It’s about 100 years old, it’s one of the earliest sort of experimental schools where children are supposed to be allowed to do what they want to do and we had virtually no lessons in the afternoon at all. We had games and we made things. We had workshops, art as well, and one was allowed to sort of invent things. I had a sort of game, I think, of inventing things all the time but I did actually make one or two things. I made an electric pendulum clock and I made a calculator with wheels, a geared calculator, that was fun, and stuff like that so in a sense it was partly pretend and partly real. I did actually try to invent things, always have done, but I’m really a sort of failed inventor, as I should probably tell you because very few of my inventions have ever really got anywhere, do you know what I mean? But as an activity in life, I think it’s absolutely super to have an idea and not simply to say to oneself, well, somebody else will have done it before, or it’s so obvious, why bother? Or it’ll be of no use. It think, you know, to be brought up with the idea that it’s good to accept challenges, it’s good to have enough self confidence so that you can actually try and do something new, is absolutely right. I think optimising self confidence is very much what education should be about and I think my school, I mean the school I went to, King Alfred, was rather good on that. It supported kids. Our Christian names, of course, were known to all the staff and we, apart from the head, used their Christian names. It had a sort of informality about it, you know, and it was like a big family, that’s why I mentioned this, in the sense that you got support and very little punishment. If you did something silly, on the whole it was just accepted. Against that, it was absolutely appalling for learning languages and really for learning mathematics because one just was not made to sit down and jolly well learn a lot of boring stuff and that’s been a handicap to me. I mean my languages are absolutely abysmal, you know. I go to Germany or France or something, I can just about order a meal if I’m thinking about it, and that’s it. No way could I have an intelligent conversation in French or German which I think is a terrible handicap and when I see German students and friends and I go to Germany and they all talk English, it actually makes me quite upset that we’re insular in that way and certainly don’t learn languages properly as children. So I think the lesson really is that some of what King Alfred did, that is to give people the confidence to think for themselves, is brilliant, but not to have sort of rote learning and make one actually learn verbs and the whole bit, is also a tremendous disadvantage and I think somehow, in a good education, you really do need both and it’s like, indeed, making something in a workshop. You’ve got tools but if you can’t use a tool, you can’t actually make anything worth having and you’ve got to learn how to plane wood straight, how to saw properly without the saw jamming, and mentally you’ve got to have the same facility for basic skills in order to be effectively creative. So I think my school made you creative but not all that effective because of the lack of primary basic skills.
