At the age of 10 Gordon Brown became, in his own words, a guinea-pig. On the
basis of an IQ test, he was plucked from his primary school in Fife to join
a select group of intellectually gifted children at Kirkcaldy High School,
one of the best secondary schools in Scotland.
For the next six years, the young Brown and 35 fellow members of the so-called
E-stream (standing for early) were nurtured in an academic hothouse, taught
in separate classes, expected to excel despite being one or two years
younger than their peers, and rigorously prepared for university.
Some thrived on the pressure. Some floundered. A few suffered. Mr Brown was
the most precocious product of the E-stream, sailing on to Edinburgh at the
age of 16 and then becoming the youngest ever rector of that university. Yet
he loathed and resented what he described as a ludicrous experiment on young
lives.
Much has been written about the Scottish roots of this “son of the manse” with
“psychological flaws”, according to his enemies, and a granite sense of
purpose, according to his friends. Yet little attention has been paid to
this crucial aspect of his childhood, the years he spent being fast-tracked
through school as part of an artificial intellectual elite.
The experiment was abandoned in 1967 but may have marked Mr Brown in various
ways. He will be the most avowedly intellectual Prime Minister since
Churchill, an avid reader and writer who declared this week: “Education is
my passion.” Yet his past as a child prodigy, selected for greatness and
schooled to be special, may also explain the weight of expectation and the
sense of entitlement that surround him, and what some see as a controlling
personality and an intensely serious cast of mind.
The Old Etonian David Cameron is often seen as a product of a very particular
sort of education, but the old school influence may weigh just as heavily on
Mr Brown. Transferred to the E-stream, leapfrogging two years, he was
expected to take control of his academic life at a time when most
schoolchildren are still mastering joined-up writing. By 12 he was
specialising in history; by 14, he was taking his School Leaving
Certificate.
The E-Stream project was the invention of Douglas Mackintosh, the chief
education officer of Fife County Council, as a way of pushing more state
school students on to university. Pupils with an IQ above 130 were informed
that they were being moved to secondary school a year early, and not just
any secondary school. Kirkcaldy High School celebrates its 425th birthday
next month (Mr Brown, inevitably, will unveil a plaque), and there are few
schools in the country with a more impressive academic record. Its alumni
include the economist Adam Smith and the architect Robert Adam. Thomas
Carlyle was once a teacher. Even the school motto seems to echo Mr Brown’s
driven personality: Usque Conabor, always strive hard.
“You have to understand that Fife is education-crazy,” Bruce Durie, a former
E-stream pupil who is now academic director of genealogical studies at the
University of Strathclyde, said. “The place is geared to the idea that you
go and get an education and you make something of yourself.”
Judith Kerr is another product of the experiment, but one with a unique
vantage point: like Brown, she went to university at 16; as an adult she
returned to the school and joined the staff; today she is deputy head
teacher at Kirkcaldy High. The school, housed in modern buildings on the
edge of Kirkcaldy, has been refurbished since Mr Brown’s day. Ms Kerr, a
bustling, bright-eyed woman, points out the wooden plaque where Gordon
Brown’s name is carved as “Dux” of 1967, the school’s highest academic
achiever. “He was 10 when he came to the school, while everyone else was
12,” she said. “For some that was fine, but for others, who did not have the
emotional maturity, it was the worst thing. Out of the 40 in my year, at
least two tried to commit suicide.”
Perhaps the most damning verdict of all on the pioneering project comes from
Mr Brown himself. Today, given the controversy over streaming, he is
reticent about the E-stream experiment, but at the age of 16 he wrote an
essay condemning the “educationalist in his ivory tower” who had dreamt up
such an inequitable, high-pressure way to educate a minority of children.
The typewritten essay is extraordinary for its articulacy and its bitterness.
“I was a guinea-pig,” he wrote in May 1967. “The victim of a totally
unsighted and ludicrous experiment in education, the result of which was to
harm materially and mentally the guinea-pigs.”
He did not detail the damage that he felt the accelerated learning had done to
him, but noted that as a teenager he had “more problems than I had years . .
. I watched each year as one or two of my friends would fail under the
strain. I saw one girl who every now and then would disappear for a while
with a nervous breakdown.
“I was lucky and passed, but many of my friends met with dismal failure,
despair and a sense of uselessness. I cannot emphasise too much the
demoralisation I saw in some of those guinea-pigs.”
Mr Brown’s view of E-stream is echoed by others who experienced it. “Some
people thrived but others found it pretty difficult: if they didn’t keep up
they felt like failures,” said Bill Laing, a Microsoft executive in Seattle
who was in the E-stream two years behind Mr Brown. “I don’t think it did me
much harm, except that I probably went to university too early.”
There were other high-achievers: Val McDermid, a year below Mr Brown, is now a
highly successful novelist; Murray Elder, now Lord Elder, was Mr Brown’s
contemporary in the E-stream and remains one of his closest advisers; John
Millar runs a computer and IT company in England.
Others, however, say that they still bear the scars, and years later some
still feel a sense of inadequacy. Naturally, the success stories are happier
to relate their experiences than those who struggled. One former E-stream
pupil agreed to be quoted on condition of anonymity. “I think it really
damaged me,” she said. “I never felt up to the others, and I dropped out of
college because I was too immature and really homesick. It took me a long
time to feel confident. Even now, I still don’t want the people I was at
school with to know how I felt.”
Almost every E-stream product seems to agree that their school experience was
profound, enduring and very different from that of their contemporaries.
Unlike other streaming systems, the E-groups were not picked out because of
an aptitude in a particular subject, but because they were intended to excel
across the board. Separated from their own age group, but expected to
compete with their elders, they were made to feel special, and
self-conscious. Ms Kerr said: “You had to try that much harder. I am not
sure being told we were clever was good for us.”
Another point of agreement is that, even among a select group, Mr Brown stood
out for his academic prowess, without being remembered as a swot.
“He wasn’t just a bookworm,” Bruce Durie said. “He sold programmes at the
football. He was socialised, if you know what I mean.”
The young Gordon was in the first batch of E-stream boys and girls. A year
after he left school, the E-stream experiment was abandoned, for reasons
that remain obscure because a fire at Fife council destroyed official
records. The introduction of comprehensive education in Scotland was
undoubtedly a contributing factor.
Today the E-stream project is just a conflicting memory for a small group of
middle-aged Scottish men and women, but as a controversial experiment in
educational engineering it perhaps lives on in the man who will soon be
Prime Minister: competitive, driven, sober, intellectual, occasionally
awkward and marked out from boyhood as exceptional. Mr Brown proved to be
the most successful guinea-pig but also, to judge from his own assessment in
1967, the angriest.
“Mistakes made with materials are revocable,” he wrote. “Mistakes made with
people cannot be altered.”
Learning lessons of alternative schools
— At Summerhill School in Suffolk, all lessons are optional, and
pupils are free to choose what to do with their time. The coeducational
boarding school is the original alternative “free” school and was founded in
1921 by A.S. Neill. School rules are made by majority vote in meetings in
which pupils and staff have equal votes
— The first bilingual state primary school in England opened last year. Pupils
at the Wix Primary School in southwest London, are taught in English
half the time and in French for the remainder. Wandsworth Council has backed
the initiative, which has also drawn support from the British and French
Governments
— Pupils at St Thomas Aquinas' Roman Catholic High School in
Chorlton, near Manchester, are to receive the same teacher for every lesson,
every day, up to the age of 14. Specialists will be brought in only for
science, languages, design and PE. The move to replicate the primary-school
style of teaching is intended to help pupils to adapt to secondary school
and to help to improve poor results
