Dullards at School

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17835, 1 May 1926, Page 19 (Supplement)

Dullards at School

Unpromising Scholars who Won Fame

of the great men to whom we now remove our hats in awe were dreadful dunces at the school-desk. In a recent lecture of his, an English medical man. Dr A. F. Tredgold, consulting physician to. the National Association for the Feeble-minded, reminded us that Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton were both backward children, and further, he said that if they had ■: been examined to day they would have run considerable’ risk of being sent to special schools. j We know that when Darwin went to Dr Butler’s school in Shrewsbury, _his master condemned the feeble intelligence of his scholar and could see ; little advancement at the end of Dar- . And later in-life when Darwin looked • back to this apparently unprofitable period of his youth, he wrote—though not intending it for publication:— ■ Xo'thingr could have been" worst, tor the • development ot' my mind than Dr Butler's school. . - . . The school as a means of education to me was simply ;i blank. \ . T T believe 3 was considered by all my ‘masters, and by my father, as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. Newton’s genius was a late blossom. Ilis. attainments at school did not herald his brilliant future. Indeed, his outward life never did develop—“he remained a child to the end of his eighty-five years.”. Yet he comes clown I to us as the most distinguished mathematician ancl philosopher o.f modern I times. 1 As with many other dull scholars I who eventually won fame, Thomas Aquinas’s reputation as a dunce is fre>i quently omitted'ftfdin the briefer biographies of this distinguished gentleman. And when we read (of his later days) that he possessed “one of the most acute, eager, and profound intellects of which we have any record,” it is, indeed, hard to reconcile the dunce’s hat placed on his young brains by the more complete . L ..biographies. Sheridan was a poor scholary.a;nd.' some of his preceptors thought hihvan impenetrable dunce. A hopeless bias for indolence constantly impeded His progress at school and * troubled him unkindly even as a grown man. From all accouhts, young Walter Scott did little to win the pfaise 'of his tutors either at the High School or s the' University. Latin arid Greek found’ scant room in the brain of his then recumbent genius. Nor did Thackeray appear to show any more promise at school than Scott. An easy-going, good-natured, and i rather dreamy fellow, he was given more to indolence than a diligent ap- ! * plication to his studies. The only I talent he ever displayed in • his- schooldays took the form of writing comic ■ verses and drawing comic _sketches! j Napoleon and Wellington, Ulysses Grant and Stonewall Jackson, Oliver I Cromwell, Lord Clive—none of these, 1 either, forecasted any but a dull j future while at school.