I have never tried to define the word "fad." I should put it thus:—A fad is a half-formed idea that a sub-inspector has borrowed from a bad translation of a distinguished foreigner's treatise on Education, and handed on to a deferential dominie.
* * *
An inspector called to-day; a middle-aged kindly gentleman with a sharp eye. His chief interest in life was tables.
"How many pence in fifty-seven farthings?" he fired at my highest class. When he found that they had to divide mentally by four, he became annoyed.
"They ought to know their tables," he said to me.
"What tables?" I asked.
"O, they should learn up that; why I can tell you at once what sixty-nine farthings are."
I explained humbly that I couldn't, and should never acquire the skill.
I did not like his manner of talkingatthe teacher through the class. When an inspector says, "You ought to know this," the scholars glance at the teacher, for they are shrewd enough to see that the teacher is being condemned.
He fired his parting shot as he went out.
"You must learn not to talk in school," he said.
I am a peaceful man, and I hate a scene. I said nothing, but I shall do nothing. If he returns he will find no difference in the school.
The bairns did talk to each other when the inspector talked to me, but when he asked for attention he got it.
I am surprised to find that his visit does not worry me; I have at last lost my fear of the terror of teaching—H.M.I.S.
I went "drumming" last night. I like the American word "drummer," it is so much more expressive than our "commercial traveller."
I made a series of postcards, and I went round the shops trying to place them. One man refused to take them up because the profits would not be large enough. As the profits work out at 41½ per cent I begin to wonder what he usually makes.
To-day I talked to the bairns about commerce, and I pointed out that much in commerce was thieving.
"This is commerce," I said: "Suppose I am a pig-dealer. I hear one day from a friend that pigs will rise in price in a few days. I at once set out on a tour of neighbouring farms, and by nightfall I have bought twenty pigs at the market price. Next morning pigs have doubled in price, and these farmers naturally want to shoot me. Why don't they shoot me?"
"They would be hanged," said Violet Brown.
"Because they would buy pigs in the same way if they had the chance," said Margaret Steel.
I went on to say that buying pigs like that is stealing, and I said that the successful business man is usually the man who is most unscrupulous.
I told them of the murderous system that allows a big firm to place a shop next door to a small merchant and undersell him till his business dies. It is all done under the name of competition, but of course there is no more competition about the affair than there is about the relationship between a wolf and a lamb.
I try very very hard to keep my bairns from low ideals. Some one, Oscar Wilde or Shaw, I think, says that love of money is the root of all good. That is the sort of paradox that isn't true, and not even funny. I see farmers growing rich on child labour: fifteen pence a day for spreading manure. I meet the poor little boys of thirteen and fourteen on the road, and the smile has gone fromtheir faces; their bodies are bent and racked.
When I was thirteen I went to the potato-gathering at a farm. Even now, when I pass a field where potatoes are being lifted, the peculiar smell of potato earth brings back to me those ten days of misery. I seldom had time to straighten my back. I had but one thought all day: When will that sun get down to the west? My neighbour, Jock Tamson, always seemed fresh and cheerful, but, unfortunately, I did not discover the cause of his optimism until the last day.
"Foo are you feenished so quick, Jock?" I asked.
Jock winked and nodded his head in the direction of the farmer.
"Look!" he said, and he skilfully tramped a big potato into the earth with his right foot; then he surreptitiously happed it over with his left.
I have never forgiven Jock for being so tardy in spreading his gospel.
* * *
To-day I received from the Clerk the Report on my school.
"Discipline," it says, "which is kindly, might be firmer, especially in the Senior Division, so as to prevent a tendency to talk on the part of the pupils whenever opportunity occurs."
An earlier part runs thus: "The pupils in the Senior Division are intelligent and bright under oral examination, and make an exceedingly good appearance in the class subjects."
I scratch my head thoughtfully. If the inspector finds the bairns intelligent and bright, why does he want them to be silent in school? I cannot tell; I suspect that talking children annoy him. I fancy that stern disciplinarians are men who hate to be irritated.
"More attention, however, should be paid to neatness of method and penmanship in copybooks and jotters."
I wonder. I freely admit to myself that the jotters are not neat, but I want to know why they should be. I can beat most men at marring a page with hasty figures; on the other hand I can make a page look like copperplate if I want to. I find that my bairns do neat work on an examination paper.
The truth is that I am incapable of teaching neatness. My desk is a jumble; my sitting-room is generally littered with books and papers. Some men are born tidy: some have tidiness thrust upon them. I am of the latter crowd. Between the school charwoman and my landlady I live strenuously.
I object to my report. I hate to be the victim of a man I can't reply to, even when he says nice things. But the main objection I have to the report is this: the School Board gets not a single word of criticism. If I were not almost proud of my lack of neatness, I might argue that no man could be neat in an ugly school. It is always filthy because the ashed playground is undrained. Broken windows stand for months; the plaster of the ceiling came down months ago, and the lathes are still showing. The School Board does not worry; its avowed object is to keep down the rates at any price in meanness (some members are big ratepayers). The sanitary arrangements are a disgrace to a long-suffering nation. Nothing is done.
* * *
It would be a good plan to make teachers forward reports of inspectors' visits to theScotch Education Department. I should love to write one.
"Mr. Silas K. Beans, H.M.I.S., paid a visit to this school to-day, and he made quite a passable appearance before the pupils.
"It was perhaps unfortunate that Mr. Beans laboured under the delusion that Mrs. Hemans wroteCome into the Garden, Maud, but on the whole the subject was adequately treated.
"The geography lesson showed Mr. Beans at his best, but it might be advisable for him to consider whether the precise whereabouts of Seville possesses the importance in the scheme of things that he attributes to it. And it might be suggested that children of twelve find some difficulty in spelling Prsym—Prysem—Pryems——anyway, the name of the town that has kept the alleged comic weeklies alive during a trying period.
"The school staff would have liked Mr. Beans to have stayed long enough to discover that a few of the scholars possessed imagination, and it hoped that he will be able to make his visit longer than four hours next time.
