CHAPTER 20 - REALISING POTENTIAL

I was born to a very poor family. My father, a cripple from WWII, was often 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, pretending he had no affliction to take onlooker’s attention off his limp.

I was born during the second world war and was oblivious to my father’s injury. Indeed, I hardly commented on my father’s disability throughout my early life as a child, because all dads who had been in the war walked that way, so I thought, so I assumed it was natural for dads to walk like that, until I was an awake teenager .

When I was four, like a seed, I was ‘sprinkled’ onto the earth of life and landed in the grounds of a small Church school in the seaside village where I lived after the war. From the first few days at school, I was called the cripple’s son and teased and laughed at by the other children, and by some teachers. I was not familiar with what the word cripple meant, but I was aware that it meant something nasty.

I had a nickname, Skinny Whiting, given to me by my friends as my ribs and nobbly knees stood out amongst the mostly well-fed children at the school. My class teacher was almost compelled to join the club and denigrate me, often clipping my ear for anything at all, even one day for wetting myself because I was worried about going to the school lavatory where there was only small pieces of newspaper, instead of toilet paper. Try it, I you need to imagine what that felt like! I was at that age a very private child and had been taught to be discreet with my ablutions!

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

I had a surname that meant I was the last to be called. Whiting!

Teeth pulling was mandatory at that time, but I thought it was a natural thing to have to go through, but it didn’t lessen the fear and nervousness I felt as I 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 inappropriately used to wipe their mouths. I can see now the blood on the cuffs of the silky white blouses adorned by the girls.

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

“Whiting, you will never be any good. You take up space”.

After school when I was seventeen, I was again ‘sprinkled’ but this time into another world, into a dark and tough life as a soldier and within a short time I was found to have had a nickname from school that had stayed with me. Skinny Whiting, son of a cripple!

I was initially an unhappy soldier and had lost my mother a few months before I enlisted. Perhaps the circumstances of my life and the loss dictated a retrograde step I had taken to join the army.

Three of my brothers had been in the services and I was hoping for something other than a nickname and abject bullying through rank!

“Whiting, 104, private, you have to earn the respect to have another much more friendly nickname, soldier. Get yourself entrenched into army life, a life in uniform” said sergeant major Grandison. “Earn a nickname which indicates what you now are and will become, not what you were”.

Life in the army was tough, and I was a committed and good soldier but none of my superiors saw anything in me 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 I coined myself after a biology lesson at school. I loved that contrived slogan, ‘to sprinkle humans!

I became confident and within seven years had grown physically, from eight stones to sixteen, was ready to shed my nickname and was training to be an athlete and be a man respected by those other soldiers who served with me. My nickname faded into insignificance and was replaced by another, Tiger.

Looking back.

PUBLIC SCHOOL.

It was now time to look back and re-engage with my childhood as I lay awake one night unable to sleep. Perhaps that was connected to how human beings change or see how they changed. Unlike most of my friends who were demobbed, I had been thrown, not sprinkled, into a world that was to me the opposite of what I had been used to. I was to become a teacher in a public school.

THIS MEMORY KEEPS COMING BACK, TIME AND TIME AGAIN.

I had worked hard to encourage myself to take steps to find my true potential, and it was just one teacher who had faith in me. I often spoke about that teacher, the one who saw that I had potential all those years ago, but who is now lying under the earth that I had once been sprinkled onto. Major Philips MC had fought in WWII.

A CAPTAIN AND THEN A MAJOR.

My childhood class teacher, Charlie Philips, had been a legend who stood out amongst the other bullying teachers who taught through fear, but one teacher in public school, my boss, who seemed to naturally emulate Captain Philips’ style in my new job saw a lot of potential in me, so much that he took me under his tutelage, and we became master and student, mentor and student, and I listened and learned from Major Benjamin David Chapman, DSO.

By this time, I 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 me, I had a daughter, was a single parent and had lost my wife to cancer aged twenty-seven.

CONFLICT IS ALWAYS IN MY MIND.

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

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

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

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

“I am a very different man Stelios” I said. Let’s have a coffee and I will teel you my story if you tell me yours.

That friendship continues today, and we had much to talk about.

SUDDENLY, AS IF IT WAS A PRE-ORDAINED EVENT, I MET WISDOM.

