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Updated: June 22, 2025
I could not only have taught them the 'gerund-grinding' of Thomas Carlyle but could have inspired them with love of learning, at all events such as were capable of being so inspired. My class of working men in Lambeth exercised this faculty to some extent. When I was teaching them English Literature, I was doing, as far as it went, good and sound work.
In the junior year matters improved somewhat; but, though the professors were most of them really distinguished men, and one at least, James Hadley, a scholar who, at Berlin or Leipsic, would have drawn throngs of students from all Christendom, they were fettered by a system which made everything of gerund-grinding and nothing of literature.
Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself: "Have I read through Lilly?
My disappointment at the instruction; character of president and professors; perfunctory methods in lower-class rooms; ``gerund-grinding'' vs. literature; James Hadley his abilities and influence, other professors; influence of President Woolsey, Professors Porter, Silliman, and Dana; absence of literary instruction; character of that period from a literary point of view; influences from fellow-students.
Interesting also were his views on education, and more than once the conversation touched this ground. As to his own academic training, there is ample testimony that he appreciated the main classical authors whom he read in the gymnasium at Cassel; but it was refreshing to hear and to read various utterances of his against gerund-grinding and pedantry.
In conclusion, I alluded to two groups of ``Eliminated Ideas, the first of these being the ``Ideas of the Pedants, and the second the ``Ideas of the Philistines. As to the former, I took pains to guard the institution from those who, in the higher education, substitute dates for history, gerund-grinding for literature, and formulas for science; as to the latter, I sought to guard it from the men to whom ``Gain is God, and Gunnybags his Prophet.
The express schoolmaster is not equal to much at present, while the unexpress, for good or for evil, is so busy with a poor little fellow! Other departments of schooling had been infinitely more productive, for our young friend, than the gerund-grinding one.
Its single course in classics and mathematics, through which all students were forced alike, regardless of their tastes, powers, or aims; its substitution of gerund-grinding for ancient literature; its want of all instruction in modern literature; its substitution of recitals from text-books for instruction in history all this was far short of my ideal.
Accordingly there is, to a singular extent, especially in his early writings, a certain tinge of Grecism and Heathen classicality traceable in him; Classicality, indeed, which does not satisfy one's sense as real or truly living, but which glitters with a certain genial, if perhaps almost meretricious half-japannish splendor, greatly distinguishable from mere gerund-grinding, and death in longs and shorts.
Temple Grove was the ATRIUM to Eton, and gerund-grinding was its RAISON D'ETRE. Before I was nine years old I daresay I could repeat parrot, that is several hundreds of lines of the AEneid. This, and some elementary arithmetic, geography, and drawing, which last I took to kindly, were dearly paid for by many tears, and by temporarily impaired health.
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