TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. [(Concluded.}

Otago Witness, Issue 1681, 9 February 1884, Page 8

TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. [(Concluded. }

One wonders how children ever endured the discipline of some of the older schools. Think of the tyranny of Christ's Hospital, of which Charles Lamb gives so realistic and pathetic a picturo ; recall the terrific Boyer, whose very frown would be enough to frighten a modern school-boy into fits — then of his punishments, rushing forth from his don, singling out by chance some unhappy boy and thrashing him, whether lie deserved it or not ; think of the fearful punishments inflicted by tho elder on younger and weaker boys— of the fagging, the boot-cleaning, the fetching and carrying, the terrible bullying. Here is an example in Elia's own words :—": — " I have been called out of my bed and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights — and this not once, but night after night— in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased ray callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to, make the last six beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit nor had the power to hinder." And again—" As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little square Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket, with a peep of light, let in askance from a prison orifice at the top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter, who brought him his bread and water, who might not'speak to him, or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to.recoive his periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him for a time from solitude ; and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves and superstition incident to his time of life might subject him to." Then read farther, with shuddering, of the disgusting, nauseating food wherewith the stomachs of these unfortunates had to be satisfied. ■ On Mondays, "it was milk porridge, blue and tasteless"; on Wednesdays, "a mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant"; on Thursdays, " quite fresh boiled beef, strong as ca.ro equina, with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison our broth " ; on Fridays, " scanty mutton scrags " ; on Tuß.sdays, "portions of the same flesh, rotten, roasted, or rare." Surely if boys could be dpgraded or brutalised, it would .be by treatment such as this, But think of the men who were turned out of this Blue Coat School— of the quaint, genial Charles Lamb, a man who could devote a lifetime to the care of a maniac sister and a querulous, discontented, half-witted father; of Leigh Hunt, whose universal benevolence was such as to deserve for his epitaph his own beautiful line, "One who loved his fellowmen"; of Coleridge, "the logician, metaphysician, bard " ; and, later, Byron, Shelley, Middleton — men whose names are "as familiar as household words " through the civilised world.

There surely was never a teacher who had the intellectual and spiritual welfare of his scholars more at heart than Dr Arnold, of •Rugby. He aimed to make his boys Christians and gentlemen, as well as scholars. To quote his own words when addressing the school— "What we must look for hi.ro is : first, religion and moral principle ; second, gentlemanly conduct ; thjrd, intellectual ability." Yet even under his just, mild, and beneficent rule flogging was permitted. He writes of the matter in the following words :— The beau-ideal of school discipline with regard to young boys would seem to be this, that whilst corporal punishment was retained on principle as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, ani therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state, we should cherish and encourage to the utmost all attempts made by boys, as individuals, to escape from the natural punishment of their age by rising above its naturally low tone of principle." But it must be remembered that the lads Dr Arnold had to daal with were the sons of gentlemen— boys who from their earliest infancy had been trained in politeness, in truth, in honesty, and taught to look upon their word as their bond whilst a lie was to be despised as the refuge of a coward. Very different is the case with public school teachers in the Colonies. They are forced to accept as pupils children takeii from the very dregs of society— children to whom deceit is second nature, who have no ideas of honesty in work, no ambition to learn farther than they are made to, who are familiar, God help them ! with vice, cunning, lewdness, and infamy from their very cradle — children whose proper training-place is rather the Reformatory than the schoolroom. Yet it is with children such as these, whose honour for their parents consists in a proper respect for father's heavy hand and mother's shrewish tongue, whose duty to their neighbour means, "Take him in lest he takeinthee" — scholars such as these are to ba managed altogether by the law of kindness and tenderness ; whose grimy, filthy palms and hardened shoulders are never, save on the rarest compulsion, to bd struck with a cane or strap lest they be degraded or brutalised, whereas a box on tho ear from mother or a cut from father's stockwhip are usual and every-day occurrences in homo life. Our modern educationists seem desirous of reversing the Doctor's code, and making it read thus— first, intellectual ability ; second, gentlemanly conduct ; third, religious and moral principles. And perhaps, indeed, they are right. It is so very much more easy to cram a boy's head with history, mathematics, and classics than to teach him to be gentle, courteous, firm, kind yet manly; and as for

religion, the less he has of that the better when the Bible is banished from the school, and atheism, freethought, and infidelity are ! the ruling moral principles of the day. Dr Arnold said that '• tho fin.t, second, and thiid diity of a school rnastor is to get rid of unpromising subjects." Were the teachers in the Colonies to attempt carrying out "so highhanded a proceeding, fancy how the parents would be up in arms, how tho Committees would storm and vilify, and how the head of the department would drive him from his only moans of livelihood with bitter and cold disdain. Yet T fail to see how, if the teachers are to be restricted in the matter of punishments and to be allowed to use no moral text- ! book iv their classes, they can be expected to maiutain discipline or instil principles of right. I have the honour to number amongst my friends very many teacheis, and I cm say emphatically that men more t ustworthy, leHS inclined to cruelty, more anxious for the tuoial welfare of tho scholars, but at the same time less liWely to craftily iuculcute any sectarian doctiines, are not to be found in the world. But when men bucli as theaa are insulted by some display of bestiality or filthiness on the par.t of some unwashed brat, are exasperated by its idleness or rudeness, they may not administer a hharp, stinging reproof with cane, strap, or ferule, unless the hour, the day, the cause, amount of correction are notod down in a book for the satisfaction of the Inspector. Do tho schoolmaFters invariably carry out this regulation ? I sincnrely hnpo nut. A man may be a teacher without losing all self-respect. Hr may lose his temper, and in the heat of passion administer a sound flogging, but not ba obliged to have the p\idence of that slight indiscretion for ever staring him in the face.

