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1 Lawrence Alexander Stenhouse An educational life
Nigel Norris
And in a sense disposition or setting a course is of great importance to me. I have never been able to believe that I â or other people â are right. Consequently, it has seemed to me of greatest importance to be principled and consistent. Moral and intellectual life may be pursued effectively and powerfully in the pragmatic terms of expediency; but moral and intellectual and perhaps even political understanding is best pursued through a kind of allegorical process in which the actors try to clarify principles by acting consistently. Or so it has often seemed to me though I have frequently been disappointed in meeting people who prefer one to claim to be consistently correct rather than correctly consistent.
Stenhouse died on Sunday 5 September 1982. He was survived by his long-term partner and colleague Jean Rudduck and by his wife Evelyn (whom he married in 1949, and separated from in 1969) and their children Susan, Laura and John. He was fifty-six years old. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in September 1981, was unwell for some time before the diagnosis, and had been in considerable pain during a trip to Norway over the summer. In the weeks and months following his death the tributes flowed. The obituaries spoke of his leadership of the Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP), his lasting impact on teachers and the theory and practice of secondary education, his substantial intellectual achievements, his wit, his pioneering and revolutionary insight and educational imagination, his ability to tell a good story and his enormous energy and appetite for life. Stenhouse liked âstyleâ: driving the right car â the old green Jaguar, staying in fine hotels, eating good food and drinking good wine in convivial company. He had a weakness for good luggage and liked travel and the possibilities it presented for international influence and professional friendship. He loved poetry, occasionally writing it and often reading it. He loved Scotland and wrote the prose to a pictorial travel guide to the country as well as The Story of Scotland and The Scottish Quiz Book. He had a mischievous streak and had difficulty resisting the temptation to be clever. He liked an audience and enjoyed being in the limelight, but there was also a touch of insecurity because he felt things very deeply and was far from thick skinned. Although he could be self-effacing, this was, in a sense, a formal poise and had to do with his views about authority and knowledge. He was charismatic, and enjoyed being so.
At a packed memorial meeting, held in the chapel of Keswick Hall College of Education on the Saturday after Stenhouse died, Barry MacDonald, friend, long-time colleague and occasional adversary, said of Stenhouse that he was âa weaver of dreams and seductive possibilitiesâ, an intellectual, âone of the best, who seldom left an argument by the same door he came inâ, and who âhad a diamond in his head where some of us have a pound of sago pudding. But more than that he was a great sensualist who really cracked the code of the affirmative life.â âBut ultimatelyâ, MacDonald said, Stenhouse âwas that rarity, a mythmaker-generator and refiner of that impossible dream, autonomy within community that sustains ambition in the educational mission. With his passing education has lost its very best friend and life one of its most graceful practitioners.â
Lawrence Alexander Stenhouse was born on 29 March 1926 at 17 East Avenue, Burnage Garden Village; a rented, two-bedroom terraced cottage with a small front garden and longer rear garden, which backed on to a cinder-covered lane and the gardens of other houses. His father, Lawrence Drummond Stenhouse, had been brought up in Dundee and on leaving elementary school had gone to work in a small jute firm called Grimmonds, which eventually became part of Jute Industries Ltd. He enlisted in 1916, joining the Royal Army Service Corps, where he remained until he was demobbed in June 1919. He returned to work in the jute industry and at some point he was sent south to Manchester to cover the Lancashire region as a travelling salesman and initially found digs with Mrs Fearnley in Burnage Garden Village; âa model cooperative housing estate of some charm, which had generated a genuine sense of communityâ. Burnage Garden Village was associated with the Garden Suburb movement that attempted to provide solutions to overcrowding and the environmental and social degradation of industrial urban life. Influenced by the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and Octavia Hill, by the developments at Port Sunlight, Bournville and Letchworth and by German approaches to town planning, the Garden Suburb movement in Manchester was spearheaded by the Citizens Association for the Improvement of the Unwholesome Dwellings and Surroundings of the People. The Burnage development was financed by the Manchester Tenants Ltd which operated a âco-partnership systemâ that âmade the tenants joint owners with outside capitalists of the houses they occupiedâ. The Garden Village was organised to give tenants more rights than usual and a greater collective stake and say in the community in which they lived. By the time he was eleven Stenhouse knew a great many people in the village by name. Village life gave Stenhouse a rich sense of community and togetherness; and may well have provided him with that sense of balance between autonomy and community that MacDonald spoke about in his funeral oration.
Stenhouse remembered his father as âintelligent, quick-minded, charming, selfish and often absentâ, and âa manâs man who went out virtually every night to the pub or later the British Legion Club. Footballer, cricketer, amateur boxer, he was a raconteur and a sports memory man.â He was âa staunch liberal, disappointed at Churchillâs defection to the Conservativesâ in 1924. Stenhouseâs mother Joanna (nee Henderson), her sister and three brothers, were also raised in Dundee by their grandmother. Lawrence was Joannaâs only child. Before he was born she had had a number of miscarriages. Stenhouse described his mother as âgentle, charming, warm and unselfishâ and âcouthieâ, meaning agreeable. Her family had been Baptists, but she was not a religious woman and Stenhouse was not christened. He spent a lot of time with his mother, and it was because of her, he said, âthat he wanted to be a good boyâ. Writing about his early life at home in Burnage, Stenhouse noted that much of the social life among neighbours took place at the âback behind the cottage facadesâ where, for example, âAuntie Polly Sewell handed broth over the back hedge and my mummy in her turn shared lentil soupâ and âhousewives used the back lane for access to the main road shops and gossiped over garden gates as they did soâ.
