she meant to miss nothing; and some of these ideas were quite good and
some were quite silly; and nearly every holiday she went off with a
large notebook and much enthusiasm to educational congresses and
conferences and summer schools and got some more. One that she acquired
quite early, soon after the battle of Omdurman, was to put all her girls
and most of her boys into Djibbahs—loose, pretty garments that were
imitated from and named after the Dervish form of shirt. Hers was one of
the first of those numerous “djibbah schools” that still flourish in
England.
Also she had a natural proclivity towards bare legs and sandals and
hatlessness, and only a certain respect for the parents kept the school
from waves of pure vegetarianism. And she did all she could to carry her
classes out of the class-rooms and into the open air....
The end of the nineteenth century was a happy and beautiful time for the
bodies of the children of the more prosperous classes. Children had
become precious. Among such people as the Stublands one never heard of
such a thing as the death of a child; all their children lived and grew
up. It was a point upon which Arthur had never tired of insisting.
Whenever he had felt bored and wanting a brief holiday he had been
accustomed to go off with a knapsack to study church architecture, and
he had never failed to note the lists of children on the monuments.
“There you are again,” he would say. “Look at that one: ‘and of Susan
his wife by whom he had issue eleven children of whom three survived
him.’ That’s the universal story of a woman’s life in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century. Nowadays it would read, ‘by whom he had issue three
children who all survived him.’ And you see here, she died first, worn
out, and he married again. And here are five more children, and three
die in infancy and childhood. There was a frightful boom in dying in
those days; dying was a career in itself for two-thirds of the children
born. They made an art of early death. They were trained to die in an
edifying manner. Parents wrote books about their little lost saints.
Instead of rearing them——”....
Miss Murgatroyd’s school was indeed healthy and pretty and full of
physical happiness, but the teaching and mental training that went on in
it was of a lower quality. Mental strength and mental balance do not
show in quite the same way as their physical equivalents. Minds do not
grow as bodies do, through leaving the windows open and singing in the
sun.
§ 2
Aunt Phœbe was an old acquaintance of Miss Murgatroyd. They had met at
Adelboden during one of the early Fabian excursions in Switzerland.
Afterwards Miss Murgatroyd had been charmed by Aunt Phœbe’s first book,
a little thin volume of bold ideas in grey covers and a white back,
called, _By-thoughts of a Stitchwoman_. In it Aunt Phœbe represented
herself rather after the fashion of one of those richly conceived women
who sit and stitch in the background of Sir Frederick Leighton’s great
wall paintings at South Kensington, “The Industrial Arts applied to
Peace” and “The Industrial Arts Applied to War” (her needlework was
really very bad indeed) and while she stitched she thought. She thought
outrageously; that was the idea; and she represented all the quiet
stitching sex as thinking as outrageously. Miss Murgatroyd had a kindred
craving for outrageous thinking, and the book became the link of a great
intellectual friendship. They vied with one another in the extremity of
their opinions and the mystical extravagance of their expressions. They
maintained a tumescent flow of thought that was mostly feeling and
feeling that was mostly imitation, far over the heads of the nice little
children, who ran about the bright and airy school premises free from
most of the current infections of body and spirit, and grew as children
do grow under favourable circumstances, after the manner of Nature in
her better moods, that is to say after the manner of Nature ploughed and
weeded and given light and air.
So far as Aunt Phœbe was concerned, the great thoughts were confined to
one or two intimates and—a rather hypothetical circle—her readers. Her
mental galumphings were a thing apart. A kind of shyness prevented her
with strangers and children. But Miss Murgatroyd was impelled by a sense
of duty to build up the character of her children by discourse, more
particularly on Sundays. On Sunday mornings the whole school went to
church; in the afternoon it had a decorous walk, or it read or talked,
and Miss Mills, the junior assistant, read aloud to the little ones; in
the evening it read or it drew and painted, except for a special half
hour when Miss Murgatroyd built its character up. That was her time.
Thus, for example, she built it up about Truth.