I have quoted Imnb's description of the Blue Coat School, and of the cruel rigour of the senior boys ; but there was another method of torturing and annoying young boys common in those days at all public schools, and which from its long reign seemed to bo regarded as an integral part of the school system : I refer to " fagging." The fag was altogether in the power and utterly at the mercy of his master — had to run his mepsages, clean his boots, brush his clothes, and perform sundry other menial services; and if that master chanced to be a bully, the fag wosbubjected to the most revolting cruelties. Don't you recollect how Flashman the bully roasted poor Tom Brown because the latter would not do his duty as fag ? At Marrow School matters seem to have been much worse, if one may judge from an account given in a work entitled " The Public Schools." The author writes : — " In the early part of this century the fags at Harrow were little better than menial servants lor the Rreater part of the day. They had not only to prepare their master's breakfast, ty make coffee, toast bread, go on errands, &c, a<; at present, but also tc clean boots and shoes, and to brush clothe covered with mud from football, &c. An unfortunate^ fag might often be heard brushing away at five o'clock on a December morning. Poker and tongs were unknown luxuries in the ' play-room ' at Butler's, and the junior fag at the cali of ' lag-poker' had to rush out into the cold to pull a. hedge-stake of substantial dimensions from the nearest fenc. or fagot-stack." But there were ncta of positive tyranny practised tar less justifiable than this. Fags were sent out at night to fetch beer and other materials for suppers ; to do this they had to scale the gates of their boarding-house, and the penalty, if caught_ by any of the masters, was invariably a flogging, no boy daring to excuse himself by representing that ho was a mere compulsory agent. But this pretence of a rigid discipline— which was, in fact, the cruellest injustice— was more discreditable to the authorities of those days than the boys who thus made others their scapegoats ; for even in a well-remembered case, where a monitor voluntarily came forward to exculpate his fag, and offered to bear the punishment, his appeal vvas disregarded. It i 3 difficult to urge any excuse for such tyranny, but it had its uses. We all admit that the school is a microcosm of the general world, and it is well that boys should early learn to be submissive— should understand that unquestioning obedience is a part of the duty of life, even though they gain their kuovvledge in such difficult ways as that of a Harrow fag. Young men of the present day are a great deal too fond of asserting their independence. Jack thinks himself «quite as good as his master, and resents any work which he chooses to consider outside bia specified labour, or, forsooth, anything that may tend to low«r his dignity. Tnat a master should have a right to order his servant- to do whatever work is necessary seems to be an exploded notion. Wo may no longer say to a servant, "Do thi?," and he doeth it— it must be, "Will | you do such and such a thing?" and if the servant thinks it not derogatory, perhaps he will be obliging enough to comply. With regard to the methods of education pursued nowadays, 1 have already said that it is possible to overdo the endeavour to make everything e.isy and attractive. Ever since tbo world began wisdom has been difficult of attainment ; the fruit hangs very high upon the tree of knowledge, and < nly those who are ready to cling and climb, heedless of many a scratch and tumble, are likely to enjoy much of it. But for the youngsters of to-day education is a mere amusement. The bitter draughts which the poor, shivering, sobbing, bruised tv chins of fifty years ago had to swallow, willing or not, are put up in the form o,f Bugarcoated pills, not to disgust the too sensitive palates of the recipients. There is no more such a thing as thrashing knowledge of grammar into a boy, or of racing him hurriedly through the Declensions and Conjugations, and then giving him " Caesar" to translate as best he could, and translate it he did, too, with thß dread of a sharp and heavy punishment awaiting him ; and I will venture to say he came to a truer and speedier knowledge of his author when he had to hunt up every substantive for himself in his dictionary, and find outthe mood and tenseof the verbsfrom parallel examples in his grammar, than now, when every difficult word, every complexed synonym, is carefully explained and unravelled by means of note and commentary. There is nothing left to be found out, nothing requiring ingenuity, thought, or hard work. It is the same with every other department of study. We have Comic Latin and Greek Grammars, Comic Geographies, Comic Histories. As Jerrold somewhere said, " There are men who would write a Comic New Testament." We have interlinean, literal translations of all the Classics ; we have manuals to all the Sciences,' composed in so simple language that any child might read and understand ; we have histories told bo graphically, and with all hard or dry details so carefully excluded, that they are as interesting as a fairy-tale. Very different was the path that had to be trodden by travellers to Parnassus fifty years ago. A toilsome, painful, cold journey it was. , I again quot« from the work entitled " The Public Schools " for the following description of the life of a schoorboy in one of England's most famous schools ;-" A Winchester education ia those days certainly did imply a con siderable amount of rough training. Independently of veryearly hours and somewhat coarse food, it was not pleasant to have to wash at the old 'Moivb,' as it was called, an open