"Mr. Beans's knowledge of dates is wonderful, and his parsing has all the glory of Early Victorian furniture."
To-night MacMurray invited me down to meet his former head, Simpson, a big man in the Educational Institute, and a likely President next year. Mac introduced me as "a chap with theories on education; doesn't care a rap for inspectors and abominates discipline."
Simpson looked me over; then he grunted.
"You'll grow out of that, young man," he said sagely.
I laughed.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I said, "I fear that the continual holding of my nose to the grindstone will destroy my perspective."
"You'll find that experience doesn't destroy perspective."
"Experience," I cried, "is, or at least, should be one of Oscar Wilde's Seven Deadly Virtues. The experienced man is the chap who funks doing a thing because he's had his fingers burnt. 'Tis experience that makes cowards of us all."
"Of course," said Simpson, "you're joking. It stands to reason that I, for instance, with a thirty-four years' experience of teaching know more about education than you do, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Man, I was teaching laddies before your father and mother met," he added.
"If you saw a lad and a lass making love would you arrange that he should sit near her?"
"Good gracious, no!" he cried. "What has that got to do with the subject."
"But why not give them chances to spoon?" I asked.
"Why not? If a teacher encouraged that sort of thing, why, it might lead to anything!"
"Exactly," I said, "experience tells you that you have to do all you can to preserve the morals of the bairns?"
"I could give you instances—"
"I don't want them particularly," I interrupted. "My main point is that experience has made you a funk. Pass the baccy, Mac."
"Mean to tell me that's how you teach?" cried Simpson. "How in all the world do you do for discipline?"
"I do without it."
"My goodness! that's the limit! May I ask why you do without it?"
"It is a purely personal matter," I answered. "I don't want anyone to lay down definite rules for me, and I refuse to lay down definite rules of conduct for my bairns."
"But how in all the earth do you get any work done?"
"Work," I said, "is an over-rated thing, just as knowledge is overrated."
"Nonsense," said Simpson.
"All right," I remarked mildly, "if knowledge is so important, why is a university professor usually a talker of platitudes? Why is the average medallist at a university a man of tenth-rate ideas?"
"Then our Scotch education is all in vain?"
"Speaking generally, it is."
I think it was at this stage that Simpson began to doubt my sanity.
"Young man," he said severely, "one day you will realise that work and knowledge and discipline are of supreme importance. Look at the Germans!"
He waved his hand in the direction of the sideboard, and I looked round hastily.
"Look what Germany has done with work and knowledge and discipline!"
"Then why all this bother to crush a State that has all the virtues?" I asked diffidently.
"It isn't the discipline we are trying to crush; it is the militarism."
"Good!" I cried, "I'm glad to hear it. That's what I want to do in Scotland; I want to crush the militarism in our schools, and, as most teachers call their militarism discipline, I curse discipline."
"That's all rubbish, you know," he said shortly.
"No it isn't. If I leather a boy for making a mistake in a sum, I am no better than the Prussian officer who shoots a Belgian civilian for crossing the street. I am equally stupid and a bully."
"Then you allow carelessness to go unpunished?" he sneered.
"I do. You see I am a very careless devil myself. I'll swear that I left your garden gate open when I came in, Mac, and your hens will be all over the road."
Mac looked out at the window.
"They are!" he chuckled, and I laughed.
"You seem to think that slovenliness is a virtue," said Simpson with a faint smile.
"I don't, really, but I hold that it is a natural human quality."
"Are your pupils slovenly?" he asked.
"Lots of 'em are. You're born tidy or you aren't."
"When these boys go out to the workshop, what then? Will a joiner keep an apprentice who makes a slovenly job?"
"Ah!" I said, "you're talking about trade now. You evidently want our schools to turn out practical workmen. I don't. Mind you I'm quite willing to admit that a shoemaker who theorises about leather is a public nuisance. Neatness and skill are necessary in practical manufacture, but I refuse to reduce education to the level of cobbling or coffin-making. I don't care how slovenly a boy is if he thinks."
"If he is slovenly he won't think," said Simpson.
I smiled.
"I think you are wrong. Personally, I am a very lazy man; I have my library all over the floor as a rule. Yet, though I am lazy physically I am not lazy mentally. Ihold that the really lazy teacher is your "ring the bell at nine sharp" man; he hustles so much that he hasn't time to think. If you work hard all day you never have time to think."
Simpson laughed.
"Man, I'd like to see your school!"
"Why not? Come up tomorrow morning," I said.
"First rate!" he cried, "I'll be there at nine."
"Better not," I said with a smile, "or you'll have to wait for ten minutes."
* * *
He arrived as I blew the "Fall in" on my bugle.
"You don't line them up and march them in?" he said.
"I used to, but I've given it up," I confessed. "To tell the truth I'm not enamoured of straight lines."
We entered my classroom. Simpson stood looking sternly at my chattering family while I marked the registers.
"I couldn't tolerate this row," he said.
"It isn't so noisy as your golf club on a Saturday night, is it?" He smiled slightly.
Jim Burnett came out to my desk and liftedThe Glasgow Herald, then he went out to the playground hummingOn the Mississippi.
"What's the idea?" asked Simpson.
"He's the only boy who is keen on the war news," I explained.
Then Margaret Steel came out.
"Please, sir, I tookThe Four Feathershome and my mother began to read them; she thinks she'll finish them by Sunday. Is anybody readingThe Invisible Man?"
I gave her the book and she went out.
Then Tom Macintosh came out and asked for the Manual Room key; he wanted to finish a boat he was making.
"Do you let them do as they like?" asked Simpson.
"In the upper classes," I replied.
Soon all the Supplementary and Qualifying pupils had found a novel and had gone out to the roadside. I turned to give the other classes arithmetic.
Mary Wilson in the front seat held out a bag of sweets to me. I took one.
"Please, sir, would the gentleman like one, too?"
Simpson took one with the air of a man onholiday who doesn't care what sins he commits.
"I say," he whispered, "do you let them eat in school? There's a boy in the back seat eating nuts."
I fixed Ralph Ritchie with my eye.
"Ralph! If you throw any nutshells on that floor Mrs. Findlay will eat you."
