ABSTRACT
Certainly both parents did have a formative influence on the young Rewi Alley. Frederick Alley, an idealistic schoolmaster, held strong opinions on everything from education to nudity. With regard to education for boys, like the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Alley believed in combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience. To this end his three sons were despatched to the family farm on school holidays and kept busy with an endless array of jobs in after-school hours. Furthermore, he believed that learning should be combined with need, that children should gravitate through learning as and when they were ready.5 Like Rousseau he also believed that girls should receive an education, so that they might be good helpmates to their future husbands. Along with many of his generation, Frederick Alley was of the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ school of parenting, an authoritarian style that his son was later to reject at Shandan.
