and the rest into investors. Each investor has his own bag of gold or
counters, his own cheque-book, the daily newspapers are brought into
school and consulted, and each youthful financier tries his fortune
with the investment that most suits his fancy at the time. Day by day
he develops his original idea, buying here, selling there, so that his
knowledge of stocks and shares by the end of a term is unassailable;
the foundation is laid of a character that will not play ducks and
drakes with his own real money in later life if he finds that his
splashes now hold him up to ridicule from his fellows at school. In
geometry the forms will invent their own problems and work out together
as a body any that defeat the individual intelligence. And again the
teacher's aid will only be invoked as a last resource; the children
will teach themselves. Buying and selling, commission and percentage
work will all be done as it were in real life by the taking of a case
that one of the form invents or by going the round of the shops in
the town or village and auditing their accounts, looking into their
businesses and receiving real instruction from those whose life's work
it is to conduct a trade or business, so that here again the factor of
reality so absolutely essential to the intelligent learner shall be
brought into play.
By the end of a term each pupil or at any rate each form will have
produced its own algebra, arithmetic and geometry, and these will
be stored in the archives of the form if they are thought to be of
sufficient value. At any rate they will be the only textbooks they will
see in these subjects.
The period following on this will be an outdoor one if possible, either
one of those mentioned above or a natural history study in the nearest
wood, or drawing of the surrounding country, or dancing on the platform
permanently kept for that purpose in a corner of the playing-fields to
a gramophone, or singing in the open air, or any exercise or physical
training decided on as beneficial to the human frame! From this the
form will come in refreshed in body ready for more intellectual
stimulus.
Then follows the hour of history and geography; the history on a plan
rudely devised in the early part of the twentieth century by Mr. C. R.
L. Fletcher in his "Sir Roger of Tubney" and Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer in
"Ladies Whose Bright Eyes," where all our ancestors, their customs and
reasons for their strange actions, stand out clearly in the broadest
outlines as real living forces. The Elizabethan adventurer, the
peasant, the villein, the Norman baron, the various Kings, the Cavalier
gallant, the Augustan Age courtier, the Georgian politician, the
powder-puff-age lady satirized by Addison, all will live as actually as
our own relatives and friends.
Scenes from history again will be acted in costume, debates will take
place in class as to why Shakespeare does not see fit to mention Magna
Charta, what effects followed, what causes, why enthusiasm was held
in such disdain in the eighteenth century, and altogether, hand in
hand with the literature of its age, the history of each period in
the nation's life will be carefully worked out, and its bearing on
present-day character and custom soundly sifted and thrashed out.
I said geography would be taken at the same time: geography as
studied in the new schools will be an excellent mixture of political
economy, history (really it is hard to separate the two), science and
mathematics, all in their relation to actual facts.
Calculations of temperatures by isotherms, geological strata, even
numerical facts about other races, all of these things will strike
home and be found of paramount interest to boys and girls, but most
especially will this be the case when, as will always happen, the form
decide to work out and write up in detail the accurate history and
geography of their school and the district immediately surrounding
it. This will give so much, such ample opportunity for the rousing
of and keeping keenly alive their faculties, that of all subjects,
history and geography will be the hardest from which to tear the ardent
enthusiasts. The nature of the soil, the various winds that blow, the
effect of these winds on the weather, that is, what weather to expect
after different winds, the rainfall, the contour of the outlying lands,
the agricultural state, the condition of the crops--the list might
be magnified into a book by itself, all these things will help the
child to a better and truer understanding of the making of history and
geography than any textbook, and will prove of lasting worth to him as
a useful citizen of the future. After this period there will follow
an entirely free time, when the school will be at liberty to follow
its own devices until lunch-time: there will be voluntary lectures on
all sorts of subjects that appeal to the stamp-collector's or the
natural historian's mind by men and women who have made their mark.
Great explorers and big-game hunters will themselves come and give an
account of their exciting experiences. Perpetual pianolas, perpetual
cinematograph films will be in use during these hours in which the
school is at liberty. In the afternoon, free time will be given for
games of every description to be played, no particular partiality being
extended to one over another. Running, swimming, tennis, basket-ball,
racquets, fives, golf, cricket, shooting, all will be equally
accessible and equally encouraged.
