Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

§ 3

At first Joan and Peter did not see very much of Miss Murgatroyd. She moved about at the back of things, very dignified and remote, decorative and vaguely terrible. Their business lay chiefly with Miss Mills.

Miss Mills was also an educational enthusiast, but of a milder, gentler type than Miss Murgatroyd; she lacked Miss Murgatroyd’s confidence and boldness; she sometimes doubted whether everything wasn’t almost too difficult to teach. She was no blind disciple of her employer. She had a suppressed sense of academic humour that she had acquired by staying with an aunt who kept a small Berlin-wool shop in Oxford, and once or twice she had thought of the most dreadful witticisms about Miss Murgatroyd. Though she had told them to no one, they had kept her ears hot for days. Often she wanted quite badly to titter at the school; it was so different from an ordinary school. Yet she liked wearing a djibbah and sandals. That was fun. She had no educational qualifications, but year by year she was slowly taking the diploma of Associate of the London College of Preceptors. It is a kindly college; the examinations for the diploma may be taken subject by subject over a long term of years. She used to enjoy going up to London for her diploma at Christmas and Midsummer. Her great difficulty was the arithmetic. The sums never came right.

Miss Murgatroyd was usually very severe upon what she called the Fetish of Examinations; she herself had neither degree nor diploma, it was a moral incapacity, and she admitted that she could as soon steal as pass an examination; but it was understood that Miss Mills pursued this qualification with no idea whatever of passing but merely “for the sake of the stimulus.” She made a point of never preparing at all (“cramming” that is) for any of the papers she “took.” This put the thing on a higher level altogether.

She had already done the Theory and Practice of Education part of the diploma. For that she had read parts of Leonard and Gertrude, and she had attended five lectures upon Froebel. Those were days long before the Montessori System, which is now so popular with our Miss Millses; the prevalent educational vogues in the ’nineties were Kindergarten and Swedish drill (the Ling System). Miss Mills was an enthusiast for the Kindergarten. She began teaching Joan and Peter queer little practices with paper mats and paper-pattern folding, and the stringing of beads. As Joan and Peter had been doing such things for a year or so at home as “play,” their ready teachability impressed her very favourably. All the children who fell under Miss Mills got a lot of Kindergarten, even though some of them were as old as nine or ten. They had lots of little songs that she made them sing with appropriate action. All these little songs dealt with the familiar daily life—as it was lived in South Germany four score years ago. The children pretended to be shoemakers, foresters, and woodcutters and hunters and cowherds and masons and students wandering about the country, and they imitated the hammering of shoes, the sawing of stone or the chopping down of trees, and so forth. It had never dawned upon Miss Mills that such types as these were rare objects upon the Surrey countryside. In the country about her there were no masons because there was no stone, no cowherds because there were no cows on the hills and the cows below grazed in enclosed fields, trees and wood were handled wholesale by machinery, and people’s boots came from Northampton or America, and were repaired in London. If any one had suggested songs about golf caddies, jobbing gardeners, or traction-engines, or steam-ploughs, or sawmills, or rate-collectors, or grocers’ boys, or season-ticket holders, or stockbrokers from London stealing rights-of-way, or carpenters putting up fences and trespass-notice boards, she would have thought it a very vulgar suggestion indeed.

Kindergarten did not occupy all the time-table of Miss Mills. She regarded kindergarten as a special subject. She also taught her class to read, she taught them to write, she imparted the elements of history and geography, she did not so much lay the foundations of mathematics as accumulate a sort of rubble on which Mr. Beldame, the visiting mathematical master (Tuesdays and Thursdays), was afterwards to build. Here again Joan and Peter were fortunate. Peter had learnt his alphabet before he was two; Joan had not been much later with it, and both of them could read easy little stories already before they came under Miss Mills’ guidance. That English spelling was entirely illogical, had not troubled them in the least. Insistence upon logical consistency comes later in life. Miss Mills never discovered their previous knowledge. She had heard of a method of teaching to read which was called the “Look and Say Method,” and the essence of it was that you never learnt your letters. It was devised for the use of those older children who go to elementary schools from illiterate homes, and who are beginning to think for themselves a little. From the first by this method the pupils learnt the letters in combination.

