The world is changing so rapidly that it may be well to say a few words about the type of school Sanderson was destined¹ to renovate². Even in the seventies and eighties these smaller 'classical' schools had a quaint³ old-fashioned air amidst the surrounding landscape. They were staffed by the less vigorous men of the university-scholar type; men of the poorer educated classes in origin, not able enough to secure any of the prizes reserved for university successes, and not courageous⁴ enough to strike out into the great world on their own account. They protected themselves from the sense of inferiority by an exaggeration of the value of the schooling⁵ and disciplines through which they had gone, and they ignored their lack of grasp in a worship of the petty accuracies within their capacity. Their ambition soared at[Pg 29] its highest to holy orders and a headmastership, a comfortable house, a competent wife, dignity, security, ease, and a certain celebrity⁶ in equation-dodging or the imitation of Latin and Greek compositions. Contemporary life and thought these worthy⁷ dominies regarded with a lofty scorn. The formal mathematical work, it is true, was not older than a century or a century and a half, but the classical training had come down in an unbroken tradition from the seventeenth century. One of the staff of Oundle when Sanderson took it over is described as a 'wonderful' classical master. 'His master passion,' we are told, 'for Latin elegiacs and Greek iambics fired many of his pupils, whose best efforts were copied into a book that bore the title Inscribatur.' These exercises in stereotyped⁸ expression were going on at Oundle right into the eighteen-nineties. They had their justification⁹. From the school the boys passed on to the Universities of Oxford¹⁰ and Cambridge, where sympathetic examining authorities awarded the greater prizes at their disposal to the more proficient¹¹ of these victims. The Civil Service Commissioners¹² by a mark-rigging system that would have won the respect of an American[Pg 30] election boss, kept the Higher Division of the Civil Service as a preserve for ignorance 'classically' adorned¹³. So that the school could boast of 'an almost uninterrupted stream of scholarship successes at Cambridge' even in its decline in the late eighties, when its real educational value to the country it served was a negative quantity.  
This seventeenth century 'classical' grind constituted the main work of the school, and no other subject seems to have been pursued with any industry. Most of the staff could not draw or use their hands properly; like most secondary teachers of that time they were innocent of educational science, and no attempt was made to teach every boy to draw. Drawing was still regarded as a 'gift' in those days. The normally intelligent boy without the peculiar¹⁴ aptitudes¹⁵ and plasticity needed to take Latin elegiacs seriously, had no educational alternative whatever. There was no mathematical teaching beyond low-grade formal stuff of a very boring sort, and the only science available was a sort of science teaching put in to silence the complaints of progressive-minded parents rather than with any educational intention, science teaching that was very properly[Pg 31] called 'stinks¹⁶.' It was a stinking¹⁷ imposture¹⁸. The boy of good ordinary quality was driven therefore to games or 'hobbies' or mischief¹⁹ as an outlet²⁰ for his energies, as chance might determine. The school buildings before Sanderson was appointed were as cramped²¹ as the curriculum; old boys recall the 'redolent' afternoon class-rooms; the Grocers' Company in its wisdom had built a new School-House during the brief boom under St. John Reade, between a public house on either side and a slum at the back. It must have been pleasant for master and boys alike to escape from the stuffiness²² of general teaching upon these premises²³, and from the priggish exploits in versification of the 'inspired' minority, to the cricket field. There one had scope; there was life. The Rev²⁴. H. St. J. Reade, the headmaster in the eighties, had been Captain of the Oxford Eleven, and drove the ball hard and far, to the admiration²⁵ of all beholders.
 
The Rev. Mungo J. Park, who immediately preceded Sanderson, is described as a man of considerable personal dignity, aloof²⁶ and leisurely²⁷, and greatly respected by the boys. Under him the number of the boys in the school declined to[Pg 32] fewer than a hundred. That dwindling²⁸ band led the normal life of boys at any small public school in England. Most of them were frightfully bored by the teaching of the bored masters; the wonderful classical master lashed²⁹ himself periodically up to the infectious level of enthusiasm for his amazing exercises; there was cribbing and ragging and loafing, festering curiosities and emotional experimenting, and, thank Heaven! games a fellow could understand. If these boys learnt anything of the marvellous new vision of the world that modern science was unfolding, they learnt it by their own private reading and against the wishes of their antiquated³⁰ teachers. They learnt nothing in school of the outlook of contemporary affairs, nothing of contemporary human work, nothing of the social and economic system in which many of them were presently to play the part of captains. If they learnt anything about their bodies it was secretly, furtively³¹, and dirtily. The gentlemen in holy orders upon the staff, and the sermons in the Oundle parish church, had made souls incredible. There has been much criticism of the devotion to games in these dens³² of mental dinginess³³, but games were[Pg 33] the only honest and conclusive³⁴ exercises to be found in them. From the sunshine and reality of the swimming-pool, the boats, the cricket or football field, the boys came back into the ill-ventilated class-rooms to pretend, or not even to pretend, an interest in languages not merely dead, but now, through a process of derivation and imitation from one generation to another, excessively decayed. The memory of school taken into after life from these establishments was a memory of going from games and sunshine and living interest into class-rooms of twilight³⁵, bad air, and sham³⁶ enthusiasm for exhausted³⁷ things.