Stenhouse attended the municipal, all age 5â14, elementary school in Burnage. Known as âThe Acaciasâ, the school âwas a substantial, four-square, redbrick houseâ with a generous garden, a monkey-puzzle tree and a drive to the front, in a district that Stenhouse later described as âhumble though aspirantâ. The headmistress was a Brethren evangelical who seemed to personify the protestant work ethic. At morning assembly there were exhortations to educational success, and hymns â from the Golden Bells Hymnbook, and a chorus from the Little Red Chorus Book. In the school hall there were honours boards recording the scholarships to Manchester Grammar School, William Hulmeâs Grammar School (for the girls Manchester High School and Withington High School) and the Corporation grammar schools. Acacias was the elementary school with the highest pass rate in Manchester. Stenhouse wrote that âit was during my elementary school years that I was taught â though not to a level of explicit consciousness â that I was a clever boy without talents or accomplishmentsâ. Nevertheless, he sat for the Manchester Grammar School (MGS) examination a year early in 1936, and was called for an oral examination that seems to have centred on âproblems of chess which involved the knightâs moveâ. Stenhouse had never seen a chessboard or chessmen before: he failed to get a place. Instead he was offered a place at the Sale Grammar School, but turned it down having a year to play with, and the following year he got a Foundation scholarship and went to MGS after all.
MGS was founded in the early sixteenth century and it saw itself at the forefront of academic education. Stenhouse entered the âmodern sideâ, as opposed to the âclassical sideâ, and was put in the top form. He studied French, English, history, geography, mathematics and art. His first Michaelmas term report from Mr Albert Hyslop, his form teacher, described him as a boy âof more than average ability and pleasant dispositionâ. He was 1st in the class of thirty boys for history and science, 4th in the class for English and geography, 22nd in the class for French and 26th in the class for mathematics. In the summer examinations overall he was 16th in the class. In his second year Stenhouseâs form master was Fred Hyslop, Albertâs brother. By the end of his second year Stenhouse had slipped to 26th in the class. Languages were not his forte, and since the school placed great store by languages both ancient and modern and as his first two form masters were both French teachers, it is perhaps not surprising that Stenhouseâs early promise was not immediately realised.
In the summer of 1939 Stenhouse went back to Manchester before the planned end of the family holiday âin response to a radio message to the nation that parents should return home with their children who were to be evacuatedâ. Stenhouse was thirteen and had been conscious of the foreboding of the adults around him. On 24 August a Ministry of Health broadcast told teachers in evacuation areas that they should return to their districts immediately. Discussions were held on Saturday 26 August with schools in Manchester about plans for a possible evacuation and on Monday 28th there was a rehearsal at which children were given labels and advice and practised marching in orderly fashion to imaginary buses. The Ministry of Health announced the final evacuation order on Thursday 31st. Early next day German forces invaded Poland and on Saturday 2 September MGS was evacuated by a fleet of buses and then by special train to Blackpool. At first the school were under canvas in a reception camp of bell tents, but after a few days they were flooded and, recalls Stenhouse, âwe were sitting shivering on the tables in the messing marqueeâ. They were then moved temporarily âto the cheap boarding houses in the streets leading inland from the Golden Mileâ. They had three daysâ schooling a week sharing the Blackpool schools with their own pupils on a basis of six-day occupancy. âOur experienced Blackpool landladiesâ, wrote Stenhouse,
sent us out after breakfast with a pack of sandwiches and told us to return for high tea. The art was to get oneâs parents to provide 2/6 for each free day and spend the whole time in the Fun House at the Pleasure Beach. There once you had paid the entrance fee you could stay all day coming down slides three storeys high or push girls into the rolling barrel or get flung into a promiscuous heap of persons on the social mixer.
It was not long until they were moved yet again and âbilleted by twos or even fours on the Blackpool bourgeoisie in the Stanley Park areaâ. Stenhouse and Joseph Hakim became the lot of Mr and Mrs Bailey, and although âthey were nice and considerate peopleâ, âone couldnât really make a noise thereâ and Stenhouse âfelt more alone and constrained than at any time since he had been torn away from homeâ. For Stenhouse one of the worst things was that they took him to church, a fate which Joseph escaped because he was Jewish. So Sundays were a misery. Not only had he never been to church before and had to have the leaves of the prayer book turned for him, but he couldnât sing and âworst of all was that every other boy in church wore a suitâ and he didnât possess one. In his leather patched sports jacket he felt like a âclassic disadvantaged evacueeâ, making him feel uncomfortably different and offending his emerging sense of status and style. He kept writing home begging for a suit, but to no avail. The period of evacuation marked an important transition from childhood to adolescence for Stenhouse, before MGS moved to Blackpool, he ânever really strayed from the narrowest paths of virtueâ, ...
