Part 4

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?"

I ignored the question.

"Charity," I said, "is foolish. I don't believe in charity of that kind. You gave him something?"

"Er--a shilling."

"You have too much heart," I said, and I took my departure.

If I have to go on tramp I shall try to live by selling sermons after school-hours.

VIII.

To-day I discussed the Women's Movement with my class. They were all agreed that women should not have votes. I asked for reasons.

"They can't fight like men," said a boy.

I pointed out that they risk their lives more than men do. A woman risks her life so that life may come into the world; a soldier risks his life so that death may come into the world.

"Women speak too much," said Margaret Steel.

"Read the Parliamentary debates," said I.

"Women have not the brains," said a boy.

I made no reply, I lifted his last exam. paper, and showed the class his 21 per cent, then I showed him Violet Brown's 93 per cent. But I was careful to add that the illustration was not conclusive.

I went on to tell them that the vote was of little use to men, and that I did not consider it worth striving for. But I tried to show them that the Women's Movement was a much bigger thing than a fight for political power. It was a protest against the system that made sons doctors and ministers, and daughters typists and shopgirls, that made girls black their idle brothers' boots, that offered £60 to a lady teacher who was doing as good work as the man in the next room with his £130. I did not take them to the deeper topics of Marriage, Inheritance, the economic dependence of women on men that makes so many marry for a home. But I tried to show that owing to woman's being voteless the laws are on the man's side, and I instanced the Corporation Baths in the neighbouring city. There only one day a week is set aside for women. Then it struck me that perhaps the women of the city have municipal votes, and I suggested that if this were the case, women are less interested in cold water than men, a circumstance that goes to show that women have a greater need of freedom than I thought they had.

On the whole it was a disappointing discussion.

* * *

I went up to see Lawson of Rinsley School to-night. I talked away gaily about having scrapped my Readers and Rural Arithmetic. He was amused; I know that he considers me a cheerful idiot. But he grew serious when I talked about my Socialism.

"You blooming Socialists," he said, with a dry laugh, "are the most cocky people I have yet struck. You think you are the salt of the earth and that all the others are fatheads."

"Quite right, Lawson," I said with a laugh. And I added seriously: "You see, my boy, that if you have a theory, you've simply _got_ to think the other fellow an idiot. I believe in Socialism--the Guild Socialism of _The New Age_, and naturally I think that Lloyd George and Bonar Law and the Cecils, and all that lot are hopelessly wrong."

"Do you mean to tell me that you are a greater thinker than Arthur James Balfour?" Lawson sat back in his chair and watched the effect of this shot.

I considered for a minute.

"It's like this," I said slowly, "you really cannot compare a duck with a rabbit. You can't say that Shakespeare is greater than Napoleon or Burns than Titian. Balfour is a good man in his own line, and--"

"And you?"

"I sometimes think of great things," I replied modestly. "Balfour has an ideal; he believes, as Lord Roberts believed, in the Public Schools, in Oxford and Cambridge, in the type of Englishman who becomes an Imperialist Cromer. He believes in the aristocracy, in land, in heredity of succession. His ideal, so far as I can make out, is to have an aristocracy that behaves kindly and charitably to a deserving working-class--which, after all, is Nietzsche's ideal.

I believe in few of these things. I detest charity of that kind; I hate the type of youth that our Public Schools and Oxfords turn out. I want to see the land belong to the people, I want to see every unit of the State working for the delight that work, as opposed to toil, can bring. The aristocracy has merits that I appreciate. Along with the poor they cheerfully die for their country ... it is the profiteering class with its "Business as Usual" cant that I want to slay. I want to see all the excellent material that exists in our aristocracy turned to nobler uses than bossing niggers in India so that millionaires at home may be multi-millionaires, than wasting time and wealth in the social rounds of London."

"Are you a greater thinker than Balfour?"

I sighed.

"I think I have a greater ideal," I said. "And," I added, "I am sure that if Balfour were asked about it he would reply: 'I wish I could have got out of my aristocratic environment at your age.'"

