And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming,
and say, "We quite agree. We regard every child in our school as a
subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them. We
challenge the experimental test for our system. We are continually
guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character of
our future citizens, etc. etc. etc." I am sorry to seem irreconcilable;
but it is the Life Force that has to make the experiment and not the
schoolmaster; and the Life Force for the child's purpose is in the child
and not in the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is another experiment;
and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on one
another would not produce intelligible results. I admit, however, that
if my schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the Life Force:
that is, if they had set me free to do as I liked subject only to my
political rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experiment
very long, because the first result would have been a rapid movement
on my part in the direction of the door, and my disappearance
there-through.
It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say that
practically every time I should have gone to a much more educational
place. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into the
National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any library
where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry and
difficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced me
to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book of
history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles V. and his
history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung by the
airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The Human
Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and
actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at
what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had
been a school where children were really free, I should have had to
be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the
children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable:
they will read and study far more than is good for them. In fact the
real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their time by reading
for the sake of reading and studying for the sake of studying, instead
of taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capable
of doing some good at. Some silly person will probably interrupt me
here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary
education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced
to. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the point
of obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect their literary
exercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on the
treadmill. In fact they are actually less literate than the treadmill
would have left them; for they might by chance have picked up and dipped
into a volume of Shakespear or a translation of Homer if they had not
been driven to loathe every famous name in literature. I should probably
know as much Latin as French, if Latin had not been made the excuse for
my school imprisonment and degradation.