Geoffrey Marshall was headteacher of three schools over a period of 35 years, 17 of those at Sherwood Park Junior School in Tunbridge Wells, which he left in 1987. He retired in 1989 following two further years as a Local Authority advisor. The articles in this book have a common purpose: to encourage someone with influence to begin a movement to revive teaching as a service to children.

“If children are encouraged to choose within their growing capacity to
choose, they will flourish in all the fields of enquiry and once more
astonish the world. Those who destroyed it did so essentially because
they could not bear to think that they might lose control of a vigorous,
unpredictable, irreverent movement whose work could not be measured
and was only concerned with the child.
“They didn’t understand that learning by experience is a
difficult skill to acquire. Doing what you are told is easy, the challenge
for some being to see what they can get away with. Making choices is a
skill which lives with you as we see in the dilemmas in which our MPs
find themselves.”