My Dad was a frustrated Olympian. In 1952 as a regional champion of England he was eligible for the Olympic trials for the 5000 metres. He was beaten by a better athlete, the great Gordon Pirie, who went on to beat 10 World records and a bronze Olympic medal behind Vladimir Kuts. Just before his death, when I started thinking abou this story, I asked him what he thought of Gordon Pirie and he replied with surprising venom for an enfeebled old man “I hated him!”
He also hated Adolf Hitler. As a young soldier in WW2 he was stationed at Dover Castle, where he had joined the Army aged 15, which was a key defensive location on the English Channel and so he was not part of D-day and did not take part in the Liberation of Europe up to an almost including Berlin.
However in 1960 he did march on Berlin, well he drove down the Autobahn from Herford in our Hillman Minx, at the head of his team brandishing a cricket bat in order to challenge Adolf to a sporting duel in the Olympic Stadium. My friend Nick, a Jungian psychologist, thinks my Dad felt frustrated that he was both a soldier who had failed to fight in the war, and an Olympian who had failed to run at the Olympics. For reasons best known to himself he decided to address these omissions by protesting against Hitler, who had been dead for 15 years, by playing a cricket match in the Olympic Stadion. This became a much-loved family joke.
However my Dad had to overcome a great number of obstacles to make this silent protest a reality. This included not being able to tell anyone about the cricket match, and not allowing anyone to watch the it when it took place on Sunday 12th June 1960. I myself, who saw every Sunday cricket match that my Dad organised across the summers of 1958, 1959 and 1960, can only remember seeing the first ball as my Mum hurried my brother and I away from the field so as not to compromise my Dad’s promise. He had used the Queens official birthday, now being used to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, to borrow the Olympic Stadion.
He told me that we were going to Berlin in order to celebrate my actual birthday, 13th June. That was a cover story that I had believed for most of my life until quite recently when I started writing about how we humans learn by reflecting on my own development as a self-determined learner. This is part of my contribution to the developing pedagogy of Heutagogy. I lead World Heutagogy Day on 26th September each year since 2013 and I have been investigating how to put learning at the centre of education; recently publishing a book in the USA entitled Digital Learning.
Having thought that I had learned to learn in the Sixties by listening to the Beatles and sharing my interest with other fans (and written a novel about that) I realised that my basic learning skills of literacy and numeracy were the result of being “accidentally homeschooled ” by my Mum and Dad respectively between 1958 and 1961.
However I am an enduring radical who seems to have the ability to go into a new situation and create something afresh. That doesn’t come from having good literacy skills and being quite fluent at mental arithmetic, which basically are skills for improving classroom performance in education systems. Only recently did I realise that my Dad’s 1960 protest at Hitler’s Nazi sportswashing of the Nazi regime in 1936 had had a profound effect on me despite his near silence on the affair.
Two years later, in 1962, I transitioned from Primary to Secondary School, often a difficult process. Aged 11 I was bullied, somewhat normal then, but mostly I was deeply unhappy that my new school, already my 9th school so I was very used to being the new boy, played rugby and not football. So aged 11 at a new school I formed a new soccer league, which took place every Saturday morning on the Stray in Harrogate, Yorkshire, as a 6-a-side competition.
I’ve recently concluded that this was informed by my Dad’s actions in Berlin. More that that, as he never boasted about it, much less even talked about his protest, this was not “learning by example” I’ve now concluded, as I intend to write about in 2023, that this was “learning by felt experience” My Dad had implicitly taught me how to protest by taking actions whilst never saying a word. I’m in Berlin to to try and uncover some more of this, to me, fascinating story.
fred(.)garnett @ gmail (.) com
Cricket in the Olympic Stadium 