"Lawson," I continued, "I gathered tatties behind the digger once. That is the chief difference between me and Balfour. When first I went through Eton on a motor-bus and saw the boys on the playing grounds, I said to myself, 'Thank God I wasn't sent to Eton!'"

"Class prejudice and jealousy," said Lawson. "Will the Rangers get into the Final?"

* * *

I met Wilkie the mason, on the road to-night. He cannot write his name, and he is the richest man in the village.

"What's this Aw hear aboot you bein' are o' they Socialists?" he demanded. "Aw didna ken that when Aw voted for ye."

"If you had?"

"Not a vote wud ye hae gotten frae me. Ye'll be layin' yer bombs a' ower the place," he said half jocularly.

"Ye manna put ony o' they ideas in the bairns' heids," he continued anxiously. "Politics have no place in a schule."

I did not pursue the subject; I sidetracked him on to turnips, and by using what I had picked up from Andrew Smith I made a fairly good effort. When we parted Wilkie grasped my hand.

"Ye're no dozzent," he said kindly, "but, tak ma advice, and leave they politics alone. It's a dangerous game for a schulemester to play."

* * *

I find that I am becoming obsessed by my creed. I see that I place politics before everything else in education. But I feel that I am doing the best I can for true education. After all it isn't Socialism I am teaching, it is heresy. I am trying to form minds that will question and destroy and rebuild.

Morris's _News from Nowhere_ appeals to me most as a Utopia. Like him I want to see an artistic world.

I travelled to Newcastle on Saturday, and the brick squalor that stretches for miles out Elswick and Blaydon way sickened me. Dirty bairns were playing on muddy patches, dirty women were gossiping at doors, miners were wandering off in twos and threes with whippets at their heels. And smoke was over all. Britain is the workshop of the world. Good old Merrie England!

These are strange entries for a Dominie's Log. I must bring my mind back to Vulgar Fractions and Composition.

* * *

There was a Cinema Show in the village hall to-night. My bairns turned out in force. Most of the pictures were drivel ... the typist wrongly accused, the seducing employer; the weeping parents at home. The average cinema plot is of the same brand as the plots in a washerwoman's weekly. Then we had the inevitable Indian chase on horseback, and the hero pardoned after the rope was round his neck.

I enjoyed the comic films. To see the comic go down in diver's dress to wreck a German submarine was delightfully ludicrous. He took off his helmet under water and wiped the sweat from his brow. Excellent fun!

I have often thought about the cinema as an aid to education. At the present time it is a drag on education, for its chief attraction is its piffling melodrama. Yet I have seen good plays and playlets filmed ... that is good melodramatic and incident plays.

I have seen _Hamlet_ filmed, and then I understood what Tolstoi (or was it Shaw?) meant when he said that Shakespeare without his word music is nowhere. Yet I must be just; philosophy had to go along with music when the cinema took up _Hamlet_.

The cinema may have a future as an educational force, but it will deal with what I consider the subsidiary part of education--the facts of life. Pictures of foreign countries are undoubtedly of great use. The cinema can never give us theories and philosophy. So with its lighter side. _Charley's Aunt_ might make a good film; _The Importance of Being Earnest_ could not. The cinema can give us humour but not wit. What will happen when the cinema and the phonograph are made to work together perfectly I do not know. I may yet be able to take my bairns to a performance of _Nan_ or _The Wild Duck_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_.

* * *

"Please, sir, Willie Smith was swearing." Thus little Maggie Shepherd to me to-day.

I always fear this complaint, for what can I do? I can't very well ask Maggie what he said, and if he says he wasn't swearing ... well, his word is as good as Maggie's. I can summon witnesses, but bairns have but the haziest notion of what swearing is. (For that matter so do I.) If a boy shoves his fingers to his nose.... "Please, sir, he swore!"

