As the great end of human society is to become wiser and better, this ought, therefore, to be the principal view of every man, in every station of life.
THE BACHELOR’S CLUB
BENNETT LAWRIE’S education began at the age of six, when, with his sister, Ph?be, he was every morning taken by Tibby to a little dame’s school where he learned the alphabet, the multiplication table, writing, and the stories of the Bible. He was also allowed to draw and taught to embroider little mats with rough silk and to make balls with pieces of wool. In five years he made a great many balls, but he was not allowed to play with them, for they were given to the poor.
When he was ten he passed from this establishment to Wellington House, where there were no girls, but a great many rough boys who frightened him. Among them were his two elder brothers, who afforded him no protection but rather supplied the others with material for teasing. Bennett could not understand that small boys should fight merely out of bluster and cockiness. He only wanted to fight when rage mastered him, and then he was out to kill. He only had one fight at that school and that was enough, for he cut open his adversary’s eye and tore the lobe of his ear away from his scalp. Thereafter he suffered from collective rather than individual bullying.
He learned arithmetic as far as fractions, algebra as far as surds, the first, second and third books of Euclid, English composition and literature, French grammar, composition and easy translations, Latin grammar, composition and [Pg 211]easy translations, Scripture (the books of Samuel, Kings, and the Acts of the Apostles in rotation), geography, history (Tudor and Stuarts alternatively), elocution and dancing. Without being in the least interested in anything, he had no difficulty in memorising for the purposes of each day the tasks that were set before him. He was said to be intelligent, industrious and eager in his work and generally satisfactory in his conduct. At the end of each year he found himself with a prize, though he knew not how or why, and his mother became quite amiable to him. There remained one member of her husband’s family with whom she had not (as yet) quarrelled, namely Bennett’s Aunt Louisa, an ex-governess who had retired upon receipt of a legacy and taken up her residence in our town in order to be near her brothers, James the failure, whom she loved, and Keith the successful merchant, whom she both feared and disliked. This gentle lady offered to pay Bennett’s fees, twelve guineas a year, at the Grammar School, and thither accordingly he repaired with a brand new handbag and a quaking heart to find himself one of five hundred boys, of all shapes and sizes and classes and nationalities and religions—the town in little. In his first term he was in the Lower Third Form, and sat between the son of a cab-driver and the son of a millionaire mill-owner.
It does not matter very much what the young are taught, but it does matter enormously who teaches them. The curriculum of the Grammar School was the curriculum of Wellington House administered in larger and more unpleasant doses. Games were not compulsory, and only one hour per week was allowed for them. What the parents wanted and what they got was a good, hard, thorough grounding and no nonsense. There may have been an ideal in the place once upon a time—(it was founded by a Bishop)—but that ideal had produced no offspring, and there were no little ideals to grow up with Bennett’s generation. Science had been added to the available subjects to be crammed into the boys’ heads, for the voice of Huxley was loud in the land; but though Bennett devoted two hours a week to physics and chemistry, [Pg 212]he never got beyond a vague notion that light and heat were not all they seemed, and a jocular idea that chemistry meant making a bad smell.
He was moved up regularly once a year, but he learned no history beyond George III, he devoted four terms to the study of the Acts of the Apostles, he dropped Latin in favour of German; having learned by heart the rivers and capitals of Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and drawn maps of all of them, he left geography behind, and having studied the Tudors and the Stuarts until he was sick of them, he was suddenly, by promotion, switched away from England, and directed to apply himself to the Thirty Years’ and the Seven Years’ Wars in Germany. Having partially grasped what they were about he was promoted into the middle of the French Revolution. Robespierre was not beheaded when he left school, and he never connected the upheaval in France with the rise of Napoleon.
His instruction in languages was entirely grammarian, and he had no notion but that the works of Corneille, Racine, Goethe and Schiller and Gustav Freytag might have been written expressly to be annotated by the various Masters and Bachelors of Arts whose names appeared on the title-pages of his text-books. He drew skeletons, profiles of girls and caricatures in the margins, and beyond cramming enough of the notes and the dictionary to satisfy his masters he took no further interest in them. He was never asked to do so.
His career and mental development were exactly those of ninety-five per cent. of the boys who passed through the institution, except that he suffered more from fear. Fear was the directing force of the machinery. The High Master was a bearded man with a huge voice, with which he bullied his assistants. The senior members of the staff bullied the junior members, and, without being given any standard of right and wrong, the boys were punished, punished, punished: detentions, impositions, enforced drills, thrashings. The school was enormously successful, and everybody was immensely satisfied with it, though there was never a boy grown man who could look back with pleasure [Pg 213]on the years spent in its toils. There were periodical attempts made to pump up the spirit of loyalty—esprit de corps—but they always flagged under the general listlessness. The boys understood that they attended day after day to be educated, a process which they regarded as extremely unpleasant, as indeed it was, and only tolerable in that its end was always in sight. The clever boys who were kept until they were nineteen and stuffed for Oxford and Cambridge and the professions were pitied rather than admired. There was nothing admirable in Oxford and Cambridge to those who knew nothing of them, save the second and third-class men who were so poor as to be glad of the miserable pittance granted them for the instruction of generations of Bennett Lawries and the sons of cab-drivers and millionaire mill-owners.
After his first term in the Fifth Form Mrs. Lawrie quarrelled with Bennett’s aunt Louisa. Her subsidy was withdrawn, and Bennett left school with a mind untrained except in memory, and stored only with a curious litter of knowledge absolutely unrelated to the facts of his existence.
Education, like charity, should begin at home. Bennett had spent eleven years in being educated, but he had been taught nothing at all of the place in which he lived. He had not been told why it was, what it was, nor for what purpose it existed and grew and expanded. He knew nothing of its history except that it had once had a Latin name and had been occupied by the Romans, and that Oliver Cromwell had passed through or near it with his Roundheads. Everything that was told him was presented to him in such a desiccated form that his gorg............