Education From My Father Alma Arnould, née Gattegno My contribution to The Gattegno Effect starts with early recollections of what it meant to be in my father’s presence during my formative years. EGYPT My sister Lola and I had a very happy childhood, in spite of the upheaval of the Second World War. During that time, my father spent a lot of time with me and we often played. He always told me bedtime stories, fairy tales from different cultures, as well as the French classics – simplified so I could understand them. But he also made up his own stories, to suit my age as I grew up. I knew then that it wasn’t the same, because he often forgot the names of the characters he was inventing for me. Before that, he never forgot the names of the characters from novels and plays. So already in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he had started on the stories he first published in French as the Six contes pour enfants (Six Tales for Children) to which he later added two more for the Eight Tales. He chose to publish our favorite stories. His story-telling inspired me and I too entertained groups of children with magical tales, using their knowledge of the Egyptian environment to make the situations more real for them, including Arabic expressions in my English or French stories. When I started at an English primary school, not knowing any of the language, I remember that I argued with the teacher showing me A for Apple, B for Bunny, C for Cat. I could not see the logic as “pomme” and “lapin” were pictured, C was valid for “chat.” So I must already have been reading in French, and I suppose Dad helped me learn. ENGLAND After the war, Dad went to England to lecture at Liverpool University for a year and returned to take the family over in 1946. He was then a lecturer at London University. We were very suddenly uprooted and taken to a country still suffering from the privations of war, where children played in bombed
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sites. The whole environment was strange, the people and the language; though my sister and I spoke English well, the education system was different, friends difficult to find. We moved three times and went to different schools before we settled in Hampton Hill. He sent us to good schools, encouraging us to do well. Later he said to us, “I will leave you nothing but the education I am giving you,” and so he helped me financially to obtain several qualifications I wanted after I left school. When I think back on that stage of my life, I realize that I did not see all that much of my father. He was always busy, teaching during the weekdays and very often spending weekends writing many articles and books. He seemed to have them fully composed in his head, before he put pen to paper and just sat and wrote, then my mother typed out his work. He also had many visitors from different countries, mathematicians or scientists, so we knew that this was not quite a normal household. He was always very involved with children, and had a huge effect on any who came in contact with him, among them my teenaged friends, who envied us because they thought we were with him all the time. He not only wrote his own books. He also translated two of Jean Piaget’s books with our friend Mrs. F. Hodgson, and I often listened to them as they worked and considered how to convey Piaget’s ideas in English. Mrs. Hodgson was a lecturer at the language education department of the University of London where Dad was in the mathematics department. She helped us to adjust to life in England and her library of English literature was a great source of enjoyment for me. CAMPS In 1947, Dad organized his first holiday camp for children in Neuilly, France. He had founded the Association Internationale pour l’Echange des Jeunes (International Association for the Exchange of Youth) to bring together children from different nationalities