Life after public school was a step into other educational establishments. I became more and more in demand as a teacher and was beginning to feel confident about my newfound life in education.

One day I was introduced to an extraordinary group of academically eminent people, one of who was my wife, who invited me to give a talk about my childhood. They met regularly in Hampstead, were an offshoot group from MENSA, and each was invited to address the group once a year. As I was new to the group, they were keen for me to speak. They asked me for a short synopsis of my life, and the seemingly oldest person there suggested it should not be too long.

“In a nutshell please young man”?

I felt very much at home, and I knew there was something about my life that needed to change. I was an opinionated man and when I left the meeting, I was inspired to take another step, and this time enter a new world, a world where a person can take the road less travelled and push themselves away from those dark days. This was a world that needed courage, a new road towards realising my potential.

I gave my short synopsis.

‘In 1948 my infant schoolteachers looked upon me and judged me for what they saw, a poor waif, a war child, who was entering school for the first time. I was!

In 1951 I entered junior school and the headmaster put me in form 2D.

In 1954 I passed the Eleven – Plus and entered grammar school. I was put in form 2D. I was only ten!

In 1960 I left school with the highest level of A level results, captain of athletics, and the winner of the prize for English, mathematics and wood and metal craft. (How I could have achieved that when I was brought up in a house with no electricity in my bedroom. I had to make my own tallow candles after a visit to the butchers to ask for the required candle material, so I could read and study.

In 1962 I joined the army after the loss of my mother.

In 1969 I was appointed as a teacher at a first-class public school in Cheltenham as an assistant master.

In 1974 I was appointed Head of Physical Education and eventually second master at an independent school in Surrey.

In 1975 I was appointed as Chairman of a Rudolf Steiner school, and after twelve years there I became Chairman of two other Steiner Schools, in Gloucester and Hereford. I was also a teacher of physical education in all three.

In 1991 I founded my own independent school called The Acorn School.

LOOKING BACK.

When my first teacher looked at the waif I was, he did not see me. He saw a young child standing before him in hand-me-downs and called his compatriot to come and look at me, who said. “Another war child”.

Neither teacher had tried to find the human being that was behind the visage of the child standing there, because I was not what they saw. I was the inner being that they did not see. Education then would not allow them to see the individuals lurking behind such an image of poverty.

What would I be today if they had found my inner child and helped teachers to teach in a human way that enabled my potential to be embraced then and throughout my education?

Education for the future must be diverted from forcing children to compete child against child, so that they can realise the unique potential that lies within them above the parapet and be seen as a unique child with potential, needing to be educated in such a way that their unseen inner potential is encouraged to rise up like a beacon, a shaft of light to light up the world. Education today is not human or potential centric!

It is the time for a renaissance in education, so that narcissism is an outdated human propensity.

It is time for a complete reappraisal of the culture of ‘a degree for all’ so that potential geniuses can rise up instead of being left to lead a life in the wilderness, struggling to be who they want to be and who they could be if their teachers looked beyond the physical form ‘smothered by a group of children’, few of who will find their true potential’!

After my ten-minute presentation I was aware that many of the group were in tears.

‘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 their inner spark called potential, who need to be encouraged through a holistic education, despite the walls that are put before them, to follow their potential to become uniquely confident and free-thinking adults’.

Rudolf Steiner

That is the future of human education, I thought.

I embraced that statement, which helped me to teach at the school I had founded after considerable hardship for thirty years, a school where every child has great potential and is educated as the unique individual they are, a 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.

My school was founded on the principle of ‘Exemplo Ducemus – By Example we Lead’, and ‘Vertute et Veritate – Have Courage for the Truth’.

The students from my school who graduate are confident and upright, ready to walk the road less travelled, to challenge 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.

I am a contented older man now and I think I have realised my potential, the potential that only one teacher saw many years ago as he cast his eye on the waif-like war child.

Captain Charlie Philips MC, through his great leadership and human strength, taught me how to ignore adversity, negativity, criticism, persecution and through his wisdom and care for the children he taught I learned so many important things that have helped me in my life.

In future the principle of education must honour every child’s potential, no matter where they come from. They are each individual young human beings with potential who have the right to be educated as such.

‘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, the child can realise its potential

Like a shaft of light entering the world

To become a free-thinking adult’.

Graeme E B Whiting