about ten minutes. You see the idea? If Bashan doesn't see us put
anything into the form-room fire, he will think it was something wrong
with the coal."
The Anarchists, much interested, murmured approval.
"Good egg!" observed the President. "We'll put it into the fire
to-morrow morning before he comes in, and after we have been at work ten
minutes or so the thing will go off and blow the whole place to
smithereens."
"Golly!" gobbled the Anarchists.
"What about us, Stinker?" inquired a cautious conspirator. "Shan't we
get damaged?"
Stinker waved away the objection.
"We shall know it's coming," he said; "so we shall be able to dodge. But
it will be a nasty jar for Bashan."
There was a silence, full of rapt contemplation of to-morrow morning.
Then the discordant voice of Ashley minor broke in.
"I don't believe it will work. All your inventions are putrid, Stinker."
"I'll fight you!" squealed the outraged scientist, bounding to his feet.
"I expect it'll turn out to be a fire-extinguisher, or something like
that," pursued the truculent Ashley.
"Hold the bomb," said Stinker to the President, "while I----"
"Sit down," urged the other Anarchists, drawing in their toes. "There's
no room here. Ashley minor, chuck it!"
"It won't work," muttered Ashley doggedly.
Suddenly a brilliant idea came upon Stinker.
"Won't work, won't it?" he screamed. "All right, then! We'll shove it
into this fire now, and you see if it doesn't work!"
Among properly constituted Anarchistic Societies it is not customary,
when the efficacy of a bomb is in dispute, to employ the members as a
_corpus vile_. But the young do not fetter themselves with red-tape of
this kind. With one accord Stinker's suggestion was acclaimed, and the
bomb was thrust into the glowing coals of Rumford's study fire. The
brotherhood, herded together within a few feet of the grate--the
apartment measured seven feet by six--breathed hard and waited
expectantly.
Five minutes passed--then ten.
"It ought to be pretty ripe now," said the inventor anxiously.
The President, who was sitting next the window, prudently muffled his
features in the curtain. The others drew back as far as they
could--about six inches--and waited.
Nothing happened.
"I am sure it will work all right," declared the inventor desperately.
"Perhaps the temperature of this fire----"
He knelt down, and began to blow upon the flickering coals. There was a
long and triumphant sniff from Master Ashley.
"I said it was only a rotten stinkp--" he began.
BANG!
There is a special department of Providence which watches over the
youthful chemist. The explosion killed no one, though it blew the coals
out of the grate and the pictures off the walls.
The person who suffered most was the inventor. He was led, howling but
triumphant, to the Sanatorium.
* * * * *
"Luckily, sir," explained Rumford to Mr. Bull a few days later, in
answer to a kindly inquiry as to the extent of the patient's injuries,
"it was only his face."
[Illustration: THE NIPPER]
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE
I
One of the most pathetic spectacles in the world is that of grown-up
persons legislating for the young. Listening to these, we are led to
suspect that a certain section of the human race--the legislative
section--must have been born into the world aged about forty, sublimely
ignorant of the requirements, limitations, and point of view of infancy
and adolescence.
In what attitude does the ordinary educational expert approach
educational problems? This question induces another. What is an
educational expert?
The answer is simple. Practically everybody.
All parents are educational experts: we have only to listen to a new
boy's mother laying down to a Headmaster the lines upon which his school
should be conducted to realise that. So are all politicians: we discover
this fact by following the debates in the House of Commons. So are the
clergy; for they themselves have told us so. So, presumably, are the
writers of manuals and text-books. So are the dear old gentlemen who
come down to present prizes upon Speech Day. Practically the only
section of humanity to whom the title is denied are the people who have
to teach. It is universally admitted by the experts--it is their sole
point of agreement--that no schoolmaster is capable of forming a correct
judgment of the educational needs of his charges. He is hidebound,
"groovy"; he cannot break away from tradition.
"What can you expect from a tripe-dresser," inquire the experts in
chorus, "but a eulogy of the stereotyped method of dressing tripe?"
