Word: burgesses
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...article about Burgess Hill School [March 9]: "A School Without Rules," I fear, will only develop ''a Classroom of Fools...
...Burgess Hill School near London, two seven-year-olds strolled into the recreation room. "Got a match?" asked one. "Sure," said the other. The boys were puffing away, when suddenly the headmaster appeared. "Hi, Jimmy," they said with friendly smiles. Waving back with kind disinterest, James East, M.A. (Cantab.), explained to a visitor: "Kids always smoke, and I'd rather know about it than have it done in secret...
...Burgess Hill is the tight little isle's loosest "freedom" (progressive) school. Shunning all rules, it allows boys and girls aged 7 to 17 to smoke, swear, pet, go barefoot, stay dirty-and study only if they care to. The school looks it: a crumbling Victorian mansion with peeling ochre paint and broken windows, its front pillars alternately scrawled with "Ban the Bomb" and "Keep the Bomb." Inside is a happy jumble of paintpots, squashed toffees, dirty clothes and unmade beds. Scribbled over the walls are drawings, poems and odd messages. Sample: "I've been sick...
Discipline Dulls. Founded 25 years ago, Burgess Hill operates on the hopeful theory that freedom breeds responsibility, not license. This exactly suits Headmaster East, 46, a bachelor who believes that discipline dulls the spirit. The son of a professional soldier, East once aspired to be an Anglican priest, studied theology after Cambridge. When a wartime stint in the R.A.F. eroded his faith, he turned his fervor to children. Eight years ago, he took over Burgess Hill "to establish a community in which the individual can find out for himself the extent to which he must curb his personality...
...Majority for God. Interestingly, smoking and swearing diminish at Burgess Hill as the kids get older. Unrepressed while young, says East, they simply grow out of it. Drinking is almost unknown; the kids apparently value their pocket money. As for sex, boys and girls can theoretically bathe or even sleep together, but as it turns out, they only pet a little. "At my old school," explains one girl, "we talked about boys all day long. Here boys and girls mix so freely that we take one another for granted...