Great Men at Bad Moments by John Saunders

Author:John Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Self Publication

3. THE REVEREND JOHN BRADLEY DYNE

Headmaster of Highgate School from 1838 to 1874: of the ‘lightning and lashed rod’

The Reverend John Bradley Dyne was one of the small group of ‘very superior set of men’ who – following the meeting at Uppingham School held in 1869 – launched the Headmasters’ Conference, putting a brake on the liberalisation and modernisation of English public schools, and in so doing helped create a national system of education which overvalued ‘the classics’ and undervalued technology. Unlike the majority of those who attended the first meeting of the HMC – who were not against curriculum innovation per se – The Reverend Dyne was a dyed in the wool traditionalist. Classics was the lynchpin of Highgate’s curriculum. One of his pupils, Edmund Hodgson Yates, once well known as a novelist and dramatist, remembered him in an autobiographical memoir as follows:

I look back to the six years which I passed at the Highgate School with very little pleasure. The head-master, Dr Dyne, was a capable pedagogue enough, not more than usually narrow-minded, priggish, and conventional. He was a type of the old-fashioned pedantic school, which looked upon Oxford as the “hub of the universe”, thought the study of Latin and Greek the primary object of our creation, despised modern languages and foreign countries, and believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment. A desperate “swisher” the doctor, as I had cause to know, and not overburdened, I fully believe, with tact, judgment, or impartiality.

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