"I'm putting them in my pooch," he said.
"Good! Write down this sum."
"What are the others doing?" asked Simpson after a time.
"Margaret Steel and Violet Brown are reading," I said promptly. "Annie Dixon is playing fivies on the sand, Jack White and Bob Tosh are most likely arguing about horses, but the other boys are reading, we'll go and see." And together we walked down the road.
Annie was playing fivies all right, but Jack and Bob weren't discussing horses; they were readingChips.
"And the scamps haven't the decency to hide it when you appear!" cried Simpson.
"Haven't the fear," I corrected.
On the way back to the school he said: "It's all very pleasant and picnicy, but eating nuts and sweets in class!"
"Makes your right arm itch?" I suggested pleasantly.
"It does," he said with a short laugh, "Man, do you never get irritated?"
"Sometimes."
"Ah!" He looked relieved. "So the system isn't perfect?"
"Good heavens!" I cried, "What do you think I am? A saint from heaven? You surely don't imagine that a man with nerves and a temperament is always able to enter into the moods of bairns! I get ratty occasionally, but I generally blame myself." I sent a girl for my bugle and sounded the "Dismiss."
"What do you do now?"
I pulled out my pipe and baccy.
"Have a fill," I said, "it's John Cotton."
* * *
To-night I have been thinking about Simpson. He is really a kindly man; in the golf-house he is voted a good fellow. Yet MacMurray tells me that he is a very strict disciplinarian; he saw him give a boy six scuds with the tawse one day for drawing a man's face on the inside cover of his drawingbook. I suppose that Simpson considers that he is an eminently just man.
I think that the foundation of true justice is self-analysis. It is mental laziness that is at the root of the militarism in our schools. Simpson is as lazy mentally as the proverbial mother who cried: "See what Willie's doing and tell him he musn't." I wonder what he would have replied if the boy had said: "Why is it wrong to draw a man's face in a drawing book?" Very likely he would have given him another six for impertinence.
It is strange that our boasted democracy uses its power to set up bullies. The law bullies the poor and gives them the cat if they trespass; the police bully everyone who hasn't a clean collar; the dominie bullies the young; and the School Board bullies the dominie. Yet, in theory, the judge, the constable, the dominie, and the School Board are the servants of democracy. Heaven protect us from the bureaucratic Socialism of people like the Webbs! It is significant that Germany, the country of the super-official is the country of the super-bully.
Paradoxically, I, as a Socialist, believe thatthe one thing that will save the people is individualism. No democracy can control a stupid teacher or a stupid judge. If our universities produce teachers who leather a boy for drawing a face, and judges who give boys the cat for stealing tuppence ha'penny, then our universities are all wrong. Or human nature is all wrong. If I admit the latter I must fall back on pessimism. But I don't admit it. Our cruel teachers and magistrates are good fellows in their clubs and homes; they are bad fellows in their schools and courts because they have never come to think, to examine themselves. In my Utopia self-examination will be the only examination that will matter.
H. G. Wells inThe New Machiavellitalks of "Love and Fine Thinking" as the salvation of the world. I like the phrase, but I prefer the word Realisation. I want men like Simpson to realise that their arbitrary rules are unjust and cowardly and inhuman.
* * *
I saw a good fight to-night. At four o'clock I noticed a general move towards Murray's Corner, and I knew that blood was about to be shed. Moreover I knew that Jim Steelwas to tackle the new boy Welsh, for I had seen Jim put his fist to his nose significantly in the afternoon.
I followed the crowd.
"I want to see fair play," I said.
Welsh kept shouting that he could "fecht the hale schule wi' wan hand tied ahent 'is back."
In this district school fights have an etiquette of their own. One boy touches the other on the arm saying: "There's the dunt!" The other returns the touch with the same remark. If he fails to return it he receives a harder dunt on the arm with the words, "And there's the coordly!" If he fails to return that also he is accounted the loser, and the small boys throw divots at him.
Steel began in the usual way with his: "There's the dunt!" Welsh promptly hit him in the teeth and knocked him down. The boys appealed to me.
"No," I said, "Welsh didn't know the rules. After this you should shake hands as you do in boxing."
Welsh never had a chance. He had no science; he came on with his arms swingingin windmill fashion. Jim stepped aside and drove a straight left to the jaw, and before Welsh knew what was happening Jim landed him on the nose with his right. Welsh began to weep, and I stopped the fight. I told him that Steel had the advantage because I had taught my boys the value of a straight left, but that I would give him a few lessons with the gloves later on. Then I asked how the quarrel had arisen. As I had conjectured Steel and Welsh had no real quarrel. Welsh had cuffed little Geordie Burnett's ears, and Geordie had cried, "Ye wudna hit Jim Steel!" Welsh had no alternative but to reply: "Wud Aw no!" Straightway Geordie had run off to Steel saying: "Hi! Jim! Peter Welsh says he'll fecht ye!"
So far as I can remember all my own battles at school were arranged by disobliging little boys in this manner. If Jock Tamson said to me: "Bob Young cud aisy fecht ye and ca' yer nose up among yer hair!" I, as a man of honour, had to reply: "Aw'll try Bob Young ony day he likes!" And even if Bob were my bosom friend, I would have to face him at the brig at four o'clock.
I noticed that the girls were all on Steel'sside before the fight began, and obviously on Welsh's side when he was beaten, the bissoms!
I gave a lecture in the village hall on Friday night, and many parents came out to hear what I had to say on the subject ofChildren and their Parents. After the lecture I invited questions.
"What wud ye hae a man do if his laddie wudna do what he was bidden?" asked Brown the joiner.
"I would have the man think very seriously whether he had any right to give the order that was disobeyed. For instance, if you ordered your Jim to stop singing while you were reading, you would be taking an unfair advantage of your years and size. From what I know of Jim he would certainly stop singing if you asked him to do so as a favour."
"Aw dinna believe in askin' favours o' ma laddies," he said.
I smiled.
