When Plato writes about education, he comes up with a brilliant image of the master-pupil relationship: ‘After a long partnership in a common life, truth flashes on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark.’ The Labour and Tory education manifestos have very little to say about this ‘rather dodgy’ (© C. Clarke) concept. They think the answer to school problems is to play about with systems and structures.
The Roman professor Quintilian (c. ad 90) is the first ancient to think seriously about how schools work. He insists that a good school depends as much on the character and psychological understanding of the teacher as on the materials for instruction. He must be a man of scholarship and high principles, since pupils learn by example. He must watch a child’s behaviour, and relate the size and difficulty of any task to a child’s attention span and capacity.
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