So, ignoring the teacher, the experts lay their heads--one had almost
said their loggerheads--together, and evolve terrific schemes of
education. Each section sets about its task in characteristic fashion.
The politician, with his natural acumen, gets down to essentials at
once.
"The electorate of this country," he says to himself, "do not care one
farthing dip about Education as such. Now, how can we galvanise
Education into a vote-catching machine?"
He reflects.
"Ah! I have it!" he cries presently. "_Religion!_ That'll ginger them
up!"
So presently an Education Bill is introduced into the House of Commons.
Nine out of its ten clauses deal purely with educational matters and
are passed without a division; and the intellectual teeth of the House
fasten greedily upon Clause Number Ten, which deals with the half-hour
per day which is to be set aside for religious instruction. The question
arises: What attitude are the youth of the country to be taught to adopt
towards their Maker? Are they to praise Him from a printed page, or
merely listen to their teacher doing so out of his own head? Are they to
learn the Catechism? Is the Lord's Prayer to be regarded as an Anglican
or Nonconformist orison?
Everybody is most conciliatory at first.
"A short passage of Scripture," suggest the Anglicans; "a Collect,
mayhap; and a few words of helpful instruction--eh? Something quite
simple and non-contentious, like that?"
"We are afraid that that is sectarian religion," object the
Nonconformists. "A simple chapter from the Bible, certainly--maybe a
hymn. But no dogmatic teaching, _if_ you please!"
"But that is no religion at all!" explain the Anglicans, with that
quickness to appreciate another's point of view which has always
distinguished the Church of England.
After a little further unpleasantness all round, a deadlock is reached.
Then, with that magnificent instinct for compromise which characterises
British statesmanship, another suggestion is put forward. Why not permit
all the clergy of the various denominations to enter the School and
minister to the requirements of their various young disciples? "An
admirable notion," says everybody. But difficulties arise. Are this
heavenly host to be admitted one by one, or in a body? If the former,
how long will it take to work through the entire rota, and when will the
ordinary work of the day be expected to begin? If the latter, is the
School to be divided, for devotional purposes, into spiritual
water-tight compartments by an arrangement of movable screens, or what?
So the battle goes on. By this time, as the astute politician has
foreseen, every one has forgotten that this is an Education Bill, and
both sides are hard at work manufacturing party capital out of John
Bull's religious susceptibilities. Presently the venue is shifted to the
country, where the electorate are asked upon a thousand platforms if the
Church which inaugurated Education in our land, and built most of the
schools, is to be ousted from her ancient sphere of beneficent activity;
and upon a thousand more, whether the will of the People or the Peers is
to prevail. (It simplifies politics very greatly to select a good
reliable shibboleth and employ it on _all_ occasions.) Finally the Bill
is thrown out or talked out, and the first nine clauses perish with it.
That is the political and clerical way of dealing with Education. The
parent's way we will set forth in another place.
The writer of manuals and text-books concerns himself chiefly with the
right method of unfolding his subject to the eager eyes of the expectant
pupil. "There is a right way and a wrong way," he is careful to explain;
"and if you present your subject in the wrong way the pupil will derive
no _educational_ benefit from it whatever." At present there is a great
craze for what is known as "practical" teaching. For instance, in our
youth we were informed, _ad nauseam_, that there is a certain fixed
relation between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, the
relation being expressed by a mysterious Greek symbol pronounced "pie."
The modern expert scouts this system altogether. No imaginary pie for
him! He is a practical man.
_Take several ordinary tin canisters_, he commands, _a piece of string,
and a ruler; and without any other aids ascertain the circumference_
_and diameter of these canisters. Work out in each case the numerical
relation between the circumference and diameter. What conclusion do you
draw from the result?_
We can only draw one, and that is that no man who has never been a boy
should be permitted to write books of instruction for the young. For
what would the "result" be? Imagine a company of some thirty or forty
healthy happy boys, each supplied gratuitously with several tin
canisters and a ruler, set down for the space of an hour and practically
challenged to create a riot. Alexander's Rag-Time Band would be simply
nowhere!
