John Haden Badley
Encyclopedia
Bedales School
Bedales School is a co-educational independent school situated in Hampshire, in the south east of England. Founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley in reaction to the limitations of conventional Victorian schools, today the school is one of the most expensive in the UK, charging £9,985 per term for a...
, which claims to have become the first coeducation
Coeducation
Mixed-sex education, also known as coeducation or co-education, is the integrated education of male and female persons in the same institution. It is the opposite of single-sex education...
al public boarding school in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1893.
Born in Dudley
Dudley
Dudley is a large town in the West Midlands county of England. At the 2001 census , the Dudley Urban Sub Area had a population of 194,919, making it the 26th largest settlement in England, the second largest town in the United Kingdom behind Reading, and the largest settlement in the UK without...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...
, West Midlands
West Midlands (region)
The West Midlands is an official region of England, covering the western half of the area traditionally known as the Midlands. It contains the second most populous British city, Birmingham, and the larger West Midlands conurbation, which includes the city of Wolverhampton and large towns of Dudley,...
, England, son of Dr. James Payton Badley and Laura Elizabeth Best his wife. He was the grandson of John Badley
John Badley (surgeon)
John Badley, F.R.C.S. student of John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. His 1801 lecture notes of Abernethy are in the archives at the University of Birmingham School of Medicine....
, one of the original 300 fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons
Royal College of Surgeons of England
The Royal College of Surgeons of England is an independent professional body and registered charity committed to promoting and advancing the highest standards of surgical care for patients, regulating surgery, including dentistry, in England and Wales...
. Early in life he saw the poverty and squalor of many working class in the Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
. When fifteen he entered the Upper School at Rugby
Rugby School
Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...
.
These early experiences were very influential in shaping his ideas of what education should not be. While a student at Trinity College Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
he gained the appreciation of a standard of music and theater and he described King's Chapel
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....
as providing "a standard of loveliness of trained voices in that architectural setting of something near perfection." His autobiography describes a tea with Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
at which they discussed the English Poets. Here too his friendship with Edmund Garrett encouraged him to join the small minority of men who supported the women's movement for socio-political equality. In 1892 he married Garrett's sister Amy who would be a strong partner until her death in 1956, and the drive behind one of Bedales's most important innovations - successful co-education. A school, he felt, should be organized like a family, with willing cooperation for common ends as the main motive rather than on the basis of mere competition. He felt that the training for social usefulness held equal importance with the fullest possible development of the individual.
At Cambridge Badley became a lifelong socialist, influenced by the ideals of William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
about art and community life. But the decisive influence on the direction these ideas should take was Cecil Reddie founder of Abbotsholme School and arguably the originator of the 'modern' British progressive school. Graduating from Cambridge with a first class classics degree in 1887, Badley heard about the plans for Reddie's school through his university friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , was a British historian and political activist. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.A noted pacifist, Dickinson protested against Britain's...
when he came down in 1888, went there and was instantly fascinated. He was, at the age of twenty-four, one of the first masters appointed, but it is probable that from the start he had secret plans to found a school of his own. In 1893, after two and a half years Reddie's increasingly autocratic temperament - and the fact that Badley wanted to marry and Reddie said he could not - gave him the impetus to leave and start Bedales.
All Badley's initial ideas ― though their later development was quite different ― were taken from Reddie. For instance the curriculum was English based, not classical, and wide ― with science, art, music, French, German, and opportunities for plays and hobbies. Religion was non-dogmatic and non-sectarian. Boys were not crammed for exams, there were no prizes and lessons were only in the mornings. The games madness of Rugby and the conventional Public School was condemned; instead much time was spent on manual labour in fields and gardens, and the boys were also taught tailoring, boot making and cookery. Badley also copied many of the early organisational details too, right down to the earth closets which enabled him to return to the soil that which had been taken from it.
He claimed, in his own modesty, to owe much to Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...
, Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who exemplified Romanticism in his approach....
, Fröbel and Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
. Helen Parkhurst
Helen Parkhurst
Helen Parkhurst was an American educator, author, lecturer, the originator of the Dalton Plan and the founder of The Dalton School....
of the Dalton Plan
Dalton Plan
The Dalton Plan is an educational concept created by Helen Parkhurst.Inspired by the intellectual ferment at the turn of the 19th century, educational thinkers such as Maria Montessori and John Dewey began to cast a bold vision of a new progressive approach to education...
would draw on his experience years later in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. He founded Bedales in January 1893 in an old Elizabethan manor at Haywards Heath, then in 1898 at the insistence of his wife Amy, an ardent suffragette, he took further risk of engaging in a 'preposterous experiment' which led to Bedales becoming a fully coeducational boarding school. In May 1899 this pioneering headmaster started building a new complex which still serves the school today at Steep, Petersfield, Hampshire.
Badley was a great educationalist, an able Classicist; tall handsome charismatic, leading through example and great personal authority. Integral to that persona though was the personal reserve and sexual repression characteristic of the English Public School system, coupled with the quaint and even kranky - to modern sensibilities at least - obsessions of 1890 Sandal Socialism and German Naturkultur: the emphasis on cold baths, earth closets, homespun fabrics, and "unsilly" (i.e. non-sexual) friendship between adolescent boys and girls. He was strict and he was obeyed; he neither smoked nor drank: "When he came stalking with his quick, silent tread, into the classroom there was immediate silence; if there happened to be a piece of paper on the floor, he would point to it without deigning to say a word, and the boy nearest would hurriedly pick it up."
He created a marvelous example of the evolving school. His educational outline, which he knew would fill out and develop as the years passed, became a framework to which he would continue to contribute and set outer limits, but then allowed the school to evolve. While he would be called "Chief" for the rest of his life by students and staff alike, he did not dominate as most great headmasters have. At the age of seventy he retired to Cholesbury
Cholesbury
Cholesbury is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, on the border with Hertfordshire. It is situated in the Chiltern Hills, about east of Wendover, north of Chesham and from Berkhamsted....
, near Tring
Tring
Tring is a small market town and also a civil parish in the Chiltern Hills in Hertfordshire, England. Situated north-west of London and linked to London by the old Roman road of Akeman Street, by the modern A41, by the Grand Union Canal and by rail lines to Euston Station, Tring is now largely a...
, after being headmaster of his school for forty-two years.
He wrote a number of books in his lifetime which include After the War (1917), Bedales: A Pioneer School (1923), Form and Spirit (1951), and his autobiography, Memories and Reflections, published in 1955, written ten years earlier and given to a friend and colleague for posthumous publication. After the friend died he consented to have it released. Yet it was his last work that can be looked at as his magnum opus: A Bible for Modern Readers (the New Testament) in 1961 and The Bible As Seen Today (the Old Testament) in 1965 together comprise over 1000 pages.
After his wife's death he returned to live his last years in the School grounds where he died.
A favorite quotation was "Labor, Art, Worship, Love, these make men's lives."
External links
- John Haden Badley's biographic sketch at Find A GraveFind A GraveFind a Grave is a commercial website providing free access and input to an online database of cemetery records. It was founded in 1998 as a DBA and incorporated in 2000.-History:...
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