"Yet you ask them of other laddies. You don't collar Fred Thomson and shout:'Post that letter at once!' You say very nicely: 'You might post that letter like a good laddie,' and Fred enjoys posting your letter more than posting a ton of letters for his own father."
The audience laughed, and Fred's father cried: "Goad! Ye're quite richt, dominie!"
"As a boy," I continued, "I hated being set to weed the garden, though I spent hours helping to weed the garden next door. A boy likes to grant favours."
"Aye," said Brown, "when there's a penny at the tail end o' them!"
"Yes," I said after the laughter had died, "but your Jim would rather have Mr. Thomson's penny than your sixpence. The real reason is that you boss your son, and nobody likes to be bossed."
"Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, I think that the father is the curse of the home. (Laughter.) The father never talks to his son as man to man. As a result a boy suppresses much of his nature, and if he is left alone with his father for five minutes he feels awkward, though not quite so awkward as the father does. You find among the lower animals that the father is of noimportance; indeed, he is looked on as a danger. Have you ever seen a bitch flare up when the father comes too near her puppies? Female spiders, I am told, solve the problem of the father by eating him." (Great laughter.)
"What aboot the mothers?" said a voice, and the men cackled.
"Mothers are worse," I said. "Fathers usually imagine that they have a sense of justice, but mothers have absolutely no sense of justice. It is the mother who cries, 'Liz, ye lazy slut, run and clean your brother's boots, the poor laddie! Lod, I dinna ken what would happen to you, my poor laddie, if your mother wasna here to look after you.' You mothers make your girls work at nights and on Saturdays, and you allow your boys to play outside. That is most unjust. Your boys should clean their own boots and mend their own clothes. They should help in the washing of dishes and the sweeping of floors."
"Wud ye say that the mother is the curse o' the hame, too?" asked Brown.
"No," I said, "she is a necessity, and in spite of her lack of justice, she is nearer to the children than the father is. She is less aloofand less stern. You'll find that a boy will tell his mother much more than he will tell his father. Speaking generally, a stupid mother is more dangerous than a stupid father, but a mother of average intelligence is better for a child than a father of average intelligence.
"This is a problem that cannot be solved. The mother must remain with her children, and I cannot see how we are to chuck the father out of the house. As a matter of fact he is usually so henpecked that he is prevented from being too much of an evil to the bairns.
"The truth is that the parents of to-day are not fit to be parents, and the parents of the next generation will be no better. The mothers of the next generation are now in my school. They will leave at the age of fourteen—some of them will be exempted and leave at thirteen—and they will slave in the fields or the factory for five or six years. Then society will accept them as legitimate guardians of the morals and spiritual welfare of children. I say that this is a damnable system. A mother who has never learned to think has absolute control of a growing young mind, and an almost absolute controlof a growing young body. She can beat her child; she can starve it. She can poison its mind with malice, just as she can poison its body with gin and bitters.
"What can we do? The home is the Englishman's castle! Anyway, in these days of high explosives, castles are out of date, and it is high time that the castle called home had some airing."
* * *
I cannot flatter myself that I made a single parent think on Friday night. Most of the villagers treated the affair as a huge joke.
I have just decided to hold an Evening School next winter. I see that the Code offersThe Life and Duties of a Citizenas a subject. I shall have the lads and lasses of sixteen to nineteen in my classroom twice a week, and I guess I'll tell them things about citizenship they won't forget.
It occurs to me that married people are not easily persuaded to think. The village girl considers marriage the end of all things. She dons the bridal white, and at once she rises meteorically in the social scale. Yesterday she was Mag Broon, an outworker atMillside; to-day she is Mrs. Smith with a house of her own.
Her mental horizon is widened. She can talk about anything now; the topic of childbirth can now be discussed openly with other married wives. Aggressiveness and mental arrogance follow naturally, and with these come a respect for church-going and an abhorrence of Atheism.
I refuse to believe those who prate about marriage as an emancipation for a woman. Marriage is a prison. It shuts a woman up within her four walls, and she hugs all her prejudices and hypocrisies to her bosom. The men who shout "Women's place is the home!" at Suffragette meetings are fools. The home isn't good enough for women.
A girl once said to me: "I always think that marriage makes a girl a 'has been.'"
What she meant was that marriage ended flirtation, poor innocent that she was! Yet her remark is true in a wider sense. The average married woman is a "has been" in thought, while not a few are "never wasers." Hence I have more hope of my evening school lasses than of their mothers. They have not become smug, nor have they concluded thatthey are past enlightenment. They are not too omniscient to resent the offering of new ideas.
A man's marriage makes no great change in his life. His wife replaces his mother in such matters as cooking and washing and "feeding the brute." He finds that he is allowed to spend less, and he has to keep elders' hours. But in essentials his life is unchanged. He still has his pint on a Saturday night, and his evening crack at the Brig. He has gained no additional authority, and he is extremely blessed of the gods if he has not lost part of the authority he had.
The revolution in his mental outfit comes later when he becomes a father. He thinks that his education is complete when the midwife whispers: "Hi, Jock, it's a lassie!" He immediately realises that he is a man of importance, a guide and preacher rolled into one; and he talks dictatorially to the dominie about education. Then he discovers that precept must be accompanied by example, and he aspires to be a deacon or an elder.
Now I want to get at Jock before the midwife gets at him. I don't care tuppencewhether he is married or not ... but he mustn't be a father.
* * *
To-day I began to read Mary Johnston'sBy Order of the Companyto my bairns. I love the story, and I love the style. It reminds me of Malory's style; she has his trick of running on in a breathless string of "ands." When I think of style I am forced to recollect the stylists I had to read at the university. There was Sir Thomas Browne and hisUrn Burial. What the devil is the use of people like Browne I don't know. He gives us word music and imagery I admit, but I don't want word music and imagery from prose, I want ideas or a story. I can't think of one idea I got from Browne or Fisher or Ruskin, or any of the stylists, yet I have found many ideas in translations of Nietzsche and Ibsen. Style is the curse of English literature.
When I read Mary Johnston I forget all about words. I vaguely realise that she is using the right words all the time, but the story is the thing. When I read Browne I fail to scrape together the faintest interestin burials; the organ music of hisDead Marchdrowns everything else.
