[Education For Tomorrow: No 95, 2008]
Jill Brown
3rd July 1945 – 1st December 2007
Jill was a member of the editorial board of Education For Tomorrow, a lifelong communist, a committed and effective campaigner, an accomplished linguist, a Francophile, a jazz musician, a leader in the Woodcraft Folk — and much more besides.
She was a local officer in the National Union of Teachers, first in the London Borough of Sutton and then in Cambridgeshire — a hard working membership secretary in the latter at the time of her death — and was known for her forthright views and her willingness and ability to argue those views.
At the same time, she was also known for regarding all union members — both those with whom she agreed and disagreed — as her ‘sisters and brothers’, and fought hard both for unity within the union, and also for professional unity through the establishment of a single union for all teachers.
She was a dedicated teacher — an often-used phrase, but one that genuinely applied to Jill. Her view of education could be summed up in a quotation from that of the great educationalist and fighter against injustice, Paulo Freire — a quotation that appears on Jill’s NUT local association banner — ‘Education is never neutral — it either oppresses or it liberates’. No one could ever have been in any doubt about which approach Jill took, about whose side she was on. Her teaching was always for liberation, for real communication, for advance.
She showed the children in her charge — both as a teacher and as a leader in The Woodcraft Folk — great humanity and care, but was no pushover — she always expected the best of them too, and let them know it. Many, many of them will remember her throughout their lives for her support and guidance — for touching and changing their lives.
She was a creative and skilled woman, with a love of languages — and the diversity of the people and communities that used them — a love of music of all kinds, and particularly the exuberance and the soul of jazz. And of course, being Jill, such enjoyment could only be properly expressed by speaking and teaching the languages, playing and energising others with her music. She was never simply the spectator.
She was a very active and indefatigable member of the National Union of Teachers, with a real personal commitment to individual teachers and to the Union as our collective voice. ‘The collective’ was a key concept in Jill’s life.
I remember her from my first years of teaching in the London Borough of Sutton, and the help and advice that she gave me then. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye in those days. I was impatient for change — change of all kinds. Jill was just a few years older with just as radical a head, but with far more experience and wisdom. I learnt a great deal, in quite a short time, from her — including the fact that there are no shortcuts to bringing about real social change and that world-changing ideas have to be grasped by people generally — they are useless if they remain the exclusive property of a few radicals.
Jill is remembered by her NUT Branch Secretary in Cambridgeshire as one of those people who would always take on what needed to be done. She worked with individual teachers through Teacher Support Network, and undertook just about every role in the branch over the years. ‘It would,’ he said, ‘be easier to identify the few roles that Jill did NOT carry out than those that she did.’
Jill’s love of people, her love of life, and her ‘question everything’ approach to life led her to strong political convictions. Jill was a firm communist when I first knew her, and remained so to her dying day.
Jill’s career, politics and commitment to the struggle for education — education that liberates rather than oppresses — led her to play a major role on the editorial board of the magazine Education For Tomorrow, and it was here that I met her again after a gap of some years. She hadn’t changed. Still as thoughtful, as committed, and with the same integrity.
Jill led a full life as a teacher, a linguist, a musician, a trade unionist and communist. We, her friends and comrades, will miss her terribly.
Bill Greenshields |