Background
Henry Caldwell Cook was born in Liverpool in 1886.
Henry Caldwell Cook was born in Liverpool in 1886.
He attended a Saint John"s Wood prep school, Highgate School in London, and Lincoln College in Oxford.
He received second class honours from the school of English language and literature in 1909 and an Oxford Diploma in Education with distinction in 1911. Caldwell Cook served as the English master at the Perse School in Cambridge from 1911–1915 and 1919–1933, and served his country with the Artists Rifles division in France. During this time, he wrote Littleman"s Book of Courtesy (1914) and The Play Way, an Essay in Educational Method (1917), his magnum opus.
Caldwell Cook saw the current schooling system to impede "true education".
He used drama to teach English, building a room, called "the Mummery", in his school based on an Elizabethan theatre, and students improvised plays based on dramatic literature. This idea had been used and publicised by Harriet Finlay-Johnson.
He called this method the "play-way". The Play Way, the book, argued that learning came from experience doing instead of from listening and reading: "The natural means of study in youth is play." The claim was debated for a generation.
A 1922 unpublished Board of Education report made the recommendation to not support grants for his program or its imitators.
In 1939, he died a bachelor "in comparative obscurity".