conduit in the quadrangle, where it was necessary on a severe winter morning for a junior to melt the ice on tho stop-cock with a lighted faprot before any water could be got to flow at all, or for the same unfortunate junior to have to watch out in the cold quadranglra before early lesson (without a hat, for in that sacred enclosure no junior is allowed to wear one), to give notice of tlio exact moment when tho master went into school, so that the seniors might wa-ste none of their precious time, but make their rush at the last available moment." Here is the description of the dormitory:— " The dormitory in old times was like nothing j known to mortal school-boys except the long chamber at Eton. It was all one long, open room, where the whole forty boys slept iv public, the juniors in not much greater comfort than the ' casuals ' in a modern union. The windows wero continually broken, and never repaired but during a vacation. In the winter time the atmosphere was consequently often at freezing point, and this was taken advantage of by such seniors as were given to vigorous exercise to order the fags out of bed when a frost had set in decidedly, to pour water down the middle of the room, so as to ensure a practicable slide by the morning ; the advance of science had even taught them to uso boiling water, as freezing moro rapidly than cold. The same floor was on one occasion converted, into a draughts-board. It was chalked out with largo squares, and on each square a junior was stationed. Two of the seniors, standing at an adjoining table, played a game of draughts with these human pieces, and when a 'king' was made his representative had to carry, by way of crown, a small boy upon his shoulders. The beds were not luxurious at the best, and did not impress visitors very favourably. When George IV., as Prince of Wales, came to the play, and passed along the dormitory, "he said to the master who escorted him : *' You don't mean to tell me, air, that Arthur Paget ever slept in one of those beds?' But a junior was often obliged to lend his pillow to improve his senior's accommodation, and to content him-, self with tha most inconvenient log ho could pick up out of the firewood. Rats, at one titno, almost disputed the right of occupation. Leather braces had t<a be hung up somewhere out of reach, or there was only a mangled remnant and a buckle or so to bo found in the morning. A nobleman now living awoke one night with a rat hanging to his ear." When we look at the care and forethought expended in making the d ormitories of modern schools comfortable and healthy, of the excellent ventilation and drainage, of the lavatories and bath-rooms, of the spacious playgrounds and gymnasiums, we wonder how boys contrived to exist ajt all in those "good old times." Fancy the feelings of a modern mamma, on hurrying to tha tick-room of her boy, to find the poor child reclining on the only chair the room contained, while a school boy friend was seated in the coal-scuttle, for want of better accommodation ! Yot such was Lady Mansfield's experience when she went to visit hßr son, y/ho happened to fall ill at Westminster. It is thought that' the brains of our present youngsters will not bear a longer strain than five hours' work, and considering the very heterogeneous^ mass of knowledge they are expected to assimilate every day,- perhaps the time is quite sufficient ; so, however, did not think Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George 11., when he drew up the following :— Hours fir tub Two E&dkst Prixcrs. To creb up at 7 o'clock At S : To rr ad w.th Mr Scot till 0, and he to stay with 'eui till tho Doctor (Dr John Thomasj the piinces' procepto ) come 3. Krom 11 to 12 : Mr Fung. From 1-2 to half an hour past 12 : Ituperti ; but Mr Fung to remain there. Then to ba their play-hour till 3 o'clock. At 3: Dinner. Throe timea a week, at half au hour past (our, Dcnoyer c meg. ; t 5 : M«- Fung till half an hour past 0. At half a« hour past 6 till 8 ; Mr Suot. At 8 : Supper. Between 9 arid 10 in bed. On Sundays : Prayers exactly afc half an hoar past 9, above stairs ; then tho two eldest prince 3 and the tivo oldest princostG* are to go to Prince George's apartment, to be in'tmctetl by Dr Ayscough in the principles «f religion till 11 o'clock. At this time the sons of his Royal Highness could not have been more than ten and twelve years of age. , But I have some fear that the philanthropists of our time are trying to perform an impossibility when they desire to make education altogether interesting and amusing. To make any acquirements worth the namo there must be a certain expenditure of hard mental work. And this necessity begins with the alphabet, and there is no use endeavouring to deceive a child that learning is or can be anything but a task. Depend upon it, the old method of teaching, though slow, was sure, and we are in too much hasto to be wise nowadays. We are not satisfied to get educated quickly, but it must be dono easily. It is a mistake, though, for-" The instruction given by amusement dissipates Effort in all forme is one of the great secrets of Nature. The mind of the child should be disciplined by the effort of study as our souls are by suffering. You may teach your child a number of things by pictures and maps, but you will not teach him to learn."— (Madame de Stael.)