“Girls,” she began, “I want to talk to you a little this evening about
Truth. I want you to think about Truth, to concentrate your minds upon
it and see just all it means and can mean to us. You know we must all
tell the Truth, but has it ever occurred to you to ask _why_ we must
tell the Truth? I want you to ask that. I want you to be aware of why
you have to be good in this way and that. I do not want you to be
unthinkingly good. I want you to be
’Not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!’
or a heroine as the case may be. And so, why do we tell the Truth? Is it
because if we did not do so people would be deceived and things go
wrong? Partly. Is it because if we did not do so, people would not trust
us? Also yes, partly. But the real reason, girls and boys, is this, the
real reason is that Lying Lips are an Abomination to the Lord, they are
disgusting to Him, and so they ought to be disgusting to us. That is the
real reason why we should tell the truth. Because it is a thing
offensive and disgraceful, and if we did not do so, then we should tell
a Lie.
(“Doris, _do_ stop plaiting your sister’s hair, please. There is a time
for all things.)
“I hope there is no one here who can bear to think calmly of telling a
Lie; and yet every time you do not tell the Truth manfully and bravely
you do that. It is an offence so dreadful that we are told in Scripture
that whosoever calleth his brother a liar—no doubt without sufficient
evidence—is in danger of Hell Fire. I hope you will think of that if
ever you should be tempted at any time to tell a Lie.
“But now I want you to think a little of what is Truth. It is clear you
cannot tell the truth unless you know what truth is. Well, what is
truth? One thing, I think, will occur to you all at once as part at
least of the answer. Truth is straightness. When we say a ruler is true
we mean that it is straight, and when we say a wall or a corner is out
of truth we mean that it isn’t straight. And, in vulgar parlance, when
we say a man is a straight man we mean one whose acts and words are
true. And another thing of which our great teacher Ruskin so often
reminds us is, that Truth is Simplicity. True people are always simple,
and simple people are usually too simple to be anything but true. Truth
never explains. It never argues. When I have to ask a girl—and sometimes
I have to ask a girl—did she or did she not do this or that, then if she
answers me simply and straightly Yes or No, I feel I am getting the
truth, but if she answers back, ’that depends,’ or ’Please, Miss
Murgatroyd, may I explain just how it was?’ then I know that there is
something coming—something else coming, and not the straight and simple,
the homespun, simple, valiant English Truth at all. Yes and No are the
true words, because as Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers
generally taught us in the Science of Logic long ago, and taught it to
us for all time, a thing either is or else it is not; it is no good
explaining or trying to explain, nothing can ever alter that now for
ever. Either you _did_ do the thing or you didn’t do the thing. There is
no other choice. That is the very essence of Logic; it would be
impossible to have Logic without it.”...
So Miss Murgatroyd building up in her pupils’ minds by precept and
example, the wonderful art and practice of English ratiocination.
§ 3
At first Joan and Peter did not see very much of Miss Murgatroyd. She
moved about at the back of things, very dignified and remote, decorative
and vaguely terrible. Their business lay chiefly with Miss Mills.
Miss Mills was also an educational enthusiast, but of a milder, gentler
type than Miss Murgatroyd; she lacked Miss Murgatroyd’s confidence and
boldness; she sometimes doubted whether everything wasn’t almost too
difficult to teach. She was no blind disciple of her employer. She had a
suppressed sense of academic humour that she had acquired by staying
with an aunt who kept a small Berlin-wool shop in Oxford, and once or
twice she had thought of the most dreadful witticisms about Miss
Murgatroyd. Though she had told them to no one, they had kept her ears
hot for days. Often she wanted quite badly to titter at the school; it
was so different from an ordinary school. Yet she liked wearing a
djibbah and sandals. That was fun. She had no educational
qualifications, but year by year she was slowly taking the diploma of
Associate of the London College of Preceptors. It is a kindly college;
the examinations for the diploma may be taken subject by subject over a
long term of years. She used to enjoy going up to London for her diploma
at Christmas and Midsummer. Her great difficulty was the arithmetic. The
sums never came right.
Miss Murgatroyd was usually very severe upon what she called the Fetish
of Examinations; she herself had neither degree nor diploma, it was a
moral incapacity, and she admitted that she could as soon steal as pass
an examination; but it was understood that Miss Mills pursued this
qualification with no idea whatever of passing but merely “for the sake
of the stimulus.” She made a point of never preparing at all (“cramming”
that is) for any of the papers she “took.” This put the thing on a
higher level altogether.
