Dulwich was far from the only school in the middle-to-late 19th century that was feeling the pressure to modernise and to expand its curriculum to include engineering and the sciences. Such pressure was widely felt by many schools. One such was Oundle School, whose failure to keep up with the times had led it into a period of decline. In July 1892, the Oundle Court of the
Grocer's Company, the governing body of the school, appointed Sanderson as the new headmaster.
Initial reception Sanderson's initial few years at Oundle were difficult ones. He faced stiff opposition to his reforms from staff, boys, and townspeople. Partly this was because of his background. He didn't have holy orders, hadn't attended a public school, wasn't particularly athletic, spoke with a strong Durham accent, and had a violent temper. The lack of holy orders, whilst insisting upon leading religious services at the school, raised questions of his religious orthodoxy. Because of the lack of a public school education, people held that he didn't have experience of what boarding school education was about. Of the lack of an athletic record, one of the biographers wrote in the official school biography: He also wasn't well served by the fact that he wasn't very good at communicating his ideas, and it took a long time for him to convey to people what he was planning and aiming to achieve. "It is possible he would have found his earlier years at Oundle easier if he had been more articulate." opined one of the masters. The school magazine,
The Old Oundelian, said of him that to him words were "an obdurate medium to the end". However, Sanderson appointed new assistant masters who shared his views, and ousted those masters that he had inherited from his predecessor who did not, such that after some seven years only three of the latter remained. (The dismissal of the Reverend Richard Edmonds Jones, the school chaplain, led to back and forth on the letters pages of the
Journal of Education when Edmonds Jones wrote a letter of complaint about how he had been treated by Sanderson. The
Journal editors decided to refuse all further correspondence on the subject in October 1899.)
Building programme Sanderson's vision for the future of schools can be seen from an address that he delivered at the
University of Leeds: This vision can be compared to the building programme that Sanderson undertook at Oundle over the years, which comprised the construction of laboratories, workshops, metalwork and woodwork shops, a forge, a foundry, botanical gardens, a meteorological station, an experimental farm, a drawing office, an observatory, and a library. The observatory was constructed the year before Sanderson died, 1921, on a school playing field, the Home Close, near to the centre of Oundle town, to house a
Cooke refracting telescope that had been presented to the school by
W. T. Carr MP, an old boy of the school. The museum was intended to be a "Temple of Vision", containing exhibits that illustrated the progress of humanity, and diagrams and charts of history. Its construction was funded by Sir
Alfred Fernandez Yarrow, who like Sanderson had lost a son (Eric Yarrow, an Oundelian) in the First World War. The project wasn't completed at the time of Sanderson's death, and he wavered somewhat on the name, sometimes referring to his idea as a "Tent of Meeting" or a "House of Vision". It is now the Yarrow Gallery.
Curriculum reform In addition to the extensive building programme, Sanderson completely reformed Oundle's curriculum. He introduced wholly new subjects including biochemistry and agriculture, and restructured the school into Classical, Modern Languages, Engineering, and Science sides. The latter two attracted boys to the school who would not have been interested in a strictly classical education. He also widened the scope of the teaching of the humanities, geography and history, to a degree unusual for the time. In the workshops, boys undertook a range of practical projects. During the First World War they made parts for munitions, and in 1905 a
reversing engine for a 4000
horsepower marine engine. Workshop projects were organised as group work, and in the style of an industrial factory: individual tasks were allotted to individual boys, but what they produced had then to be integrated with the output of others. A similar approach was adopted for non-engineering subjects, such as history and literature. A whole form would be subdivided into groups, each responsible for studying one aspect of a particular subject, whose collective work would be combined to form an overall result. Pupils were encouraged to be "Dalton-like", and to pursue original research of their own. The senior boys also took part in what were called "conversaziones": presentations to their peers (and others) of practical experiments in the sciences, categorised into physics plus mechanics, chemistry, biology, or workshop. These took place in the spring term, and boys who participated were allowed four or five days off all other work immediately before Speech Day, for work on their presentations, although at any other time work was expected to be done outwith school hours. Other innovations included the boys of the school, each year, producing one of the plays of Shakespeare, and, in the winter term, an
oratorio involving all of the boys of the school. More than one boy was cast for each part in the play, to provide a share in the experience for each boy. In the teaching of English, Sanderson preferred to employ the works of
John Ruskin, or any other such "uncharted" author, over Shakespeare; on the grounds that annotated copies of the works of such authors, providing ready-made opinions to be regurgitated for examinations, were not available, and therefore boys had to form their own opinions. He favoured Ruskin in particular because his opinions were controversial, and thus potentially stimulating. Sanderson's encouragement of engineering and practical work greatly influenced, amongst others, the young
Joseph Needham. In a 1973 interview, Needham recalled Sanderson thus:
Educational ethos Sanderson's aforementioned address to the University of Leeds also encompassed his vision of the ways that education should occur, continuing as it does: Sanderson's views on education were very similar to Wells', and Sanderson's reform programme was a practical instance of the progressive, science-based, coöperative, and systematic reformism that Wells himself also advocated. Both Sanderson and Wells believed that education should be a synthesis of the arts, humanities, and sciences; geared towards the individual aptitudes and interests of each pupil; and applied and technical in addition to theoretical and experimental. Wells also influenced Sanderson to include the teaching of Russian in the curriculum. Sanderson regarded schools as altruistic institutions, which should encourage coöperation rather than competition, and regarded them as microcosms of the world that they exist in. In the address to the University of Leeds, he argued that it was more important "for the effective growth of the nation" to "rescue the submerged, and raise the average" – in other words to ensure that the weak are not pushed out of education and to increase the average educational level of all pupils – than to focus exclusively upon enabling the progress of "men of ability". On the subject of coöperation over competition, he asserted that "the two are not of the same order of dimensions", and that the stimulation to be obtained by a pupil from the former was far greater than the stimulation from the latter. He also maintained that boys learned best by doing, and that all school work should be, at least in some sense, creative. Sanderson spoke and wrote on his ideas for education reform. In addition to writing , , and the preface to , he was a member of the 1916 Committee on the Neglect of Science, a lobbyist group of prominent scientists that had been formed after a letter written to
The Times claiming that Britain's failure in the First World War to that point had in part been to the neglect of "physical science" teaching in public schools in favour of the classics. The committee published a book in 1918, to which Sanderson contributed . He also addressed the May 1919 conference of the League for the Promotion of Science in education, the successor to the 1916 Neglect of Science committee, and in 1917 was a member of a committee of the British Association (alongside
Henry Edward Armstrong) that had been charged with reporting on the state of science education in British schools. == Death and posthumous biographies ==