CHAPTER 17 - GEORGE’S STORY

George was born to a very poor family. His father, a cripple from WWII, was often having to tolerate being laughed at as he dragged his injured leg along the street in the seaside town where he lived throughout the last years of his life. George, his son, was born during the war and was oblivious to his father’s injury. Indeed, he hardly commented on his father’s disability throughout his early life as a child.

Like a seed, George was ‘sprinkled’ onto the earth of life and landed in the grounds of a small Church school in the seaside village where his family lived after the second world war. From the first few days at school, he was called the cripple’s son by the other children and by most teachers. George was not familiar with what the word cripple meant, but he was aware that it meant something nasty.

George had a nickname, Skinny, given to him by his friends as his ribs and nobbly knees stood out amongst the mostly well-fed children at the school. His class teacher was almost compelled to join the club and denigrate Skinny, often clipping his ear for anything at all, even one day for wetting himself because he was worried about going to the school lavatory where there was only small pieces of newspaper instead of toilet paper.

George was at that age a very private child who had been taught to be discreet with his ablutions!

This ‘seed’ one day, when he was seven, had to watch his classmates walk from the classroom of fifty-seven children in a class, one by one, and enter a mobile dentist lorry which was parked outside the school, to have his teeth pulled out. George had no idea that they were his baby teeth and that it was to enable his second teeth to come through.

George had a surname that meant he was the last to be called.

Teeth pulling was mandatory at that time and he thought it was a natural thing to have to do, but it didn’t lessen the nervousness as he saw pupil after pupil come back to the classroom, some crying and most with lots of blood around their mouths. By ten o’clock all those who were seven were sitting in class with bleeding mouths and nothing more than shiny loo paper for mopping their mouth, and a number of shirt and blouse cuffs used to wipe their mouths. I can see now the blood on the cuffs of the white blouses adorned by the girls.

George was rather a reclusive young child and throughout his childhood at school he was made to feel insignificant, a seed without a root, and a waste of space as one teacher called him in front of the class.

After school when George was seventeen, he was again ‘sprinkled’ into another world, this time into a dark and tough life as a soldier and within a short time he was found to have had a nickname from school that had stayed with him into uniform.

Skinny was initially an unhappy soldier and had lost his mother a few months before he enlisted. Perhaps the circumstances of his life and the loss of his wonderful mother dictated such a retrograde step to take into the army.

Three of his brothers had been in the services and he was hoping for something other than a nickname and abject bullying through rank.

“George, 104, private, you have to earn the respect to have another much more friendly nickname, soldier. Get yourself another life, a life in uniform” said sergeant major Grandison.

Life in the army was tough, and George was a good soldier but none of his superiors saw anything in him except the visage that stood before them, the archetypal nine stone weakling with no future ahead of him. Where next might this young soldier be ‘sprinkled’ a word George coined himself after a biology lesson at school. George loved that slogan, to sprinkle humans!

George became confident and within seven years had grown physically, wanted to shed his nickname and was training to be an athlete and be a man respected by those other soldiers who served with him. His nickname faded into insignificance and was replaced by another, Tiger.

Tiger, unlike almost all his fellow soldiers who were demobbed, was thrown, not this time sprinkled, into a world that was to him the opposite of what he had been used to, public school education as a teacher.

George encouraged himself to take steps to find his true potential, and it was just one teacher who had faith in him. He often thought about the teacher who saw the potential in him all those years ago, but who was now lying under the earth that George had once been sprinkled onto. Major Philips MC had fought in WWII.

His childhood class teacher had been a legend who stood out amongst the other bullying teachers who taught through fear, but one teacher in his new job in public school saw a lot of potential in him, so much that he took him under his tutelage, and they became master and student, mentor and student, and George listened and learned.

By this time George was twenty-nine, a father and a husband, who was seeking better things than being a public schoolmaster. The struggle from those days with bleeding gums to being nearly thirty, was to test George, who had a daughter but was a single parent and had lost his wife to cancer aged twenty-seven.

George looked around him and was drawn to take a step back to where he had been a soldier on active service in Cyprus when he was nineteen and try to find a Greek Cypriot who he met at that time called Stelios Xanthos, and re-kindle their friendship. Stelios was shocked when he heard that George was flying to Nicosia and wanted to be collected from the airport with his daughter, who was then a young child.

As George walked down the steps from the Trident jet, he could see Stelios at the arrival’s door. He hadn’t changed. He had three children with him and a very lovely wife.

George walked straight past him as a joke. Stelios did not recognise him, but the embrace said it all.

“What have you done to yourself, George. When I last saw you, you were very different”.

“I am a very different man Stelios” George said.

Life after public school was a step into other educational establishments. George became more and more desired as a teacher and was beginning to feel confident about his newfound life in education and life with his daughter. One day he met a group of eminent people who invited him to give a talk about his childhood. They met regularly in Hampstead, were an offshoot group from MENSA, and each was invited to address the group. As George was new to the group, they were keen for him to speak.

George felt very much at home, but he knew there was something about his life that needed to change. He was an opinionated man without a wife and when he left the meeting, he was inspired to take another step and this time sprinkle himself into a new world, the world where a person can take the road less travelled and push away those dark days. This was a world that needed courage, a new road towards realising his potential.

George wanted to change the world so he entered an alternative educational system, became headteacher at three different independent schools and was able to create a new way of looking at children, innocent children with phenomenal potential who needed to be seen not for what they seem to be, but what they can be if given a child-centred holistic education. George could only realise his ideals if he had his own school.

With 45 years of life behind him George had a vision. Not the kind of silly vision that people laugh about, but a vision that what he had gone through need not be the same pathway for other children.

George’s vision was to create a school where every child is seen by teachers as uniquely individual but with unseen potential who, through a child-centred, individual human education, can realise that potential.

Rudolf Steiner had once said at a meeting in 1919.

‘It is not wars that change the world. It is not power that changes the world. It is not money that changes the world. It is individuals who follow that inner spark called potential, despite the walls that are put before them, and follow their potential to become uniquely confident and free-thinking adults’.

That is the future of human education, thought George.

George embraced that statement, which helped him to teach at the school he had founded after considerable hardship for thirty years, a school where every child has great potential and who are educated as the unique individual they are, the school without harsh discipline, without detention, without children being shouted at, without children being sent out of lessons when they do what is a natural part of their development as growing humans, a school founded on the principle of ‘Exemplo Ducemus – By Example we Lead’, and ‘Vertute et Veritate – Have Courage for the Truth’.

The students from George’s school who graduate are confident and upright, ready to walk the road less travelled, to take the road often travelled, embrace society and be confident in the knowledge that they were taught at a school where they were receiving a human education with a curriculum that encouraged them to follow their heart and realise their true potential as unique human beings.

George is a contented older man now and can be confident in the knowledge that he has realised his true potential, the potential that only one teacher saw, and he realised it against adversity, negativity, criticism, and he learned harsh lessons that the world is not an easy place to negotiate, and for the future the principle of education must be….

‘When a child stands before a teacher

It is not the child that the teacher sees.

The child is the unseen inner being of the child.

It is the inner core, the being, that holds the child’s potential.

It is the task of the teacher

To humanly educate the child,

So that they can realise their potential

To become a free-thinking adult’