She had already done the Theory and Practice of Education part of the
diploma. For that she had read parts of _Leonard and Gertrude_, and she
had attended five lectures upon Froebel. Those were days long before the
Montessori System, which is now so popular with our Miss Millses; the
prevalent educational vogues in the ’nineties were Kindergarten and
Swedish drill (the Ling System). Miss Mills was an enthusiast for the
Kindergarten. She began teaching Joan and Peter queer little practices
with paper mats and paper-pattern folding, and the stringing of beads.
As Joan and Peter had been doing such things for a year or so at home as
“play,” their ready teachability impressed her very favourably. All the
children who fell under Miss Mills got a lot of Kindergarten, even
though some of them were as old as nine or ten. They had lots of little
songs that she made them sing with appropriate action. All these little
songs dealt with the familiar daily life—as it was lived in South
Germany four score years ago. The children pretended to be shoemakers,
foresters, and woodcutters and hunters and cowherds and masons and
students wandering about the country, and they imitated the hammering of
shoes, the sawing of stone or the chopping down of trees, and so forth.
It had never dawned upon Miss Mills that such types as these were rare
objects upon the Surrey countryside. In the country about her there were
no masons because there was no stone, no cowherds because there were no
cows on the hills and the cows below grazed in enclosed fields, trees
and wood were handled wholesale by machinery, and people’s boots came
from Northampton or America, and were repaired in London. If any one had
suggested songs about golf caddies, jobbing gardeners, or
traction-engines, or steam-ploughs, or sawmills, or rate-collectors, or
grocers’ boys, or season-ticket holders, or stockbrokers from London
stealing rights-of-way, or carpenters putting up fences and
trespass-notice boards, she would have thought it a very vulgar
suggestion indeed.
Kindergarten did not occupy all the time-table of Miss Mills. She
regarded kindergarten as a special subject. She also taught her class to
read, she taught them to write, she imparted the elements of history and
geography, she did not so much lay the foundations of mathematics as
accumulate a sort of rubble on which Mr. Beldame, the visiting
mathematical master (Tuesdays and Thursdays), was afterwards to build.
Here again Joan and Peter were fortunate. Peter had learnt his alphabet
before he was two; Joan had not been much later with it, and both of
them could read easy little stories already before they came under Miss
Mills’ guidance. That English spelling was entirely illogical, had not
troubled them in the least. Insistence upon logical consistency comes
later in life. Miss Mills never discovered their previous knowledge. She
had heard of a method of teaching to read which was called the “Look and
Say Method,” and the essence of it was that you never learnt your
letters. It was devised for the use of those older children who go to
elementary schools from illiterate homes, and who are beginning to think
for themselves a little. From the first by this method the pupils learnt
the letters in combination.
“Now, Peter,” Miss Mills would say, “this is ’to.’ Look and say—to.”
“To,” said Peter.
“Now I put this little squiggle to it.”
(“P,” said Peter privately).
“And it is ’top’.”
“Top,” said Peter.
“And now _this_ is ’co.’ What is this? Look and say.”
Peter regarded “cop” for a moment. He knew c-o-p was the signal for
“cop,” just as S.O.S. is the signal for “help urgently needed,” but he
knew also it was forbidden to read out the letters of the signal.
“Cop,” said Peter, after going through the necessary process of thought.
His inmost feeling about the matter was that Miss Mills did not know her
letters, but had some queer roundabout way of reading of her own, and
that he was taking an agreeable advantage of her....