Tea-parties daily from 4 to 4.30 will be given by masters and
mistresses, and by pupils to other pupils or to their elders, a time
of social intercourse and polite society: the neighbouring populace
will then be entertained by the youthful hosts, and courtesy and
gallantry have a special chance of being adequately cultivated. After
tea school will again be continued in the science hour, where each
pupil will proceed to experiment under the care of an expert with the
produce which he or she has been concerned with in the morning. It may
be to-day that the Modern Shell are trying to discover a use for the
millions of rotten bananas that are shipped into this country week by
week in order to economize in produce or to discover a new fertilizer:
it may be that they wish to discover how to eliminate from the water of
the neighbourhood certain properties that have been found to have an
evil effect on the health of the populace; once you see the bugbear,
the nightmare of examination, is removed the child can occupy himself
doing something really useful, something which will in all probability
be, in the end, of great service to the State and at the same time
train the youthful mind in the way it both wishes and ought to go.
The French period which finishes up the afternoon school will be of
great use, for reminiscences will be indulged in of the last visit
to a French school, village or town on the part of those members of
the form who went last year, in the annual foreign tour; they will
by these reminiscences, told of course in French, whet the minds of
the neophytes, so that they will look forward more than ever to the
holidays which will see them as a body transported to a land where so
many fascinating customs may be witnessed. Conversation both in and
out of school will be carried on in both German and French as much
as possible, helped of course by the fact that there will be so many
natives of these countries always in the school.
The evening will sometimes be spent in quiet reading, sometimes in
lectures, sometimes in cinematograph shows (as a matter of fact the
cinema will be very much in evidence throughout each and every day),
sometimes in concerts, pianola and real, very often in theatricals;
but on this particular evening of which I am speaking the Modern Shell
have decided to do the English that the present-day form did in morning
school before breakfast. This English period is, if anything, looked
forward to more than any other period in the day.
The reason is that, in its many-sidedness, it is even perhaps more
entrancing than geography. First there is the writing and editing
of the form magazine, which is an intricate periodical with a daily
news-sheet merging into a more serious-minded weekly, which itself
turns into a monthly magazine of extraordinary bulk. News, verses,
stories, long and short, novels, drawings, essays, debates, dialogues,
all are heaped into this production.
Plays are written, produced and acted by each form, supervised only at
the rarest intervals by the form master, parts for which are thought
out and debated about spiritedly in form as part of the subject.
Extracts from the great masters are discovered, learnt and declaimed
by the discoverer to the rest of his confederates; everywhere and in
every branch of this subject there is the fresh air and fierce pleasure
of the explorer and pioneer, carving out for himself a gigantic task
to be performed, disciplining himself for that task by repeated
smaller undertakings. In such an atmosphere of feverish excitement and
interest, is it to be wondered at that the result is so magnificent?
For our youthful poetry is real poetry written in the white heat of
passion, the literature of our youth is real literature written while
the fire of life is still burning strongly and furiously inside. Each
boy and girl finds in him or her self something that he or she must
say, something sacred that must be expressed after attempts which may
often be futile, volatile, fluid; at length there emanates a solid,
lasting record in sentences that will ring through the world of a
generation that had risen out of the slough of sullen acquiescence
in an age that cared not for learning or things of the soul, to the
highest heights that had ever been dreamt of by the human race, and our
schools of the future had shown how nearly godlike indeed are these
puny mortals when they put their shoulders to the wheel and help God to
grind His mill.
So we leave our dream-children and this sketch of Utopia in the fervid
hope that something of truth exists in this vision that I have seen,
and the last and most fervent prayer of my life is that I may live
long enough to take part in a revolution that shall make such a vision
possible, and see it in the initial stages starting on its godlike
course; then shall I, like Simeon, be content to depart in peace, for I
shall have, in little at any rate, O God, have seen Thy salvation.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's
original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Schoolmaster's Diary, by Stuart Petre Brodie Mais