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

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And then the professor of Latin; he also was a terror, though his whiskers were brown. He was a prominent Catholic propagandist, editor of “The Catholic Encyclopedia,” and conceived a dislike for me because I refused to believe things just because they were told me. I can see this old gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims: “Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!” Five hours a week for five years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. I look at a page of the language, and the words are as familiar to me as my own English, but I don’t know what they mean, unless they happen to be the same as the English.

And then the professor of chemistry; an extremely irascible old gentleman with only one arm. There was a rumor to the effect that he had lost the other through the misbehavior of chemicals, but I never investigated the matter. I learned that chemistry consists of mixing liquids in test-tubes, and seeing that various colored “precipitates” result. After you do this you write down formulas, showing that a part of one chemical has got switched over to the other chemical; but why these things happen, or how anybody knows that they happen, was something entirely beyond my comprehension, and which neither the professor of chemistry nor his three assistants ever explained to any member of my class. My most vivid recollection of this class has to do with the close of the hour, when a group of us would gather with our various test-tubes, and each put up a nickel, and guess a color; then we would mix the contents of the tubes in one big tube, and shake them up, and the fellow who guessed the right color won the “pot.”