising to their feet, anticipating the ritual that is to come. Moving to the lectern to speak my allotted words (the high master and high mistress alternate their lines each year, in careful observance of equality) I wonder again about the respective characters of these two schools, with their brother and sister relationship of familial closeness and sibling rivalry, and whether one day they will become one. For the time being, Colet Day brings the two schools together in symbolic unity and the question dissolves unspoken in the air.

      Whatever form schools take in the future, the length of time it has taken us to take seriously the education of girls must remain one of history’s great opportunity costs. We can reflect that despite the efforts of early pioneers, for all the women who have risen to prominence in the world, there are so many more whose capability and contribution have rested either unsung, unrealised or unfulfilled. That’s half the potential of any single generation. And when we talk about the education of women today, even though so much progress has been made, there is still always an underlying sense that we are righting a wrong, catching up with something which has been given insufficient importance and which now therefore needs special explanation or attention. As part of this, we are also still working out how women fit into the public, professional world and therefore to what kinds of roles they are best suited: are they bringing something different from men to strategy, to leadership, to getting things done? Should the fact of your gender be celebrated or ignored? While the debate continues, at school level the emphasis is overwhelmingly on integration. Worldwide, the modern default school model that is regarded as more ‘natural’ is not single-sex education but having boys and girls learning alongside one another in a co-educational setting. Single-sex schools might have been all right a hundred years ago, when girls were only just progressing from being taught refined accomplishments by governesses in the safe and sequestered setting of their homes, but that time has passed. This is the twenty-first century. Aren’t single-sex schools just an anachronism, encouraging outdated ways of thinking and walking out of step with the real world?

      This is a question that cannot be sidestepped with sentimental appeals to custom and tradition. If single-sex education is to have a future, for girls or indeed for boys, it has to be not merely nice, but necessary. This means being based on something more than a nostalgic affection for how things used to be when time stood still and a school was its own little citadel, shut off from the real world like Hogwarts or St Trinian’s. Boys’ schools, perhaps because many are so long established, have not often felt the need to explain overtly the advantages they offer boys. Why would you, if you’ve been going strong for hundreds of years and produced many of the people (men) who have been the opinion formers and leaders of their day? And perhaps too with the prevailing attention being on addressing the needs of women, it hasn’t been easy for them to do so. As more and more boys’ schools admit girls to buttress their finances and academic profile, and boys-only establishments become a rarity, a few are now advancing their unique proposition

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