How Progressive Can You Get?

For a small school (24 pupils), Britain's ultra-progressive, coed Horsley Hall in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, had had its share of the headlines. When a whipping-cane maker lectured at Horsley last fall, teen-age pupils grabbed him and flogged him with one of his own canes (TIME, Dec. 6). Later, Headmaster Robert Copping hit the news by announcing that he was founding a children's union to protect British kids everywhere from their reactionary elders. Last week, bearded Robert Copping was a headline again as a stream of shocked witnesses in the Eccleshall magistrates' court told just how progressive the Copping experiment in "do-as-you-like" education seemed to have got.

"There is nothing," declared the prosecuting attorney, "to prevent boys and girls at any hour from visiting each other in their bedrooms, and it is done." The court was told by the prosecutor that once, when one teen-aged boy dared another to seduce the school's middle-aged housekeeper, Assistant Headmaster Edward Reynolds had cracked, "I'll bet you a pound to a penny that you don't." Another witness said that the children were forever talking about sex in "short Anglo-Saxon words." A former matron at the school admitted having given one girl a contraceptive, though she recalled that Headmaster Copping had bawled her out for it.

From Copping's point of view, the whole case, which had been started on the complaint of a former Horsley Hall maintenance worker, was "preposterous." Though admitting that his pupils could visit in each other's bedrooms any time, he denied that at Horsley this led to sex relations, "not if they have been with us for more than a few weeks." Argued Copping's lawyer: "One of the most astonishing features in the case is that not a single parent has been called [by the prosecutor] to say they are dissatisfied with the way the children are treated or that the children have suffered."

The court seemed little impressed with such rebuttals. Copping and Reynolds had "exercised a baleful, destroying influence on the white souls of the children," it ruled. Then it ordered all students "removed to a place of safety," in effect, closing Horsley Hall. Said Copping, who promised to appeal the decision: "You'll hear from us again."

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