Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

10 страница из 178

He learned that the painted rainbow,

God’s promise, as poets feign,

Was transverse oscillations

Turning somersaults in rain.

And then there was drawing. We sat in a big studio, in front of plaster casts of historic faces, and we made smudges supposed to resemble them. On this subject, also, I wrote some verses, portraying the plight of a student who forgot which cast he was copying, and paced up and down before them, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno or King Henry of Navarre?”

I studied a number of complicated technical subjects—perspective and mechanical drawing and surveying—though now, thirty years later, I could not survey my front porch. I studied mathematics, from simple addition to differential calculus. The addition I still remember; but if I were asked to do the simplest problem in algebra I should not have an idea how to set about it.

I remember with vividness the men who put me through these various torments; young men, some feeble, some impatient, but always uninterested in what they were doing; old men, kind and lovable, or irritable and angry, but all of them hopeless so far as concerned the task of teaching anybody anything of any use. Every morning we spent half an hour in what was called “chapel,” and the old men, the members of the faculty, were lined up on the platform, and remain to this hour the most vivid line of human faces stored in my memory. It was their duty to listen to student oratory; and so perfect had been the discipline of their lives that they were able to sit without moving a muscle, or giving the least sign of what they must have felt.