And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for
"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I
have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is
being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all
as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near
Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils
with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill
commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music,
live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their
several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated
living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music
for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques
Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants,
knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so
or else break his heart (not somebody else's, observe), yet his school
is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims "Oh, why was I
not taught like this!" and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves
as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors
to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start
off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever
Monsieur Daleroze calls out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about these
wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of,
and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but
adore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris
and Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from
thirty shillings to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances
of converting your millions of little scholastic hells into little
scholastic heavens. If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make
a living, you can still open a little school; and you can easily buy a
secondhand brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to
your door, though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what
he advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began
as a Hydropathic has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plate
inscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that
Froebel is the governing genius of your little _creche_. No doubt the
new brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be
used when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins
and Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land.
I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be
allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another
friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply
deplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters," has offered to accept my
challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go out
of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go out
of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my own
schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, and
whom I should certainly have pestered for information and instruction
if I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, and
if they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves as
carefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt them
accidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod from
behind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; for
they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that.
Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or three
teachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs
over our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For that
matter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a
judge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering
of science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a
clergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like
enough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs
Solness, have "a genius for nursing the souls of little children" are
like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even
at that they are mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine who
went from the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush
from an elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend,
not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded
beyond endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. The
schoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waiting
nervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach of
the peace. In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen
to him. "What did you do?" said the officer. "I gave a man a black eye"
said my friend. "Six pounds if he was a gentleman: two pounds if he
wasnt," said the constable. "He was a schoolmaster" said my friend. "Two
pounds" said the officer; and two pounds it was. The blood money was
paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised elementary schoolmasters
to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence, as the British
Constitution expresses our national estimate of them by allowing us to
blacken three of their eyes for the same price as one of an ordinary
professional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons and
Doctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get on these terms even if
they occurred much more frequently in nature than they actually do?
No: I cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect if
it were worked by angels. I do not admit it even at that, just as I do
not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks. But I do
not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which does
not exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by at once
recognizing and establishing the rights of children.