What sort of teacher was Richard Lower – good, bad or indifferent? Mark Antony’s testimony quoted in Chapter 5 suggests that he was good, but from outside his family there comes only one small piece of contemporary, and almost worthless, evidence. “Dickie Lower whacked ‘em into sound larning,” a group of old Chiddingly men told the Reverend A. A. Evans, who reported it in his Highways and Byways of Sussex. That tells us nothing except that Richard Lower, like almost every other 19^th century teacher in England and many in the 20^th century, used the birch, occasionally or often. It says nothing about the techniques by which he imparted literacy, numeracy, morality or any understanding of literature, music and the arts; nothing about the precepts and examples he set before his pupils.

In his day there were no HMIs, GCEs, LEAs or any other of the acronymed institutions which today investigate and record a teacher’s worth. Anyone could set up a school, for which the only judges of performance were the customers, i.e. the parents who paid to have their children taught. Since the school at Muddles Green did not take boarders, no parent paid him just to take their children off their hands. All must have wanted him to impart at least the Three R’s. Since his school survived for many years, by the criteria of the market-place it was competent.

It was held in the largest room of the Muddles Green School House, a space measuring 20 feet by 14 feet, of which one corner was in all probability occupied by a small pulpit that was still there until quite recently and may have served both as a teaching rostrum and a focal point for religious gatherings. In his bookThe Village School Improved published in 1805, John Poole gave an instance of a schoolroom measuring 70 feet by 16 feet successfully accommodating seventy pupils, which suggests that Richard’s room could not have held more than forty-five. Perhaps he taught these as a single group, perhaps each child worked individually; but it is more probable that he used the monitorial system by which a number of senior pupils, the monitors, each taught a separate group under the teacher’s overall supervision. If so, it is very likely that those of his children who later became teachers themselves, and perhaps those others who did not, served as monitors at Muddles Green once they had grown old enough.

If we do not have any objective, factual assessments of his ability as a teacher, we can still judge his worth by the achievements of his own children, for he and Mary were their sole educators in childhood. By these standards he was unquestionably a good teacher for three, possibly four, acquired sufficiently high standards of literacy and numeracy to become teachers themselves, whilst one became a professional surveyor. We know, too, that he taught them to play musical instruments and to sketch in pen and ink.