As for the last gang of experts--the dear old gentlemen who come down to
give away prizes on Speech Day--they do not differ much as a class. They
invariably begin by expressing a wish that they had enjoyed such
educational facilities as these in their young days.
"You live in a palace, boys!" announces the old gentleman. "I envy you."
(Murmurs of "Liar!" from the very back row.)
After that the speaker communicates to his audience a discovery which
has been communicated to the same audience by different speakers since
the foundation of the School--to this effect, that Education
(derivation given here, with a false quantity thrown in) is a "drawing
out" and not a "putting-in." Why this fact should so greatly excite
Speech Day orators is not known, but they seldom fail to proclaim it
with intense and parental enthusiasm. Then, after a few apposite remarks
upon the subject of _mens sana in corpore sano_--a flight of originality
received with murmurs of anguish by his experienced young hearers--the
old gentleman concludes with a word of comfort to "the less successful
scholars." It is a physical impossibility, he points out, when there is
only one prize, for all the boys in the class to win it; and adds that
his experience of life has been that not every boy who wins prizes at
school becomes Prime Minister in after years. All of which is very
helpful and illuminating, but does not solve the problem of Education to
any great extent.
So much for the experts. Their name is Legion, for they are many, and
they speak with various and dissonant voices. But they have one thing in
common. All their schemes of education are founded upon the same amazing
fallacy--namely, that a British schoolboy is a person who desires to be
instructed. That is the rock upon which they all split. That is why it
was suggested earlier in these pages that educational experts are all
born grown-up.
Let us clear our minds upon this point once and for all. In nine cases
out of ten a schoolmaster's task is not to bring light to the path of an
eager, groping disciple, but to drag a reluctant and refractory young
animal up the slopes of Parnassus by the scruff of his neck. The
schoolboy's point of view is perfectly reasonable and intelligible. "I
am lazy and scatterbrained," he says in effect. "I have not as yet
developed the power of concentration, and I have no love of knowledge
for its own sake. Still, I have no rooted objection to education, as
such, and I suppose I must learn something in order to earn a living.
But I am much too busy, as a growing animal, to have any energy left for
intellectual enterprise. It is the business of my teacher to teach me.
To put the matter coarsely, he is paid for it. I shall not offer him
effusive assistance in his labours, but if he succeeds in keeping me up
to the collar against my will, I shall respect him for it. If he does
not, I shall take full advantage of the circumstance."
That is the immemorial attitude of the growing boy. When he stops
growing, conscience and character begin to develop, and he works
because he feels he ought to or because he has got into the habit of
doing so, and not merely because he must. But until he reaches that age
it is foolish to frame theories of education based upon the idea that a
boy is a person anxious to be educated.
Let us see how such a theory works, say, in the School laboratory. A
system which will extract successful results from a class of boys
engaged in practical chemistry will stand any test we care to apply to
it. Successful supervision of School science is the most ticklish
business that a master can be called upon to undertake. We will follow
our friend Brown minor to the laboratory, and witness him at his
labours.
He takes his place at the working bench, and sets out his
apparatus--test-tubes, beakers, and crucibles. He lights all the bunsen
burners within reach. Presently he is provided with a sample of some
crystalline substance and bidden to ascertain its chemical composition.
"How shall I begin, sir?" he asks respectfully.
"Apply the usual tests: I told you about them yesterday in the
lecture-room. Take small portions of the substance: ascertain if they
are soluble. Observe their effect on litmus. Test them with acid, and
note whether a gas is evolved. And so on. That will keep you going for
the present. I'll come round to you again presently."
And off goes the busy master to help another young scientist in
distress.
