The Lighter Side of School Life by Ian Hay (top 20 books to read TXT) 📕

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 [130] 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 [131] 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 [132] 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 [133] 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; [134] 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 [135] at last. The rod descended upon the day when he translated cæruleæ 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. [136] 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 Cæsar, 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.

[137] 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 [138] 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 [139] 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 [140] 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