1. Dr Cecil Reddie was a reforming English educationalist.
19 Facts About Cecil Reddie
1. 2.
Cecil Reddie founded and was headmaster of the progressive Abbotsholme School.
3.
Cecil Reddie was born in Colehill Lodge, Fulham, London, the sixth of ten children.
4.
Cecil Reddie's parents were James Reddie from Kinross, an Admiralty civil servant and Caroline Susannah Scott.
5.
Cecil Reddie spent four years at Goldolphin School in London until his parents' deaths.
6.
Cecil Reddie attended Birkenhead School as a day-boy and he then was a boarder at Fettes College, Edinburgh.
7.
Cecil Reddie studied medicine, physics, mathematics and chemistry at Edinburgh University before obtaining his doctorate in chemistry at Gottingen University.
8.
Cecil Reddie had been unhappy at boarding school and was bored by the classical curriculum.
9.
Cecil Reddie agonised over his homosexuality and he sought emotional guidance.
10.
Cecil Reddie was influenced by fellow teacher Clement Charles Cotterill, polymath Patrick Geddes, the utopian socialists Edward Carpenter and John Ruskin.
11.
Cecil Reddie rejected corporal punishment and substituted the principles of self-discipline and tutoring.
12.
Cecil Reddie returned to Fettes to teach science and then moved to Clifton College in Bristol until 1888.
13.
Cecil Reddie believed that being close to nature was important and so the boys worked on the estate providing practical experience on raising animals and vegetables, haymaking, digging, wood-chopping and fencing.
14.
Cecil Reddie devised a uniform of comfortable clothes at a time when boys at public schools wore stiff collars and top hats.
15.
Cecil Reddie bought the other founders out with borrowed money.
16.
Badley said: "Cecil Reddie taught me everything I needed to do and what not to do".
17.
Cecil Reddie often engaged foreign teachers, who learned its practices before returning home to start their own schools.
18.
Cecil Reddie changed his ideals from romantic socialism to a more authoritarian policy.
19.
Cecil Reddie retired to Welwyn Garden City and he died in St Bartholomew's Hospital in February 1932.