Читать книгу Judgments in Vacation онлайн

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I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference, will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who, learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding, running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham, who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,” and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned off on the golf-links.