Brown minor gets to work. He takes a portion of the crystalline
substance and heats it red-hot, in the hope that it will explode; and
treats another with concentrated sulphuric acid in order to stimulate it
into some interesting performance. At the same time he maintains a
running fire of _sotto voce_ conversation and chaff with his
neighbours--a laboratory offers opportunities for social intercourse
undreamed of in a form-room--and occasionally leaves his own task in
order to assist, or more often to impede, the labours of another. When
he returns to his place he not infrequently finds that his last
decoction (containing the balance of the crystalline substance) has
boiled over, and is now lying in a simmering pool upon the bench, or
that another chemist has called and appropriated the vessel in which the
experiment was proceeding, emptying its contents down the sink. Not a
whit disturbed, he fills up the time with some work of independent
research, such as the manufacture of a Roman candle or the preparation
of a sample of nitro-glycerine. At the end of the hour he reports
progress to his instructor, expressing polite regret at having failed as
yet to solve the riddle of the crystalline substance; and returns
whistling to his form-room, where he jeers at those of his companions
who have spent the morning composing Latin Verses.
No, it is a mistake to imagine that the young of the human animal
hungers and thirsts after knowledge.
* * * * *
Arthur Robinson, B.A., of whom previous mention has been made, soon
discovered this fact; or rather, soon recognised it; for he was not much
more than a boy himself. He was an observant and efficient young man,
and presently he made further discoveries.
The first was that boys, for teaching purposes, can be divided into
three classes:
(_A_) Boys whose conduct is uniformly good, and whose industry is
continuous. Say fifteen per cent.
For example, Master Mole. He was invariably punctual; his work was
always well prepared; and he endured a good deal of what toilers in
another walk of life term "peaceful picketing" for contravening one of
the fundamental laws of schoolboy trades-unionism by continuing to work
when the master was out of the room.
(_B_) Boys whose conduct is uniformly good--except perhaps in the matter
of surreptitious refreshment--but who will only work so long as they are
watched. Say sixty per cent.
Such a one was Master Gibbs. By long practice he had acquired the art of
looking supremely alert and attentive when in reality his thoughts were
at the back of beyond. When engaged in writing work his pen would move
across the page with mechanical regularity, what time both eyes were
fixed upon a page torn from a comic paper and secreted under his
manuscript. He gave no trouble whatever, but was a thorn in the flesh of
any conscientious teacher.
(_C_) Boys who are not only idle, but mischievous. Say twenty-five per
cent.
There was Page, whose special line was the composition of comic answers
to questions. Some of his efforts were really praiseworthy; but like all
adventurous spirits he went too far at last. The rod descended upon the
day when he translated _caeruleae puppes_ "Skye terriers"; and thereafter
Master Page joked no more. But it was a privation for both boy and
master.
Then there was Chugleigh, whose strong suit was losing books. He was a
vigorous and muscular youth, more than a little suspected of being a
bully; but he appeared to be quite incapable of protecting his own
property. Sometimes he grew quite pathetic about it. He gave Mr.
Robinson to understand, almost with tears, that his books were at the
mercy of any small boy who cared to snatch them from him. Certainly he
never had any in form.
"I see you require State protection," said Arthur Robinson one morning,
when Chugleigh put in an appearance without a single book of any kind,
charged with a rambling legend about his locker and a thief in the
night. He scribbled an order. "Take this to the librarian, and get a set
of new books."
Mr. Chugleigh, much gratified--the new books would be paid for by an
unsuspicious parent and could be sold second-hand at the end of the
term--departed, presently to return with five new volumes under his arm.
"Write your name in them all," said Mr. Robinson briskly.
Chugleigh obeyed, as slowly as possible.
"Now bring all the books here."
Chugleigh did so, a little puzzled.
"For the future," announced Mr. Robinson, unmasking his batteries, "in
order to give you a fair chance in this dishonest world, you shall have
_two_ sets of the books in use in this form. I will keep one set for
you. The others you may keep or lose as you like, but whenever you turn
up here without a book I shall be happy to hire you out the necessary
duplicates, at a charge of threepence per book per hour. This morning
you will require a Caesar, a grammar, and a Latin Prose book. That will
be ninepence. Will you pay cash, or shall I knock it off your
pocket-money at the end of the week?"
He locked up the remaining two books in his desk, and the demoralised
Chugleigh resumed his seat amid loud laughter.
II
The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of other precious things in
life, occasionally leads its votaries into tortuous ways. Cribbing, for
instance.
