Week 13.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh my help?'

It was in the summer of 1975 that I took the photograph below, while on a camping holiday with my family in the lovely Aosta Valley in the Italian Alps. We were camped high in the mountains not far from the ancient city of Aosta. One day we drove the length of the valley to its beginning at the foot of Monte Bianco (most of us probably know it better by its French name, Mont Blanc).

Spotting a cable car station we decided we would do some Alpine mountaineering the easy way. At the cable car terminus near the summit there was a covered walkway, over and across the upper slopes of the mountain' to a French terminus on the other side. We though, looked in another direction at this breath-taking depiction of the Crucifixion carved among the snow-covered peaks.

My knowledge of any language other than English is strictly limited. I think though that the small notice at the statue’s feet says ‘Christ, Lord of the Cords’ and on either side is the message, in Italian and in French, ‘If only all the people in the world would give me their hand’.

It was a striking message on a very striking monument ‘on the roof of the Europe’. I felt that it was one that readers of this blog would appreciate during Holy Week, the last week of Lent. It is the week that ends with Good Friday, when Christians world-wide remember the cruel judicial murder of Jesus Christ some two thousand years ago. It is followed ‘on the third day’ by Easter Sunday, when we celebrate Christ’s glorious resurrection, God’s demonstration of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, then, now, and always.

The words on the monument remind me of the message of the inner voice that seventeenth century George Fox heard when he was in despair at what he saw as the failure of both the established and the dissenting churches of his day:

‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition’.

They were words that, as he recorded in his journal, made his heart ‘leap with joy!’ He went on to found the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) as a vehicle by means of which that message could be made known to all humankind. That message is as true, and as badly needed, today as it was three hundred years ago.

Rewards and Punishments

We have certainly come a long way from the world of Charles Dickens’ Mr Squeers, and that of Dr Arnold of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, at Rugby. By comparison with that world, my own secondary-school schooldays nearly eighty years ago were positively benign. We were though expected to turn up at school every day on time, to behave ourselves in class and on school premises, to do our set homework and apply ourselves diligently to our lessons.

Those who broke any of those basic rules could expect to be punished. This usually involved ‘detention’ for an hour or so after school or the imposition of extra homework, the writing of a page or more of tedious ‘lines’ to be presented at school the following morning. Trips to the Headmaster’s study for three stroke of the cane were comparatively rare and generally awarded only to persistent or defiant offenders.

The ‘reward’ for those who obeyed the rules was the teacher’s approbation and possibly a few appreciative words in the school’s report to their parents. No one expected more that that.

Now, according to a report in the Daily Gazette, pupils in years ten and eleven at Clacton’s new Coastal Academy are being offered material rewards, not for outstanding progress or effort but simply for turning up at school each day and behaving themselves in a way that earlier generations of school children took for granted. There’s no word of any punishments for truancy or misbehaviour. The pupils involved are those who previously attended truancy-afflicted Bishops Gate College and Colbayns High School. I suppose it is feared that if punishments were even mentioned, they’d just walk out of the school and disappear forever!

Rewards for punctuality and good behaviour are given by means of the ‘Vivo’ system. All members of the staff have a number of points that they can distribute and pupils collect these points, save them up, and select their own rewards from a catalogue that includes mobile phone vouchers, hair straighteners, iPods, computer consoles and so on.

Ms. Sandy Tate, the Academy’s Vice-Principal, is reported as saying that certificates for good behaviour work well enough as incentives in the lower school but by the time students are in the higher school, they lose their impact. By that time, I suppose, the children are a bit more worldly wise and conscious of their own ‘pupil power’!

Unsurprisingly, the pupils concerned are enthusiastic. The Daily Gazette quotes one fifteen-year-old as saying, ‘It makes a lot of students think about getting on with their work. People do go to more lessons, as they can really see that they are getting something out of it – it’s a brilliant idea’

The ‘people do go to more lessons’, fascinated me. Can it possibly be true that in a third millennial British Academy (claimed to be a pinnacle of twenty-first century secondary educational excellence) pupils decide for themselves whether or not they will bother to attend lessons, and only turn up if ‘they can really see that they are getting something out of it'? Something that is, in addition to an education and, in the case of Clacton’s Coastal Academy, a free school uniform and set of sports gear!

How shaming to think that while, in many parts of the world, children are so eager to get an education that they will trudge barefoot for miles to sit on mud floors in primitive schoolrooms, in Clacton-on-Sea, England, kids offered every educational advantage have to be bribed to turn up at school on time, to attend lessons and to behave themselves in a civilised manner!

‘O Brave New World!’

‘Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring’

So wrote Shelley in his poem The Question. How appropriate it is that the most important festival in the Christian year, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, with its promise of eternal life, should take place in the springtime when nature is coming out of its winter hibernation and new life is springing up all around us.
My daffodils - there were many more until two years ago when an over-enthusiastic gardener cut them back too early after blooming.

The view from my kitchen window of the flowering of the daffodils around the apple tree in my garden assures me that spring is here at last. For many years Heather, my wife, watched with pleasure from that window as the daffodils emerged from the soil and burst into flower. When her life on earth came to an end nearly four years ago, I scattered her ashes where those daffodils flourish

I believe that her spirit lives on in another better world, and I like to think that every spring her ashes are transformed into those lovely golden flowers. Sometime, in the not-too-distant future, I hope that my spirit will rejoin hers and that my ashes too will be scattered where the daffodils dance in the spring breeze.

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose, as where some dying Caesar bled,
And every hyacinth the garden wears,
Leapt to its couch from some once-lovely head.

Omar Khayyam