To-day I have scrapped somebody's Rural Arithmetic. It is full of sums
of the How-much-will-it-take-to-paper a-room? type. This cursed
utilitarianism in education riles me. Who wants to know what it will
take to paper a room? Personally I should call in the painter, and take
my meals on the parlour piano for a day or two. Anyway, why this
suspicion of the poor painter? Is he worse than other tradesmen? If we
must have a utilitarian arithmetic then I want to see a book that will
tell me if the watchmaker is a liar when he tells me that the mainspring
of my watch is broken. I want to see sums like this:--How long will a
plumber take to lay a ten foot pipe if father can do it at the rate of a
yard in three minutes? (Ans., three days).
To me Arithmetic is an art not a science. I do not know a single rule; I
must always go back to first principles. I love catch questions,
questions that will make a bairn think all the time. Inspectors' Tests
give but little scope for the Art of Arithmetic; they are usually poor
peddling things that smell strongly of materialism. In other words, they
appeal to the mechanical part of a bairn's brain instead of to the
imagination. I want to see a test that will include a sum like
this:--23.4 × .065 × 54.678 × 0. The cram will start in to multiply out;
the imaginative bairn will glance along and see the nought, and will at
once spot that the answer is zero.
* * *
I have just discovered an excellent song-book--Curwen's _Approved
Songs_. It includes all the lovely songs of Cavalier and Puritan times,
tunes like _Polly Oliver_ and _Golden Slumbers_. At present my bairns
are singing a Christmas Carol by Bridge, _Sweeter than Songs of Summer_.
They sing treble, alto, and tenor, while I supply the bass. The time is
long past Christmas, but details like that don't worry me. This carol is
the sweetest piece of harmonising I have heard for a long time.
* * *
I have been re-reading Shaw's remarks on Sex in Education. I cannot see
that he has anything very illuminating to say on the subject; for that
matter no one has. Most of us realise that something is wrong with our
views on sex. The present attitude of education is to ignore sex, and
the result is that sex remains a conspiracy of silence. The ideal some
of us have is to raise sex to its proper position as a wondrous
beautiful thing. To-day we try to convey to bairns that birth is a
disgrace to humanity.
The problem before me comes to this: How can I bring my bairns to take a
rational elemental view of sex instead of a conventional hypocritical
one? How can I convey to them the realisation that our virtue is mostly
cowardice, that our sex morality is founded on mere respectability? (It
is the easiest thing in the world to be virtuous in Padanarum; it is not
so easy to be a saint in Oxford Street. Not because Oxford Street has
more temptation, but because nobody knows you there.)
In reality I can do nothing. If I mentioned sex in school I should be
dismissed at once. But if a philanthropist would come along and offer
me a private school to run as I pleased, then I should introduce sex
into my scheme of education. Bairns would be encouraged to believe in
the stork theory of birth until they reached the age of nine. At that
age they would get the naked truth.
A friend of mine, one of the cleverest men I know, and his wife, a wise
woman, resolved to tell their children anything they asked. The eldest,
a girl of four, asked one day where she came from. They told her, and
she showed no surprise. But I would begin at nine chiefly because the
stork story is so delightful that it would be cruel to deprive a bairn
of it altogether. Yet, after all, the stork story is all the more
charming when you know the bald truth.
Well, at the age of nine my bairns would be taken in hand by a doctor.
They would learn that modesty is mainly an accidental result of the
invention of clothes. They would gradually come to look upon sex as a
normal fact of life; in short, they would recognise it as a healthy
thing.
Shaw is right in saying that children must get the truth from a teacher,
because parents find a natural shyness in mentioning sex to their
children. But I think that the next generation of parents will have a
better perspective; shyness will almost disappear. The bairns must be
told; of that there is no doubt. The present evasion and deceit lead to
the dirtiness which constitutes the sex education of boys and girls.
The great drawback to a frank education on sex matters is the disgusting
fact that most grown-up people persist in associating sex with sin. The
phrase "born in sin" is still applied to an illegitimate child. When I
think of the damnable cruelty of virtuous married women to a girl who
has had a child I want to change the phrase into "born into sin."
* * *
I have just discovered a section of the Code that deals with the subject
of Temperance. I smile sadly when I think that my bairns will never have
more than a pound a week to be intemperate on. I suspect that if I had
to slave for a week for a pound I should trek for the nearest pub on pay
night; I should seek oblivion in some way.
