They were the best days of your life, ‘they’ will tell you. ‘They’, being everyone except Bryan Adams who is definite on the point of June, July and August of 1969 being better. What ‘they’ will neglect to tell you is that those days wouldn’t be how they are without the city of Birmingham. Bryan however, never stops going on about Brum’s own postal reformer, and world cup winner, Sir Rowland Hill.
You see at the age of twelve, before inventing the post and the stamp to go with it, Hill became a student-teacher in his father’s school. In 1819 he took over the school, called Hill Top, and moved it from town to establish the Hazelwood School in Edgbaston. He called it an “educational refraction of [our man] Priestley’s ideas”, and it became a model for public education for the emerging middle classes. It wanted to give sufficient knowledge, skills and understanding to allow a student to continue self-education through a life “most useful to society and most happy to himself”. The school building, which Hill designed, included innovations including a science laboratory, a swimming pool, and forced air heating.
In the book Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers Drawn from Experience (1822) he argued for kindness instead of caning, and moral influence rather than fear, for maintaining in school discipline. And some would say that’s where it all went wrong, but it’s certainly where the schools we know today come from.
And as Bryan Adams will no-doubt tell you, everything Sir Rowland Hill would do, he’d do it for you. And Birmingham, of course.