When a man writes too musically and ornately I always suspect him of having a paucity of ideas. If you have anything important to say you use plain language. The man who writes to the local paper complaining of "those itinerant denizens of the underworld yclept hawkers, who make the day hideous with raucous cries," is a pompous ass. Yet he is no worse than the average stylist in writing. I think it was G. K. Chesterton who said that a certain popular authoress said nothing because she believed in words. He might have applied the phrase to 90 per cent of English writers.
Poetry cannot be changed. Substitute a word for "felicity" in the line: "Absent thee from felicity awhile" and you destroy the poetry. But I hold that prose should be able to stand translation. The prose that cannot stand it is the empty stuff produced by our Ruskins and our Brownes. Empty barrels always have made the most sound.
* * *
There must be something in style after all. I had this note from a mother this morning.
"Dear Sir,Please change Jane's seat for she brings home more than belongs to her."
"Dear Sir,
Please change Jane's seat for she brings home more than belongs to her."
I refuse to comment on this work of art.
* * *
I must get a cornet. Eurhythmics with an artillery bugle is too much for my wind and my dignity. Just when the graceful bend is coming forward my wind gives out, and I make a vain attempt to whistle the rest. Perhaps a concertina would be better than a cornet. I tried Willie Hunter with his mouth-organ, but the attempt was stale and unprofitable, and incidentally flat. Then Tom Macintosh brought a comb to the school and offered to perform on it. After that I gave Eurhythmics a rest.
When the war is over I hope that the Government will retain Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions ... for Schools. I haven't got a tenth of the munitions I should have; I want a player-piano, a gramophone, a cinematograph with comic films, a library with magazines and pictures. I want swings and see-saws in the playground, I want rabbits and white mice; I want instruments for a school brass and wood band.
I like building castles in Spain. The truth is that if the School Board would yield to my importunities and lay a few loads of gravel on the muddy patch commonly known as the playground I should almost die of surprise and joy. One learns to be content with small mercies when one is serving those ratepayers who control the rates.
Margaret Steel has left school, and to-morrow morning she goes off at five o'clock to the factory.
To-day Margaret is a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked lassie; in three years she will be hollow-eyed and pale-faced. Never again will she know what it is to waken naturally after sleep; the factory syren will haunt her dreams always. She will rise at half-past four summer and winter; she will tramp the two mile road to the factory, and when six comes at night she will wearily tramp home again. Possibly she will marry a factory worker and continue working in the factory, for his wage will not keep up a home. In the neighbouring town hundreds of homes are locked all day ... and Bruce the manufacturer's daughters are in county society. Heigh ho! It is a queer thing civilisation!
I wonder when the people will begin torealise what wagery means. When they do begin to realise they will commence the revolution by driving women out of industry. To-day the women are used by the profiteer as instruments to exploit the men. Surely a factory worker has the right to earn enough to support a family on. The profiteer says "No! You must marry one of my hands, and then your combined wages will set up a home for you."
I spoke of this to the manager of Bruce's factory once.
"But," he said, "if we did away with female labour we'd have to close down. We couldn't compete with other firms."
"Not if they abolished female labour too?"
"I was thinking of the Calcutta mills where labour is dirt cheap," he said.
"I see," I said, "so the Scotch lassie is to compete with the native?"
"It comes to that," he admitted.
I think I see a very pretty problem awaiting Labour in the near future. As the Trade Unions become more powerful and show their determination to take the mines and factories into their own hands, capitalists will turnto Asia and Africa. The exploitation of the native is just beginning. At a time when Britain is a Socialistic State all the evils of capitalism will be reproduced with ten-fold intensity in India and China and Africa. I see an Asia ruled by lash and revolver; the profiteer has a short way with the striker in Eastern climes. The recent history of South Africa is sinister. A few years ago our brothers died presumably that white men should have the rights of citizenship in the Transvaal. What they seemed to have died for was the right of profiteers to shoot white strikers from the windows of the Rand Club. If white men are treated thus I tremble for the fate of the black man who strikes.
Yes, the present profiteering system is a preparation for an exploited East. Margaret Steel and her fellows are slaving so that a Persia may be "opened up," a Mexico robbed of its oil wells.
* * *
To-day I gave a lesson on Capital.
"If," I said, "I have a factory I have to pay out wages and money for machinery and raw material. When I sell my cloth I getmore money than I paid out. This money is called profit, and with this money I can set up a new factory.
"Now what I want you to understand is this:—Unless work is done by someone there is no wealth. If I make a fortune out of linen I make it by using the labour of your fathers, and the machinery that was invented by clever men. Of course, I have to work hard myself, but I am repaid for my work fully. Margaret Steel at this moment standing at a loom, is working hard too, but she is getting a wage that is miserable.
"Note that the owner of the factory is getting an income of, say, ten thousand pounds a year. Now, what does he do with the money?"
"Spends it on motor cars," said a boy.
"Buys cigarettes," said a girl.
"Please, sir, Mr. Bruce gives money to the infirmary," said another girl.
"He keeps it in a box beneath the bed," said another, and I found that the majority in the room favoured this theory. This suggestion reminded me of the limitations of childhood, and I tried to talk more simply. I told them of banks and stocks, I talked ofluxuries, and pointed out that a man who lived by selling expensive dresses to women was doing unnecessary labour.
Tom Macintosh showed signs of thinking deeply.
"Please, sir, what would all the dressmakers and footmen do if there was no money to pay them?"
"They would do useful work, Tom," I said. "Your father works from six to six every day, but if all the footmen and chauffeurs and grooms and gamekeepers were doing useful work, your father would only need to work maybe seven hours a day. See? In Britain there are forty millions of people, and the annual income of the country is twenty-four hundred million pounds. One million of people take half this sum, and the other thirty-nine millions have to take the other half."
"Please, sir," said Tom, "what half are you in?"
"Tom," I said, "I am with the majority. For once the majority has right on its side."
