It is good to read the tributes to Harold Dent’s pioneering style as editor of The TES on the occasion of his 100th birthday. I remember well his campaigning for RA Butler’s 1994 Education Act, and the supportive contributions he made to the gatherings of illuminati of the movement known as The Third Way - the brainchild of Karl Mannheim and John Trevelyan.
Harold Dent had a shrewdness of judgment and in his time was one of the few who appreciated the farsightedness of Sir Michael Sadler. In the summer of 1941, the 80-year-old Sadler sent The TES five articles bearing the title Juncta Disjuncta. Dent printed all five, introducing them with a detailed appreciation in which he wrote of Sadler: “Every teacher owes to him a lasting debt for having preached so insistently the doctrine that the most gorgeous buildings are useless if the salaries paid to the staff who work in them are such as to unsettle the young, dispirit the old, discourage the skilled and make inevitable the unskilled.”
That Dent made The TES “not just a forum for the nascent 1944 Act, but a new kind of educational journal” is a most perceptive evaluation of his achievement.
J H HIGGINSON
Oastfield
12 St Lawrence Forstal
Canterbury, Kent