All boys crib more or less. It is not suggested that the more sinful
forms of this species of self-help are universal, or even common. But
the milder variations are practised by all, with the possible exception
of the virtuous fifteen per cent. previously mentioned.
The average boy's attitude towards cribbing is precisely the same as his
attitude towards other types of misdemeanour: that is to say, he regards
it as one of these things which is perfectly justifiable if his
form-master is such a weakling as to permit it. It is all part of the
eternal duel between the teacher and the taught.
"Do I scribble English words in the margin of my Xenophon?" asks the
boy. "Certainly. Do I surreptitiously produce loose pages of Euclid from
my pocket and copy them out, when I am really supposed to have learned
them by heart? Of course. Why should I, through sheer excess of virtue,
handicap myself in the race to escape the punishment of failure, simply
because the highly qualified expert who is paid to supervise my
movements fails in his plain duty?"
So he cribs.
But his attitude towards the matter is quite consistent, for when he
rises to a position of trust and authority in the school, he ceases to
crib--at least flagrantly. The reason is that he is responsible now not
so much to a master as to his own sense of right and wrong; and he has
made the discovery which all of us make in the end--that the little
finger of our conscience is often thicker than the hardest taskmaster's
loins.
There are two forms of cribbing, and school opinion differentiates very
sharply between them. There is cribbing to gain marks, and there is
cribbing to save trouble or avoid punishment. The average boy, who is in
the main an honest individual, holds aloof from the former practice
because he feels that it is unsportsmanlike--rather like stealing, in
fact; but he usually acquiesces without a struggle in the conveniences
offered by the second. For instance, he refrains from furtively copying
from his neighbour, for he regards that as the meanest kind of
brain-sucking. (If the neighbour pushes his paper towards him with a
friendly smile, that of course is a different matter.) But he is greatly
addicted to a more venial crime known as "paving." The paver prepares
his translation in the orthodox manner, but whenever he has occasion to
look up a word in a lexicon he scribbles its meaning in the margin of
the text, or, more frequently, just over the word itself, to guard
against loss of memory on the morrow.
Much less common is the actual use of cribs--the publications of the
eminent house of Bohn, and other firms of less reliability and repute.
Most boys have sufficient honesty and common sense to realise that
getting up work with a translation is an unprofitable business, though
at the same time they are often unable to resist the attractions of such
labour-saving appliances. Their excuse is always the same, and it is not
a bad one.
"If the School Library," they say, "contains Jowett's Thucydides and
Jebb's Sophocles for all the Sixth to consult, why should not we, in our
humbler walk of scholarship, avail ourselves of the occasional
assistance of Kiddem's Keys to the Classics?"
So much for the casual cribber. The professional--the chronic--exercises
an ingenuity, and devotes an amount of time and labour to the perfecting
of his craft which, if applied directly to his allotted task, would
bring him out at the top of his form. In a little periodical entitled
_The Light Green_, published in Cambridge thirty years ago by a young
Johnian named Hilton (who might have rivalled Calverley himself had he
lived to maturity), we have a brilliant little portrait of the
professional cribber, executed in the style of _The Heathen Chinee_. It
is called _The Heathen Passee_.
In the crown of his cap
Were the Furies and Fates,
And an elegant map
Of the Dorian States:
And we found in his palms, which were hollow,
What are common in palms--that is dates.
But he is a rare bird, the confirmed cribber, with his algebraical
formulae written on his finger-nails, and history notes attached to
unreliable elastic arrangements which shoot up his sleeve out of reach
at critical moments. The ordinary boy does not crib unless he is pressed
for time or in danger of summary execution. He usually limits his
enterprises to co-operative preparation--that is to say, the splitting
up an evening's work into sections, each section being prepared by one
boy and translated to the other members of the syndicate afterwards--to
the gleaning of discarded lines and superfluous tags from the rough
copies of cleverer boys' Latin Verses, and to the acceptance of a
whispered "prompt" from a good Samaritan when badly cornered by a
question.