* * *
Bruce the manufacturer had an advertisement in to-day's local paper. "Noencumbrances," says the ad. Bruce has a family of at least a dozen, and he possibly thinks that he has earned the right to talk of "encumbrances." I sympathise with the old chap.
But I want to know why gardeners and chauffeurs must have no encumbrances. If the manorial system spreads, a day will come when the only children at this school will be the offspring of the parish minister. Then, I suppose, dominies and ministers will be compelled to be polygamists by Act of Parliament.
I like the Lord of the Manor's damned impudence. He breeds cattle for showing, he breeds pheasants for slaughtering, he breeds children to heir his estates. Then he sits down and pens an advertisement for a slave without "encumbrances." Why he doesn't import a few harem attendants from Turkey I don't know; possibly he is waiting till the Dardanelles are opened up.
* * *
I have just been reading a few schoolboy howlers. I fancy that most of these howlers are manufactured. I cannot be persuaded that any boy ever defined a lie as "Anabomination unto the Lord but a very present help in time of trouble." Howlers bore me; so do most school yarns. The only one worth remembering is the one about the inspector who was ratty.
"Here, boy," he fired at a sleepy youth, "who wroteHamlet?"
The boy started violently.
"P—please, sir, it wasna me," he stammered.
That evening the inspector was dining with the local squire.
"Very funny thing happened to-day," he said, as they lit their cigars.
"I was a little bit irritated, and I shouted at a boy, 'Who wroteHamlet?' The little chap was flustered. 'P—please, sir, it wasna me!' he stuttered."
The squire guffawed loudly.
"And I suppose the little devil had done it after all!" he roared.
* * *
Lawson came down to see me to-night, and as usual we talked shop.
"It's all very well," he said, "for you to talk about education being all wrong. Any idiot can burn down a house that took manymen to build. Have you got a definite scheme to put in its place?"
The question was familiar to me. I had had it fired at me scores of times in the days when I talked Socialism from a soap-box in Hyde Park.
"I think I have a scheme," I said modestly.
Lawson lay back in his chair.
"Good! Cough it up, my son!"
I smoked hard for a minute.
"Well, Lawson, it's like this, my scheme could only be a success if the economic basis of society were altered. So long as one million people take half the national yearly income you can't have any decent scheme of education."
"Right O!" said Lawson cheerfully, "for the sake of argument, or rather peace, we'll give you a Utopia where there are no idle rich. Fire away!"
"Good! I'll talk about the present day education first.
"Twenty years ago education had one aim—to abolish illiteracy. In consequence the Three R.'s were of supreme importance. Nowadays they are held to be quite as important, but a dozen other things have beenplaced beside them on the pedestal. Gradually education has come to aim at turning out a man or a woman capable of earning a living. Cookery, Woodwork, Typing, Bookkeeping, Shorthand ... all these were introduced so that we should have better wives and joiners and clerks.
"Lawson, I would chuck the whole blamed lot out of the elementary school. I don't want children to be trained to make pea-soup and picture frames, I want them to be trained to think. I would cut out History and Geography as subjects."
"Eh?" said Lawson.
"They'd come in incidentally. For instance, I could teach for a week on the text of a newspaper report of a fire in New York."
"The fire would light up the whole world, so to speak," said Lawson with a smile.
"Under the present system the teacher never gets under way. He is just getting to the interesting part of his subject when Maggie Brown ups and says, 'Please, sir, it's Cookery now.' The chap who makes a religion of his teaching says 'Damn!' very forcibly, and the girls troop out.
"I would keep Composition and Readingand Arithmetic in the curriculum. Drill and Music would come into the play hours, and Sketching would be an outside hobby for warm days."
"Where would you bring in the technical subjects?"
"Each school would have a workshop where boys could repair their bikes or make kites and arrows, but there would not be any formal instruction in woodwork or engineering. Technical education would begin at the age of sixteen."
"Six what?"
"Sixteen. You see my pupils are to stay at school till they are twenty. You are providing the cash you know. Well, at sixteen the child would be allowed to select any subject he liked. Suppose he is keen on mechanics. He spends a good part of the day in the engineering shop and the drawing room—mechanical drawing I mean. But the thinking side of his education is still going on. He is studying political economy, eugenics, evolution, philosophy. By the time he is eighteen he has read Nietzsche, Ibsen, Bjornson, Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells, Strindberg, Tolstoi, that is if ideas appeal to him."
"Ah!"
"Of course, I don't say that one man in a hundred will read Ibsen. You will always have the majority who are averse to thinking if they can get out of it. These will be good mechanics and typists and joiners in many cases. My point is that every boy or girl has the chance to absorb ideas during their teens."
"Would you make it compulsory? For instance, that boy Willie Smith in your school; do you think that he would learn much more if he had to stay at school till he was twenty?"
"No," I said, "I wouldn't force anyone to stay at school, but to-day boys quite as stupid naturally as Smith stay at the university and love it. A few years' rubbing shoulders with other men is bound to make a man more alert. Take away, as you have done for argument's sake, the necessity of a boy's leaving school at fourteen to earn a living and you simply make every school a university."
"And it isn't three weeks since I heard you curse universities!" said Lawson with a grin.
"I'm thinking of the social side of a university," I explained. "That is good. The educational side of our universities is bad because it is mostly cram. I crammed Botany and Zoo for my degree and I know nothing about either; I was too busy trying to remember words like Caryophylacia, or whatever it is, to ask why flowers droop their heads at night. So in English I had to cram up what Hazlitt and Coleridge said about Shakespeare when I should have been readingOthello. The university fails because it refuses to connect education with contemporary life. You go there and you learn a lot of rot about syllogisms and pentameters, and nothing is done to explain to you the meaning of the life in the streets outside. No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge dons write to the papers saying that life has no opening for a university man."
"But I thought that you didn't want education to produce a practical man. You wanted a theoretical chimney-sweep, didn't you?" said Lawson smiling.
"The present university turns out men who are neither practical nor theoretical. I want a university that will turn out thinkers.The men who have done most to stimulate thought these past few years are men like Wells and Shaw and Chesterton; and I don't think that one of them is a 'varsity man.'"
"You can't run a world on thought," said he.
