The Hopeless Ones

Though he had heard quite a bit about Finchden Manor - school for maladjusted boys 25 miles southwest of Canterbury -the London Times correspondent was hardly prepared for the frail, abstracted man who runs it. "What is the curriculum?" asked the correspondent.

"There is none," replied George A. Lyward.

"But . . . can you tell me what the boys are doing at this particular moment?"

"I have a rough idea. I can tell you that three are in London. Two . . . are playing croquet. One has just been given -L-20 to start breeding budgerigars [parakeets]. Another is thinking of making a telescope, but won't get a penny till he shows that he means it. And one has run away."

"Run away?" asked the correspondent.

"I think he'll come back," said G. A. Lyward.

In 27 years of such casual administration, G. A. Lyward has rescued scores of disturbed boys for whom teachers, doctors and parents had given up hope. What is his secret? Correspondent Michael Burn decided to find out. He joined the Finchden Manor staff, eventually published a book (Mr. Lyward's Answer; Hamish Hamilton) that last week was the talk of British educational circles. Though Schoolmaster Lyward's secret is too complex to be entirely clear, he emerges from the book as one of the most unusual of living educators.

Respite for a While. Actually, Finchden Manor is not a school in the ordinary sense. It has no board of governors, no blazers or old-school ties, no school hall and no chapel. There are no fixed terms or holidays, and except for bedtime and meals, which the boys cook and serve themselves, there are no fixed hours. For Correspondent Burn, one clue to Finchden lies in the word "respite" -the belief, says G. A. Lyward, "that some young people needed complete respite from lessons as such, in schools as such, so that they could be shepherded back from the ways . . . by which they have escaped for a while their real challenge."

Finchden's 40 boys have an average age of 17, come from every sort of home and background. Some are rich, some poor, quite a few come from what would seem to be normal families. One boy was the victim of an alcoholic schoolmaster who would sometimes tie his hands behind his back, force him to eat until he vomited, and then refuse to allow him to change his soiled clothes. One boy had been to 17 schools by the time he was 16. Others were regularly beaten or mistreated by their parents or foster parents. A good many were the victims of another sort of tyranny: overindulgent parents who pampered them into mental paralysis.

Kings & Jeweled Chains. They come with a variety of symptoms. One lived in a dreamworld of knights and kings. Another, who had been a model child, suddenly went berserk, smashed every bit of glass in his home, disappeared for four days. A few had threatened suicide; one boy had stolen his mother's jewelry. One arrived wearing five vests, another brought 100 ties, still another came wearing a jeweled chain about his neck. One packed a loaded revolver, another brought along a stack of books on psychology. A few had religious manias, and one had the habit of setting fire to churches.

For all this variety of trouble, most of the boys seemed to have one thing in common. Their lives, Lyward learned, had been "usurped." Usually they had been pressured into trying to be something they thought they could never be. As a result, they either rebelled or became abnormally submissive. By removing all these pressures, Finchden was also able to remove the neurotic defenses the boys had built up. Though nearly adults, and above average in intelligence, they usually went through a stage of returning to childhood. But that was part of their cure. "They're small," G. A. Lyward once explained, "or they've been made to feel small, and they've wanted to feel big. They're really little boys, and here that's what they become . . . Why not let them have back their childhood?"

New Family. Though Finchden has no regular curriculum, there is always plenty to do. But without rigid instructions from Lyward and his six-man staff, the -boys must fall back on their own resources. The more they do, the more confident they become. The more confident they become, the more easily they learn about themselves. They learn to play games and musical instruments, build radios and tend the manor's swarm of animals. When they are ready, they take up normal school study. Some boys collected books; one collected glassware; another gave tea parties in a small shack and locked the door to keep his guests from leaving. No one sneered. The boys soon learned to accept one another's idiosyncrasies. As a boy's months passed at Finchden, he not only became an accepted part of a tolerant community, he also found a family to replace the one he had lost.

G. A. Lyward wanders among his charges as a special friend -but he is a friend who can become stern and withhold favors. Occasionally his discipline can seem arbitrary: he might let one boy go to London three times in a month, and not let another go at all. This "unfairness" is a part of his effort to help each boy become aware of personal relationships. "The real secret of living with children," says he, "lies in knowing how to be creative in taking away and in being 'unfair' and haphazard, so that the gift shall never deny the children increasing awareness of the giver ... A gift by itself means nothing."

Come to Terms. Lyward does not rely on psychoanalysis to get results. He relies more on the absence of fear, the necessary, temporary suspension of excessive moral judgments, and a personal ability to draw out a boy until he is able to face himself. Of the 270 boys he has worked with, 20 turned out to be hopeless psychotics. A few left or were withdrawn by their parents before they were ready. But the majority have come to terms with the world, and a good many have achieved spectacular success. Among them:

P: A onetime pathological liar, thief and vandal whose psychiatrist wrote: " I cannot warn you too strongly of the depths of his depravity." After leaving Finchden he finished his education, commanded a light cruiser during the war, won a decoration, now heads a large business.

P: A chronic thief, who also set a church on fire, became a successful journalist who specializes in the problems of juvenile delinquents.

P: A confirmed liar and sex offender later rose to the top of a government department. "If only he had not been so brusque with the Prime Minister," one of his superiors said, "he would be head of the department."

To G. A. Lyward, education is "nourishment." The kind of nourishment he provides would probably not suit normal boys, and perhaps only he could give it so successfully to the abnormal. He breaks many of the rules of psychology, and even the boys he cures do not know exactly how he did it. "What do you learn there?" a neighbor once asked a boy from Finchden. "We learn," said the boy, "to live."

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