Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

142 So the cultural wheel turned. Upholstered by the sporting elements of the books and story papers, cricket was secured as an ingredient in the overall 1902 prescription for secondary education, by a country mile one of its more appetising adjuncts. In so far as school-based stories indoctrinated the English mentality as to how a secondary school should be shaped, this included cricket as the obligatory summer game. Many readers will rejoice with me at this outcome. Many of us found in school cricket an introduction to a pastime that would bring untold pleasure for years. At the same time, we might spare a tear for those who hated it. Like all forms of educational compulsion, there were those who were turned off the game possibly for life because they were forced to participate and then were humiliated by what was a very public failure. It is said that the simplest way of determining whether Shakespeare or Francis Bacon wrote the plays would be to check which one had turned in his grave when one of the canon had been yet again chosen for school examination study. The cost would be hundreds of pupils put off the bard for ever by its being pressed upon them willy-nilly. Cricket, like algebra or Latin translation, was not to everyone’s taste or liking. The explicit critique of the secondary school system hereabouts is not a sour grapes rant of one bemoaning his lot. I was fortunate enough to benefit hugely from a grammar school education, inclusive of some pleasant success at cricket. It was contemptuously said of Neville Chamberlain that he would have made a good Mayor of Peterborough in a bad year; I was Captain of the school 1 st Eleven in a poor summer, during which I was excitedly delighted to lead my Egerton ‘house’ cricketers, junior and senior, in winning the Cricket Cup. I was completely enmeshed in the system. Nonetheless, through professional experience and study, I came to understand that the system failed many, not only those who were unsuccessful in gaining entry but also some who had done so, given the cramped narrowness of its substance and the grinding stultification The Educational Effect