I try to be a just man, and ... well, I was bunkered at the ninth hole on Saturday, and I dismissed Willie Smith--without an admonition. But I am worried to-night, for I can't recollect whether Willie has ever caddied for me; I have a shrewd suspicion that he has.

IX.

The word "republican" came up to-day in a lesson, and I asked what it meant. Four girls told me that their fathers were republicans, but they had no idea of the meaning of the word. One lassie thought that it meant "a man who is always quarrelling with the Tories" ... a fairly penetrating definition.

I explained the meaning of the word, and said that a republican in this country was wasting his time and energy. I pointed to America with its Oil Kings, Steel Kings, Meat Kings, and called it a country worse than Russia. I told of the corruption of politics in France.

Then I rambled on to Kings and Kingship. It is a difficult subject to tackle even with children, but I tried to walk warily. I said that the notion of a king was for people in an elementary stage of development. Intellectual folk have no use for all the pomp and pageantry of kingship. Royalty as it exists to-day is bad for us and for the royal family. The poor princes and princesses are reared in an atmosphere of make-believe. Their individuality and their loves are crushed by a system. And it is really a system of lies. "In the King's name!" Why make all this pretence when everyone knows that it is "In the Cabinet's name"? It is not fair to the king.

I am no republican; I do not want to see monarchy abolished in this land. I recognise that monarchy is necessary to the masses. But I want to bring my bairns to see monarchy stripped of its robes, its pageantry, its remoteness, its circumstance. Loyalty is a name to most of us. People sing the National Anthem in very much the same way as they say Grace before Meat. The Grace-sayer is thinking of his dinner; the singer is wondering if he'll manage to get out in time to collar a taxi.

I do not blame the kings; I blame their advisers. We are kept in the dark by them. We hear of a monarch's good deeds, but we never hear the truth about him. The unwritten law demands that the truth shall be kept secret until a few generations have passed. I know nothing about the king. I don't know what he thinks of Republicanism (in his shoes I should be a red-hot Republican), Socialism, Religion, Morals; and I want to know whether he likes Locke's novels or Galsworthy's drama. In short, I want to know the man that must of necessity be greater than the king. I am tired of processions and functions.

I became a loyalist when first I went to Windsor Castle. Three massed bands were playing in the quadrangle; thousands of visitors wandered around. The King came to the window and bowed. I wanted to go up and take him by the arm and say: "Poor King, you are not allowed to enjoy the sensation of being in a crowd, you are an abstraction, you are behind a barrier of nobility through which no commoner can pass. Come down and have a smoke with me amongst all these typists and clerks." And I expect that every man and woman in that crowd was thinking: "How nice it must be to be a king!"

Yet if a king were to come down from the pedestal on which the courtiers have placed him, I fear that the people would scorn him. They would cry: "He is only a man!" I am forced to the conclusion that pomp and circumstance are necessary after all. The people are to blame. The King is all right; he looks a decent, kindly soul with a good heart. But the people are not interested in good hearts; the fools want gilt coaches and crimson carpets and all the rubbish of show.

* * *

A lady asked me to-day whether I taught my children manners. I told her that I did not. She asked why. I replied that manners were sham, and my chief duty was to get rid of sham. Then she asked me why I lifted my hat to her ... and naturally I collapsed incontinently. Once again I write the words, "It is a difficult thing to be a theorist ... and an honest man at the same time."

On reflection I think that it is a case of personality _versus_ the whole community. No man can be consistent. Were I to carry my convictions to their natural conclusion I should be an outcast ... and an outcast is of no value to the community. I lift my hat to a lady not because I respect her (I occasionally do. I always doff my hat to the school charwoman, but I am rather afraid of her), but because it is not worth while to protest against the little things of life. Incidentally, the whole case against hat-lifting is this:--In the lower and lower middle classes the son does not lift his hat to his mother though he does to the minister's wife.

