Word: ottershaw
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...county of Surrey, near London, was the first to take Parliament up. The county council went shopping for a suitable location, four years ago chose Ottershaw, an imposing Italianate country house with formal gardens, fishing ponds and a wooded 160-acre park. The council hired Arthur Edward Foot, a onetime assistant master at Eton, to supervise remodeling and act as headmaster. A year and a half ago, Foot and nine assistant masters opened Ottershaw School to its first 70 students...
...Comers. Ottershaw's students came from all income levels. (Some parents could afford the full tuition and boarding fees; others were unable to pay anything at all.) Dockers' sons and farmers' sons from three-R grade schools were mixed in with middle-class youngsters who had been learning Latin since they were seven. To provide for all comers, Foot and the council set a scale of boarding fees that varies from ?110 to nothing, depending on family income, a curriculum with choices ranging from the classics to courses in science and vocational training. For each...
...Most of Ottershaw's first crop of students had little idea of boarding-school discipline. From magazines and British comic books they had definite ideas of what they should be up to: they were all set for dormitory raids, pillow fights and secret midnight feasts. Foot's solution of the discipline problem: a student council made up of elected representatives from each class, supplemented later by the venerable system of student prefects. To level off social differences, he required all boys to do their share of tidying up, put a half-crown (35?) ceiling on weekly spending money...
Busy Bulldozers. So far, thought Surrey, the Ottershaw experiment was working pretty well. Enrollment had jumped to 120, and there were twelve applicants for every vacancy. Last month onetime Rugby Headmaster Percy H. B. Lyon called on Parliament to establish 300 new schools along similar lines. A more practical tribute came from the Labor Government itself. Though recently the government had been obliged to order cutbacks in new construction, including school building, it had given Ottershaw the green light. Bulldozers and construction crews were busy last week on the foundations for a new wing to house 60 more Ottershavians next...
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