INDEX OF QUOTES
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In one junior school in a mining community the entrance hall is dominated by a huge blown-up photograph of miners just up from the pit, their blackened faces smiling at the photographer. They are surprisingly young men in their early thirties who could easily be the dads of the children in the school. It is not difficult to guess what kind of picture would have hung in that place in such a school twenty or thirty years ago and how differently it would have spoken. A sceptic might well think the photo was a fashionable democratic gesture, as indeed it could have been, but in that school there was an all-pervasive respect for the lives and experience of the children and the school was a part of the community represented by the photo. The adult members of the mining families from which the children came moved in and out of the school without ceremony. Much of the children’s work takes them out of the school to the life and work of the area which reappears in the classroom in what the children talk about, write about, draw, paint and model. |
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