No, I do not teach manners. If a boy "Sirs" me, he does it of his own free will. I believe that you cannot teach manners; taught manners are always forced, always overdone. My model of a true gentleman is a man with an innate good taste and artistry. My idea of a lady ... well, one of the truest ladies I have yet known kept a dairy in the Canongate of Edinburgh.

I try to get my bairns to do to others as they would like others to do to them. Shaw says "No: their tastes may not be the same as yours." Good old G. B. S.!

I once was in a school where manners were taught religiously. I whacked a boy one day. He said, "Thank you, sir."

* * *

I wonder how much influence on observation the so-called Nature Study has. At one time I attended a Saturday class. We went botanising. I learned nothing about Botany, but that was because Margaret was there. I observed much ... her eyes were grey and her eyelashes long. We generally managed to lose the class in less than no time. Yet we did pretend. She was pretending to show me the something or other marks on a horse-chestnut twig when I first kissed her. She is married now. I don't believe in Saturday excursions.

I got up my scanty Nature Study from Grant Allen's little shilling book on plants. It was a delightful book full of an almost Yankee imagination. It theorised all the way ... grass developed a long narrow blade so that it might edge its way to the sun; wild tobacco has a broad blade because it doesn't need to care tuppence for the competition of other plants, it can grow on wet clay of railway bankings. I think now that Grant Allen was a romancer not a scientist.

I do not see the point in asking bairns to count the stamens of a buttercup (Dr. Johnson hated the poets who "count the streaks of the tulip"). But I do want to make them Grant Allens; I want them to make a theory. Nature Study has but little result unless bairns get a lead. No boy will guess that the lines on a petal are intended to lead bees to the honey; at least, I know I would never have guessed it. I should never have guessed that flowers are beautiful or perfumed in order to attract insects. But I am really no criterion. I could not tell at this moment the colour of my bedroom wallpaper; I can't tell whether my father wears a moustache or side-whiskers. Until I began to teach Woodwork I never observed a mortise, or if I did, I never wondered how it was made. I never noticed that the tops of houses sloped downward until I took up Perspective.

Anyway, observation is a poor attainment unless it is combined with genius as in Darwin's case. Sherlock Holmes is a nobody. Observation should follow fancy. The average youth has successive hobbies. He takes up photography, and is led (sometimes) to enquire into the action of silver salts; he takes up wood-carving, and begins to find untold discoveries in the easy-chair.

I would advocate the keeping of animals at school. I would have a rabbit run, a pigeon loft, one or two dogs, and a few cats for the girls. Let a boy keep homers and fly them, and he will observe much. Apart from the observation side of the question I would advocate a live stock school-farm on humanitarian grounds; every child would acquire a sense of duty to animals. I am sure all my bairns would turn out on a Sunday to feed their pets. And what a delightful reward for kindness ... make a boy or girl "Feeder-in-Chief" for the week! Incidentally, the study of pigeons and rabbits would conduce to a frank realisation of sex.

* * *

I have just bought the new shilling edition of H. G. Wells's _New Worlds for Old_, and I have come upon this passage ... " ... Socialists turn to the most creative profession of all, to that great calling which, with each generation, renews the world's 'circle of ideas,' the Teachers!"

But why he puts the mark of exclamation at the end I do not know.

On the same page he says: "The constructive Socialist logically declares the teacher master of the situation."

If the Teachers are masters of the situation I wish every teacher in Scotland would get _The New Age_ each week. Orage's _Notes of the Week_ are easily the best commentary on the war I have seen. _The New Age_ is so very amusing, too; its band of "warm young men" are the kind who "can't stand Nietzsche because of his damnable philanthropy" as a journalist friend of mine once phrased it. They despise Shaw and Wells and Webb ... the old back-numbers. The magazine is pulsating with life and youth. Every contributor is so cock-sure of himself. It is the only fearless journal I know; it has no advertisements, and with advertisements a journal is muzzled.

* * *

One or two bairns are going to try the bursary competition of the neighbouring Secondary School, and I have just got hold of the last year's papers.