"I don't know," I said, "we seem to run this old State of ourswithoutthought. The truth is that there will always be more workers than thinkers. While one chap is planning a new heaven on earth, the other ninety-nine are working hard at motors and benches.
"H. G. Wells is always asking for better technical schools, more research, more invention. All these are absolutely necessary, but I want more than that; along with science and art I want the thinking part of education to go on."
"It goes on now."
"No," I said, "it doesn't. Your so-called educated man is often a stupid fellow. Doctors have a good specialist education, yet I know a score of doctors who think that Socialism means 'The Great Divide.' When Osteopathy came over from America a few years ago thousands of medical men pronounced it 'damned quackery' at once; only a few werewide enough to study the thing to see what it was worth. So with inoculation; the doctors follow the antitoxin authority like sheep. At the university I once saw a raid on an Anti-Vivisection shop, and I'm sure that not one medical student in the crowd had ever thought about vivisection. Mention Women's Freedom to the average lawyer, and he will think you a madman.
"Don't you see what I am driving at? I want first-class doctors and engineers and chemists, but I want them to think also, to think about things outside their immediate interests. This is the age of the specialist. That's what's wrong with it. Somebody, Matthew Arnold, I think, wanted a man who knew everything of something and something of everything. It's a jolly good definition of education."
"That is the idea of the Scotch Code," said Lawson.
"Yes, perhaps it is. They want our bairns to learn tons of somethings about everything that doesn't matter a damn in life."
* * *
My talk with Lawson last night makes me realise again how hopeless it is to plan asystem of education when the economic system is all out of joint. I believe that this nation has the wealth to educate its children properly. I wonder what the Conscriptionists would say if I hinted to them that if a State can afford to take its youth away from industry to do unprofitable labour in the army and navy it can afford to educate its youth till the age of twenty is reached.
The stuff we teach in school leads nowhere; the Code subjects simply lull a child to sleep. How the devil is a lad to build a Utopia on Geography and Nature Study and Woodwork? Education should prove that the world is out of joint, and it should point a Kitchener finger at each child and say, "Your Country NeedsYou... to set it Right."
This has been a delightful day. About eleven o'clock a rap came at the door, and a young lady entered my classroom.
"Jerusalem!" I gasped. "Dorothy! Where did you drop from?"
"I'm motoring to Edinburgh," she explained, "on tour, you know, old thing!"
Dorothy is an actress in a musical comedy touring company, and she is a very old friend of mine. She is a delightful child, full of fun and mischief, yet she can be a most serious lady on occasion.
She looked at my bairns, then she clasped her hands.
"O, Sandy! Fancy you teaching all these kiddies! Won't you teach me, too?" And she sat down beside Violet Brown. I thanked my stars that I had never been dignified in that room.
"Dorothy," I said severely, "you'retalking to Violet Brown and I must give you the strap."
The bairns simply howled, and when Dorothy took out her wee handkerchief and pretended to cry, laughter was dissolved in tears.
It was minutes time, and she insisted on blowing the "Dismiss" on the bugle. Her efforts brought the house down. The girls refused to dismiss, they crowded round Dorothy and touched her furs. She was in high spirits.
"You know, girls, I'm an actress and this big bad teacher of yours is a very old pal of mine. He isn't such a bad sort really, you know," and she put her arm round my shoulders.
"See her little game, girls?" I said. "Do you notice that this woman from a disreputable profession is making advances to me? She really wants me to kiss her, you know. She—" But Dorothy shoved a piece of chalk into my mouth.
What a day we had! Dorothy stayed all day, and by four o'clock she knew all the big girls by their Christian names. She insisted on their calling her Dorothy. She even triedto talk their dialect, and they screamed at her attempt to say "Guid nicht the noo."
In the afternoon I got her to sing and play; then she danced a ragtime, and in a few minutes she had the whole crowd ragging up and down the floor.
She stayed to tea, and we reminisced about London. Dear old Dorothy! What a joy it was to see her again, but how dull will school be tomorrow! Ah, well, it is a workaday world, and the butterflies do not come out every day. If Dorothy could read that sentence she would purse up her pretty lips and say, "Butterfly, indeed, you old bluebottle!" The dear child!
* * *
The school to-day was like a ballroom the "morning after." The bairns sat and talked about Dorothy, and they talked in hushed tones as about one who is dead.
"Please, sir," asked Violet, "will she come back again?"
"I'm afraid not," I answered.
"Please, sir, you should marry her, and then she'll always be here."
"She loves another man, Vi," I saidruefully, and when Vi whispered to Katie Farmer, "What a shame!" I felt very sad. For the moment I loved Dorothy, but it was mere sentimentalism, Dorothy and I could never love, we are too much of the pal to each other for emotion to enter.
"She is very pretty," said Peggy Smith.
"Very," I assented.
"P—please, sir, you—you could marry her if you really tried?" said Violet. She had been thinking hard for a bit.
"And break the other man's heart!" I laughed.
Violet wrinkled her brows.
"Please, sir, it wouldn't matter for him, we don't know him."
"Why!" I cried, "he is a very old friend of mine!"
"Oh!" Violet gasped.
"Please, sir," she said after a while, "do you know any more actresses?"
I seized her by the shoulders and shook her.
"You wee bissom! You don't care a rap about me; all you want is that I should marry an actress. You want my wife to come andteach you ragtimes and tangoes!" And she blushed guiltily.
* * *
Lawson came down to see me again to-night; he wanted to tell me of an inspector's visit to-day.
"Why don't you apply for an inspectorship?" he asked.
I lit my pipe.
"Various reasons, old fellow," I said. "For one thing I don't happen to know a fellow who knows a chap who lives next door to a woman whose husband works in the Scotch Education Department.
"Again, I'm not qualified; I never took the Education Class at Oxford."
"Finally, I don't want the job."
"I suppose," said Lawson, "that lots of 'em get in by wire-pulling."
"Very probably, but some of them probably get in straight. Naturally, you cannot get geniuses by wire-pulling; the chap who uses influence to get a job is a third-rater always."