Temperance! Why waste time telling poor bairns to be temperate? When
they are fourteen they will learn that to be intemperate means the sack.
If we must teach temperance let us begin at Oxford and Cambridge; at
Westminster (I really forget how much wine and beer was consumed there
last year; the amount raised a thirst in me at any rate).
Temperance! The profiteers see to it that the poor cannot afford to be
intemperate. Coals are up now, the men who draw a royalty on each ton as
it leaves the pit do not know the meaning of temperance.
I want to cry to my bairns: "Be intemperate! Demand more of the fine
things of life. Don't waste time in the beershops, spend your leisure
hours persuading your neighbour to help you to impose temperance on your
masters."
The Code talks about food. But it does not do so honestly. I would
insert the following in the Code:--
"Teachers in slum districts should point out to the children that most
of their food is adulterated. Most of their boots are made of paper.
Most of their clothes are made of shoddy."
* * *
The best thing I have found in the Code is the section on the teaching
of English. I fancy it is the work of J. C. Smith, the Editor of the
Oxford _Spenser_. I used to have him round at my classes; he was a
first-rate examiner. If a class had any originality in it he drew it
out. But I never forgave J. C. Smith for editing _Much Ado About
Nothing_. He made no effort to remark on the absurdity of the plot and
motives. To me the play is as silly as _Diplomacy_ or _Our Boys_.
"No grammar," says the Code, "should be taught until written composition
begins." I like that, but I should re-write it thus: "No grammar should
be taught this side the Styx."
Grammar is always changing, and the grammar of yesterday is scrapped
to-day. A child requires to know how to speak and how to write
correctly. I can write passably well, and when I write I do not need to
know whether a word is an adjective or an adverb, whether a clause is a
noun clause or an adverbial clause of time modifying a certain verb ...
or is it a noun? Society ladies speak grammatically (I am told), and
I'm quite sure that not three people in the Row could tell me whether a
word is a verb or an adverb (I shouldn't care to ask). The fact that I
really could tell what each word is makes absolutely no difference to
me. A middle-class boy of five will know that the sentence "I and nurse
is going to the Pictures" is wrong.
But I must confess that grammar has influenced me in one way. I know I
should say "Whom did you see?" but I always say "Who did you see?" And I
used to try not to split my infinitives until I found out that you can't
split an infinitive; "to" has nothing to do with the infinitive anyway.
I want to abolish the terms Subject, Predicate, Object, Extension, Noun,
Verb, &c. I fancy we could get along very well without them.
Difficulties might arise in learning a foreign tongue. I don't know
anything about foreign tongues; all I know is the Greek alphabet and a
line of Homer, and the fact that all Gaul is divided into three parts.
Yet I imagine that one could learn French or German as a child learns a
language.
Good speaking and writing mean the correct use of idiom, and idiom is
the best phrasing of the best people--best according to our standards at
the present time.
I have heard Parsing and Analysis defended on the ground of their being
an exercise in reasoning. I admit that they do require reasoning, but I
hold that the time would be better spent in Mathematics. I hope to take
my senior pupils through the first and third books of Euclid this
summer. Personally, I can find much pleasure in a stiff deduction, but I
find nothing but intense weariness in an analysis of sentences. My
theories on education are purely personal; if _I_ don't like a thing I
presume that my bairns dislike it. And the strange thing is that my
presumptions are nearly always right.
* * *
Folklore fascinates me. I find that the children of Forfarshire and
Dumfriesshire have the same ring song, _The Wind and the Wind and the
Wind Blows High_. I once discovered in the British Museum a book on
English Folksongs, and in it I found the same song obtaining in
Staffordshire. Naturally, variations occur. Did these songs all spring
from a common stock? Or did incomers bring them to a district?
When I am sacked ... and I half expect to be some day soon ... I shall
wander round the schools of Scotland collecting the folk-songs. I shall
take a Punch and Judy show with me, for I know that this is a long felt
want in the country. That reminds me:--a broken-down fellow came to me
to-day and told pathetically how he had lost his school ... "wrongous
dismissal" he called it. I wept and gave him sixpence. To-night I
visited the minister. "I had a sad case in to-day," he began, "a poor
fellow who had a kirk in Ross-shire. Poor chap, his wife took to drink,
and he lost his kirk."
"Chap with a reddish moustache?" I asked.
"Yes, did you see him?"