An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education
Tony Little (Bloomsbury, 270pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) NO PARENT of teenage boys should be without this ‘hugely reassuring, common-sense guide’ by the former Eton headmaster Tony Little, said Sian Griffiths in the Sunday Times. She particularly admired his chapter on Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’roll, which covered everything from his reading list for sixteen-year-olds — he sets the bar high with titles including Gulliver's Travels and The Bonfire of the Vanities — to his gentle attack on Velcro Mums (hovering and interfering, inflicting damage without even realising the effects of their intrusive behaviour).
Even critics who itched to sneer at the privileges of Eton were won over by Little’s vision of the qualities required of good schools. In the Times
Educational Supplement, the principal of Kingsbridge Community College in Devon, Roger Pope, thought that Little’s understanding of the adolescent mind was superb. ‘I know of many parents who would value his advice on navigating these turbulent years, and many teachers who could learn from his wise, balanced approach to discipline.’ The real joy of the book was its vision of education: academic attainment is never enough, schools must be about developing fully rounded human beings. Nourishing individuality is vital, but so too is learning to be ‘part of the tribe’. ‘I could happily spend an evening drinking claret with this man whose values I find myself unexpectedly sharing,’ said Pope.
In the New Statesman, another initial sceptic, Tristram Hunt, then Labour’s education spokesman, described the book as a ‘work of reflection, humility and insight’ which read both as ‘pathfinder for helicopter parents and a heartfelt contribution to England’s depressingly binary debate on education’.
For Carey Schofield in the Spectator, Little captured ‘the magic, the surprising alchemy that makes things work in an outstanding school, and offers hope and inspiration to people elsewhere who are battling lethargy and low standards’.
Little’s story of workmen at Eton uncovering fragments of a wall painting under some wood panelling was enjoyed by Roy Blatchford in the Guard
ian. The images, from around 1520, are believed to be the earliest representation of a school scene in England. A banner headline from Roman scholar Quintilian crowns the scene ‘Virtuo preceptoris est ingeniorum notare discrimina,’ meaning ‘The excellence of the teacher is to identify the difference in talents of students.’