The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what the
child ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify itself
is another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing children
to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but
finite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is an
instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress is
made. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism,
a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you are
sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you therefore
keep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again until
you hit on the plan of making it learn instalments of Bible verses,
preferably from the book of Numbers. But as it is less trouble to set a
lesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating the
already learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school I began
with a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish sense
of being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, or
rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because
he knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who
could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress took
place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledge
that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with the
culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. I
preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into three
parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentence
I could translate at sight: therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar the
better I was pleased. Just so do less classically educated children see
nothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning of subtraction, and
so on through multiplication and division and fractions, with the black
cloud of algebra on the horizon. And if a boy rushes through all that,
there is always the calculus to fall back on, unless indeed you insist
on his learning music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the
year Beethoven was born.
A child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons.
Also as regards physical training. At present it is assumed that the
schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become
Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This is
the tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even more
horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive boys
through compulsory games in the playing fields until they are too much
exhausted physically to do anything but drop off to sleep. This is
supposed to protect them from vice; but as it also protects them from
poetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer, it may be dismissed
with the obvious remark that if boarding schools are places whose
keepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest more abominable
things should happen, then the sooner boarding schools are violently
abolished the better. It is true that society may make physical claims
on the child as well as mental ones: the child must learn to walk, to
use a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to acquire sufficient
power of self-defence to make an attack on it an arduous and uncertain
enterprise, perhaps to fly. What as a matter of common-sense it clearly
has not a right to do is to make this an excuse for keeping the child
slaving for ten hours at physical exercises on the ground that it is not
yet as dexterous as Cinquevalli and as strong as Sandow.