Sanderson of Oundle

The leitmotif of all the later writings of H. G. Wells is education. When therefore Mr. Wells designates a man in measured terms as " the greatest man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy," one is not surprised to find him an educator. The man is Frederick William Sanderson, headmaster of Oundle School, Northamptonshire, England, who died last year at the age of 66 in the height of his powers. He is the hero of a biographical sketch by Wells now running serially in The New Republic.

Sanderson was educated at Durham and Cambridge, lectured at various colleges until 1892, when he went to Oundle, then a small country grammar school. He was an authority on hydrostatics and electricity, but nothing human was alien to his interests.

Ruddy, jolly, plump, energetic, roguish, confidential--these are some of the adjectives with which Wells sketches Sanderson's surface character and mannerisms. Exceptionally bold, creative, emancipated, with a "mind like at octopus," perpetually growing, leaving others behind, a "rock-climber";-- these are the outlines of the mental picture.

Sanderson's life work at Oundle encompassed all the main educational ideas of the last half-century. His school became extraordinarily prosperous and had a five-year waiting list. But he never lost the goal of preparing his boys for citizenship in the great world. The center of Oundle was a sort of museum--" the Temple of Vision"--which Sanderson planned, but did not complete, before he died. Charts, exhibits, putting before the opening minds of boys the romance of evolution in life, society, industry, science, art, were to be on its walls. All the teaching of history, geography, literature was planned in relation to the "Temple." The boys were constantly linked with the life of the world they were soon to enter--by an experimental farm, actual engineering work in outside businesses, trips to industrial districts, research at the Marine Biological Station. The ingredients are not all original. Our American experimental schools inspired by Dewey, Wirt and others, have many of them. But the ensemble as Sanderson shaped it was unique. And Wells is his prophet.