Lawson reddened.
"I pulled wires to get into my job," he said.
"That's all right," I said cheerfully, "I've pulled wires all my days."
"But," I added, "I wouldn't do it again."
"Caught religion?"
"Not quite. The truth is that I have at last realised that you never get anything worth having if you've got to beg for it."
"It's about the softest job I know, whether you have to beg for it or not. The only job that beats it for softness is the kirk," he said.
"I wouldn't exactly call it a soft job, Lawson; a rotten job, yes, but a soft job, no. Inspecting schools is half spying and half policing. It isn't supposed to be you know, but it is. You know as well as I do that every teacher starts guiltily whenever the inspector shoves his nose into the room. Nosing, that's what it is."
"You would make a fairly decent inspector," said Lawson.
"Thanks," I said, "the insinuation being that I could nose well, eh?"
"I didn't mean that. Suppose you had to examine my school how would you do it?"
"I would come in and sit down on a bench and say: 'Just imagine I am a new boy, and give me an idea of the ways of the school. Iwarn you that my attention may wander. Fire away! But, I say, I hope you don't mind my finishing this pie; I had a rotten breakfast this morning.'"
"Go on," said Lawson laughing.
"I wouldn't examine the kids at all. When you let them out for minutes I would have a crack with you. I would say something like this: 'I've got a dirty job, but I must earn my screw in some way. I want to have a wee lecture all to myself. In the first place I don't like your discipline. It's inhuman to make kids attend the way you do. The natural desire of each boy in this room was to watch me put myself outside that pie, and not one looked at me.
"'Then you are far too strenuous. You went from Arithmetic to Reading without a break. You should give them a five minutes chat between each lesson. And I think you have too much dignity. You would never think of dancing a ragtime on this floor, would you? I thought not. Try it, old chap. Apart from its merits as an antidote to dignity it is a first-rate liver stimulator.' Hello! Where are you going? Time to take 'em in again?
"'O, I say, I'm your guest, uninvited guest, I admit, but that's no reason why you should take advantage of me. Man, my pipe isn't half smoked, and I have a cigarette to smoke yet. Come out and watch me play footer with the boys.'"
"You think you would do all that," said Lawson slowly, "but you wouldn't you know. I remember a young inspector who came into my school with a blush on his face. 'I'm a new inspector,' he said very gingerly, 'and I don't know what I am supposed to do.' A year later that chap came in like whirlwind, and called me 'young man.' Man, you can't escape becoming smug and dignified if you are an inspector."
"I'd have a darned good try, anyway," I said. "Getting any eggs just now?"
* * *
To-night I have been glancing atThe Educational News. There is a letter in it about inspectors, it is signed "Disgusted." That pseudonym damns the teaching profession utterly and irretrievably. Again and again letters appear, and very seldom does a teacher sign his own name. Naturally, aletter signed with a pseudonym isn't worth reading, for a moral coward is no authority on inspectors or anything else. It sickens me to see the abject cringing cowardice of my fellow teachers. "Disgusted" would no doubt defend himself by saying, "I have a wife and family depending on me and I simply can't afford to offend the inspector."
I grant that there is no point in making an inspector ratty, or for that matter making anyone ratty. I don't advise a man to seize every opportunity for a scrap. There is little use in arguing with an inspector who has methods of arithmetic different to your methods; it is easier to think over his advice and reject it if you are a better arithmetician than he. But if a man feels strongly enough on a subject to write to the papers about it, he ought to write as a man not as a slave. Incidentally, the habit of using a pseudonym damns the inspectorate at the same time. For this habit is universal, and teachers must have heard tales of the victimising of bold writers. Most educational papers suggest by their contributed articles that the teachers of Britain are like a crowd of Public School boys who fear to send their erotic verses tothe school magazine lest the Head flays them. No wonder the social status of teachers is low; a profession that consists of "Disgusted" and "Rural School" and "Vindex" and their kind is a profession of nonentities.
* * *
Once in my palmy days I told a patient audience of Londoners that the Post Office was a Socialist concern.
"Any profits go to the State," I said.
A postman in the crowd stepped forward and told me what his weekly wage was, and I hastily withdrew my statement. To-day I should define it as a State Concern run on the principles of Private Profiteering,i.e., it considers labour a commodity to be bought.
The School Board here is theoretically a Socialistic body. Its members are chosen by the people to spend the public money on education. No member can make a profit out of a Board deal. Yet this board perpetrates all the evils of the private profiteer.
Mrs. Findlay gets ten pounds a year for cleaning the school. To the best of my knowledge she works four or five hours a day, and she spends the whole of each Saturday morning cleaning out the lavatories. This sumworks out at about sixpence a day or three ha'pence an hour. Most of her work consists of carrying out the very considerable part of the playground that the bairns carry in on their boots. Yet all my requests for a few loads of gravel are ignored.
The members do not think that they are using sweated labour; they say that if Mrs. Findlay doesn't do it for the money half a dozen widows in the village will apply for the job. They believe in competition and the market value of labour.
A few Saturdays ago I rehearsed a cantata in the school, and I offered Mrs. Findlay half a crown for her extra trouble in sweeping the room twice. She refused it with dignity, she didn't mind obliging me, she said. And this kindly soul is merely a "hand" to be bought at the lowest price necessary for subsistence.
Sometimes I curse the Board as a crowd of exploiters, but in my more rational moments I see that they could not do much better if they tried. If Mrs. Findlay had a pound a week the employees of the farmers on the Board would naturally object to a woman's getting a pound a week out of the publicfunds for working four hours a day while they slaved from sunrise to sunset for less than a pound. A public conscience can never be better than the conscience of the public's representatives. Hence I have no faith in Socialism by Act of Parliament; I have no faith in municipalisation of trams and gas and water. Private profit disappears when the town council takes over the trams, but the greater evil—exploitation of labour remains.
Ah! I suddenly recollect that Mrs. Findlay has her old age pension each Friday. She thus has eight and six a week. I wonder did Lloyd George realise that his pension scheme would one day prevent fat farmers from having conscience qualms when they gave a widow sixpence a day?