Craig Fees (2024) "Foreword" to “The Village That Once Was Our World”, by William Eiduks and Leonard Clarke, narratives compiled by Carolyn L. Mears, PhD.
Published by the Early Pestalozzi Children Project, 2024
In 2016 - during the evening before giving a short talk to introduce the Early Pestalozzi Children Project at Pestalozzi to an audience of trustees, staff, students, friends from the community, and a small group of early Pestalozzi children - I began a list of essential key-words on the back of an envelope. The first six, all with initial capitals, were “Careful Rigorous Caring Adding-Value Inclusive”, culminating in “LOVING”, in capital letters. Immediately after LOVING came “outreaching thorough rigorous thoughtful professional”. Later in the evening came “integrity” and “Visionary”, with a capital “V”. Later still came “humble proud patient”. By the time I went to bed there were forty-one in total, and I had missed at least one. Before I turned out the light and went to sleep, I wrote “kind loyal committed devoted”. The one I missed was “courageous”.
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I met Will and Len in person for the first time in 2013, at an “Archive Weekend” event for former students of Wennington School, a very special progressive boarding school which closed in 1975. Archive Weekends were social occasions with a serious community purpose, which the Wenningtonians had helped pioneer a decade earlier, and had then been generalised to other communities for children and even adults whose archives and collections of heritage we held. “We” was the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, a specialist archive, library and museum for therapeutic children’s and other communities which I had been asked to establish in 1989. It was on the site of an old therapeutic community for children in rural Gloucestershire, with extensive grounds and residential facilities where people could come together.
“Archive Weekends” were a kind of inter-generational family gathering: People related by virtue of having lived in the same children’s community and/or sometimes having lived and worked there, would come and live together for two, three or more days, over the course of which a family emerged and the culture and ethos of the original community unfolded. Through jokes and experiences unique to themselves the bonds of relationship appeared. During meals and cleaning up after; working together to preserve, explore, expand and explain the history, archives, and memories of their community, and to challenge them; in arguments and laughter; on walks, and talking late into the night before going to their rooms, the life and values of the community and what made it work, and not work, came alive, palpably and visibly.
Len and Will were thrown by invitation into this Wennington “Weekend”, and thrived. More keywords from 2016 applied - “clear-eyed, curious, disciplined, exciting, reflective, respectful, searching, generous...uncertain proactive voluble...”. “Insatiability”, with a lower case ‘i’, could easily have been rendered in all capitals. But most impressive was their capacity to belong; to be in place and “embracing” - another of the key-words - among the members of a community in the full flow of a family reunion which was not theirs. A curtain was drawn back, and among the keywords an essence of Pestalozzi was revealed.
Belonging, for children who have been thrown into darknesses that most of us can not conceptualise, is the most distant and fragile of possibilities, and that distance and fragility is carried into adulthood unless something profound happens. For children for whom their foundations have been undermined and their experiences of life fragmented, belonging is both the start and sometimes the greatest triumph. And here, embodied in two former Pestalozzi children, in the midst of a vigorous other community, was not just a profound sense of belonging, but an active reaching out from this belonging - outreaching to other members of their community, to you, to me, to anyone who cares enough about the damage that can be done to children and communities through human and non-human catastrophes to ask “What can be done and what shouldn’t be done to make these children’s futures creative, productive, and rewarding for them and for others? What is the evidence? Where is the evidence?”
The fact of this book is the evidence. They, the Pestalozzi children, in themselves, are the evidence. What they have to say is the evidence.
Many important and insightful books have been written and edited by founders and staff of therapeutic children’s communities, or by other professionals, or by former children from their personal experience; but I do not know of any book, or any project, like this one: Conceived, researched (rigorously - a keyword so key it appeared twice), recorded, written, project managed, brought to publication by the people who were children who grew up in the children’s community whose history and impact they are telling.
In this book you are invited to do what Will and Len did in 2013: immerse yourself in the evidence of possibility, to come to your own belief and inspiration in what you are capable of - as someone living in a world in which deprived and devastated childhoods are still generated; in which you may be or have been one of those children, or may encounter and care for others who are or have been one of those children. And to help answer that question - “What do children who have experienced exceptional disruptions and destructions, inheritors of an adult world dismantled around them and before they were born, and infused with traumas - what do these children need from an adult world?” Because we know the answers.