THE ROARING IN THE CHIMNEY
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
I burnt most of my infant room material on Friday. I say that the more material there is for a child, the less pull there is on his own resources. Other children coming to me from other schools are most annoyingly helpless. They want the teacher to do everything for them like a mother. I don't believe in shiny polished blocks. The shine and the colour should be supplied by the child's own imagination. … I speak of blocks as an example but only symbolically. I mean all the other contraptions. Mrs. S for example was given the job of preparing mountains of reading cards to supplement the new reading books. Pictures for every word. Pictures illustrating, believe it or not, words like "up," "to," "my"… over and above the nouns. It's terribly hard to believe that modern teachers can do this and modern inspectors instigate it. Can't a child picture his own nouns when he hears them? Do we have pictures of prepostions and conjunctions? And beyond all this, think of the time it takes to care for all this stuff. Only infant teachers know the time it takes to keep this stuff in order and in repair. Time that could be used in precious conversation with them. I burnt all the work of my youth. Dozens of cards made of three-ply, and hand-printed and illustrated. Boxes of them. There will be only the following list in my infant room:
Chalk Books Blackboards Charts Paper Paints Pencils Clay Guitar Piano
And when a child wants to read he can pick up a book with his own hands and struggle through it. The removal of effort and denying to the child of its right to call on its own resources . . . .
(I was sad, though, seeing it all go up in smoke.)
But teaching is so much simpler and clearer as a result. There's much more time for conversation . . . communication. (You should have heard the roaring in the chimney!)
(pp. 118.119 Teacher 1963, 1980 London: Virago)