John Dancy: We Must Offer a Vision

Headmaster of Lancing when he was only 33, now headmaster of Marlborough, John Dancy "believes a public school can only be successful if it offers its pupils a vision - a vision of something they can live by, or aspire to". In his One Pair of Eyes John Dancy, one of Britain's most progressive public school heads, shows how he is trying to achieve his aims at Marlborough - a public school where there is no fagging or beating, where a small number of girls are admitted, and where the old games-playing traditions of "muscular Christianity" have no part in his concept of what a school community ought to be. Dancy's vision of understanding comes from a mixture of Greek and Christian ideals - in the words of one of his favourite quotations: "To Christ we owe compassion, to the Greeks everything else".