Then Miss Mills taught Peter to add and subtract and multiply and
divide. She had once heard some lectures upon teaching arithmetic by
graphic methods that had pleased her very much. They had seemed so
clear. The lecturer had suggested that for a time easy sums might be
shown in the concrete as well as in figures. You would first of all draw
your operation or express it by wood blocks, and then you would present
it in figures. You would draw an addition of 3 to 4, thus:
┌──────┐
┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ├──────┤
├──────┤ ├──────┤ ├──────┤
├──────┤ added to ├──────┤ makes this heap ├──────┤
└──────┘ ├──────┤ ├──────┤
└──────┘ ├──────┤
├──────┤
└──────┘
And then when your pupil had counted it and verified it you would write
it down:
3 + 4 = 7
But Miss Mills, when she made her notes, had had no time to draw all the
parallelograms; she had just put down one and a number over it in each
case, and then her memory had muddled the idea. So she taught Joan and
Peter thus: “See,” she said, “I will make it perfectly plain to you.
Perfectly plain. You take three—so,” and she drew
┌───┐
│ │
│ 3 │
│ │
└───┘
“and then you take four—so,” and she drew
┌───┐
│ │
│ 4 │
│ │
└───┘
“and then you see three plus four makes seven—so:
┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ 3 │ + │ 4 │ = │ 7 │
│ │ │ │ │ │
└───┘ └───┘ └───┘
“Do you see now how it must be so, Peter?”
Peter tried to feel that he did.
Peter quite agreed that it was nice to draw frames about the figures in
this way. Afterwards he tried a variation that looked like the face of
old Chester Drawers:
┌───┐ ┌───┐
│ │ │ │
│ 3 │ ┼ │ 4 │
│ │ ║ │ │
└───┘ ┼ └───┘
▼
┌───┐
│ │
│ 7 │
│ │
└───┘
But for some reason Miss Mills would not see the beauty of that. Instead
of laughing, she said: “Oh, no, that’s _quite_ wrong!” which seemed to
Peter just selfishly insisting on her own way.
Well, one had to let her have her own way. She was a grown-up. If it had
been Joan, Peter would have had his way....
Both Joan and Peter were much addicted to drawing when they went to the
School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. They had picked it up from
Dolly. They produced sketches that were something between a scribble and
an inspired sketch. They drew three-legged horses that really kicked and
men who really struck hard with arms longer than themselves, terrific
blows. If Peter wanted to make a soldier looking very fierce in profile,
he drew an extra eye aglare beyond the tip of the man’s nose. If Joan
wanted to do a pussy-cat curled up, she curled it up into long spirals
like a snake. Any intelligent person could be amused by the sketches of
Joan and Peter. But Miss Mills discovered they were all “out of
proportion,” and Miss Murgatroyd said that this sort of thing was “mere
scribbling.” She called Peter’s attention to the strong, firm outlines
of various drawings by Walter Crane. She said that what the hands of
Joan and Peter wanted was discipline. She said that a drawing wasn’t a
drawing until it was “lined in.” She set the two children drawing pages
and pages of firm, straight lines. She related a wonderful fable of how
Giotto’s one aim in life was to draw a perfect freehand circle. She held
out hopes that some day they might draw “from models,” cones and cubes
and suchlike stirring objects. But she did not think they would ever
draw well enough to draw human beings. Neither Miss Mills nor Miss
Murgatroyd thought it was possible for any one, not being a professional
artist, to draw a human being in motion. They knew it took years and
years of training. Even then it was very exhausting to the model. They
thought it was impertinent for any one young to attempt it.
So Joan and Peter got through their “drawing lessons” by being as
inattentive as possible, and in secret they practised drawing human
beings as a vice, as something forbidden and detrimental and delightful.
They drew them kicking about and doing all sorts of things. They drew
them with squinting eyes and frightful noses. Sometimes they would sort
of come like people they knew. They made each other laugh. Peter would
draw nonsense things to amuse the older girls. When he found
difficulties with hands or feet or horses’ legs he would look secretly
at pictures to see how they were done. He thought it was wrong to do
this, but he did it. He wanted to make his pictures alive-er and liker
every time; he was unscrupulous how he did it. So gradually the two
children became caricaturists. But in their school reports there was
never anything about their drawing except “Untidy,” or, in the case of
Joan, “Could do better if she would try.”
