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Updated: May 8, 2025
Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of the time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original or heroic school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part our leading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when some prominent one among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anything more than platitudes and little things?
Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common sense and disguising ignorance under phrases. No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education.
I cannot so easily picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering, "Romanus civis sum." Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being learned.
Some headmasters douche the walls of the school-building with cold water, and then examine the thermometer; but children as well as teachers think this a very mean thing to do. The school holidays commence at the beginning of July, not in August, as is the case in England.
At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of the Thirty-nine Articles.
From his own face the most observant of headmasters could have detected no evidence that he had been engaged in a vulgar fight. Walton, on the other hand, looked as if he had been engaged in several all violent. Kennedy went off to his study to change, feeling that he had advanced a long step on the thorny path that led to the Perfect House. But the step was not such a very long one after all.
In some schools the council or permanent board of governors work excellently with the headmasters; but too often the Australian dislike to absolute authority in whatever shape or form is so great as to induce the council to become meddlesome; and unduly interfere with the master. So much for the constitution of the school.
I'm Rugby. 'Just so, and I'm St Austin's. Personally, I'm going for the knock-out. You won't feel hurt? This was in the days before the Headmasters' Conference had abolished the knock-out blow, and a boxer might still pay attentions to the point of his opponent's jaw with an easy conscience. 'I probably shall if it comes off, said Allen.
There are distinguished public school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who, in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral purity. As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean.
Some headmasters, and the writers to The Boy's Own Paper, draw lurid pictures of the bully who by cribbing steals the prize from the poor innocent who looks up every word in a big Liddell and Scott; but such people don't exist. No one ever cribbed in order to get a prize: they crib from mere slackness. Mansell's exam. prize in IV. A is about the only instance of a prize won by cribbing.
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