Peter was rather good at arithmetic, in spite of Miss Mills’
instruction. He got sums right. It was held to be a gift. Joan was less
fortunate. Like most people who have been badly taught, Miss Mills had
one or two foggy places in her own arithmetical equipment. She was not
clear about seven sevens and eight eights; she had a confused, irregular
tendency to think that they might amount in either case to fifty-six,
and also she had a trick of adding seven to nine as fifteen, although
she always got from nine to seven correctly as sixteen. Every learner of
arithmetic has a tendency to start little local flaws of this sort,
standing sources of error, and every good, trained teacher looks out for
them, knows how to test for them and set them right. Once they have been
faced in a clear-headed way, such flaws can be cured in an hour or so.
But few teachers in upper and middle-class schools in England, in those
days, knew even the elements of their business; and it was the custom to
let the baffling influence of such flaws develop into the persuasion
that the pupil had not “the gift for mathematics.” Very few women indeed
of the English “educated” classes to this day can understand a fraction
or do an ordinary multiplication sum. They think computation is a sort
of fudging—in which some people are persistently lucky enough to guess
right—“the gift for mathematics”—or impudent enough to carry their
points. That was Miss Mills’ secret and unformulated conviction, a
conviction with which she was infecting a large proportion of the
youngsters committed to her care. Joan became a mathematical gambler of
the wildest description. But there was a guiding light in Peter’s little
head that made him grip at last upon the conviction that seven sevens
make always forty-nine, and eight eights always sixty-four, and that
when this haunting fifty-six flapped about in the sums it was because
Miss Mills, grown-up teacher though she was, was wrong.
Mr. Robert Mond, who has done admirable things for the organized study
and organized rearing of infants, once told me that a baby was the
hardest thing in the world to kill. If it were not, he said, there would
be no grown-up people at all. “But a lot,” he added, “get their
digestions spoilt, mind you, or grow up rickety.”... Still harder is it
to kill a child’s intelligence. There is something heroic about the
fight that every infant mind has to make against the bad explanations,
the misleading suggestions, the sheer foolishness in which we adults
entangle it. The dawning intelligence of Peter, like a young Hercules,
fought with the serpentine muddle-headedness of Miss Mills in its
cradle, and escaped—remarkably undamaged.... Joan’s, too, fought and
escaped, except perhaps for a slight serpentine infection. She was
feminine and flexible; she lacked a certain brutality of conviction that
Peter possessed.
§ 4
But the regular teaching was the least important thing in the life of
the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. It existed largely in
order to be put on one side.
Miss Murgatroyd had the temperament of a sensational editor. Her school
was a vehicle for Booms. Every term there was at least one fundamental
change.
The year when Joan and Peter joined the school was the year of the
Diamond Jubilee, and Miss Murgatroyd had a season of loyalty. The
“Empire” and a remarkable work called _Sixty Years a Queen_ dominated
the school; Victoria, that poor little old panting German widow, was
represented as building up a great fabric of liberty and order, as
reconciling nations, as showing what a woman’s heart, a mother’s
instinct, could do for mankind. She was, Miss Murgatroyd conveyed, the
instigator of such inventions as the electric light and the telephone;
she spread railways over the world as one spreads bread with butter; she
inspired Tennyson and Dickens, Carlyle and William Morris to their
remarkable efforts. The whole world revered her. All this glow of
personal loyalty vanished from the school before the year was out; the
Queen ceased to be mentioned and the theme of Hand Industry replaced
her. Everything was to be taught by hand and no books were to be used.
Education had become too bookish. “Rote learning” was forbidden
throughout the establishment and “textbooks” were to be replaced by
simple note-books made by the children themselves. Then two bright girls
came to the school whose father was French, and, by a happy accident, a
little boy also joined up who had been very well trained by a French
governess. All three spoke French extremely well. Miss Murgatroyd was
inspired to put the school French on a colloquial footing, and the
time-table was reconstructed with a view to the production of _Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ on St. George’s Day, the anniversary day of the
school.
A parent who could paint was requisitioned as a scene-painter, the stage
was put up in the main schoolroom, and those who could take no other
part were set to help make the costumes and distribute programs at the
performance....
These things happened over the heads of Joan and Peter very much as the
things in the newspaper used to happen over our heads before the Great
War got hold of us. They went about their small lives amidst these
things and with a vast indifference to all such things. They played
their little parts in them—the realities of life were not there.