“Now, Peter,” Miss Mills would say, “this is ’to.’ Look and say—to.”

“To,” said Peter.

“Now I put this little squiggle to it.”

(“P,” said Peter privately).

“And it is ’top’.”

“Top,” said Peter.

“And now this is ’co.’ What is this? Look and say.”

Peter regarded “cop” for a moment. He knew c-o-p was the signal for “cop,” just as S.O.S. is the signal for “help urgently needed,” but he knew also it was forbidden to read out the letters of the signal.

“Cop,” said Peter, after going through the necessary process of thought.

His inmost feeling about the matter was that Miss Mills did not know her letters, but had some queer roundabout way of reading of her own, and that he was taking an agreeable advantage of her....

Then Miss Mills taught Peter to add and subtract and multiply and divide. She had once heard some lectures upon teaching arithmetic by graphic methods that had pleased her very much. They had seemed so clear. The lecturer had suggested that for a time easy sums might be shown in the concrete as well as in figures. You would first of all draw your operation or express it by wood blocks, and then you would present it in figures. You would draw an addition of 3 to 4, thus:

added to

makes this heap

And then when your pupil had counted it and verified it you would write it down:

3 + 4 = 7

But Miss Mills, when she made her notes, had had no time to draw all the parallelograms; she had just put down one and a number over it in each case, and then her memory had muddled the idea. So she taught Joan and Peter thus: “See,” she said, “I will make it perfectly plain to you. Perfectly plain. You take three—so,” and she drew

“and then you take four—so,” and she drew

“and then you see three plus four makes seven—so:

“Do you see now how it must be so, Peter?”

Peter tried to feel that he did.

Peter quite agreed that it was nice to draw frames about the figures in this way. Afterwards he tried a variation that looked like the face of old Chester Drawers:

But for some reason Miss Mills would not see the beauty of that. Instead of laughing, she said: “Oh, no, that’s quite wrong!” which seemed to Peter just selfishly insisting on her own way.

Well, one had to let her have her own way. She was a grown-up. If it had been Joan, Peter would have had his way....

Both Joan and Peter were much addicted to drawing when they went to the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. They had picked it up from Dolly. They produced sketches that were something between a scribble and an inspired sketch. They drew three-legged horses that really kicked and men who really struck hard with arms longer than themselves, terrific blows. If Peter wanted to make a soldier looking very fierce in profile, he drew an extra eye aglare beyond the tip of the man’s nose. If Joan wanted to do a pussy-cat curled up, she curled it up into long spirals like a snake. Any intelligent person could be amused by the sketches of Joan and Peter. But Miss Mills discovered they were all “out of proportion,” and Miss Murgatroyd said that this sort of thing was “mere scribbling.” She called Peter’s attention to the strong, firm outlines of various drawings by Walter Crane. She said that what the hands of Joan and Peter wanted was discipline. She said that a drawing wasn’t a drawing until it was “lined in.” She set the two children drawing pages and pages of firm, straight lines. She related a wonderful fable of how Giotto’s one aim in life was to draw a perfect freehand circle. She held out hopes that some day they might draw “from models,” cones and cubes and suchlike stirring objects. But she did not think they would ever draw well enough to draw human beings. Neither Miss Mills nor Miss Murgatroyd thought it was possible for any one, not being a professional artist, to draw a human being in motion. They knew it took years and years of training. Even then it was very exhausting to the model. They thought it was impertinent for any one young to attempt it.

So Joan and Peter got through their “drawing lessons” by being as inattentive as possible, and in secret they practised drawing human beings as a vice, as something forbidden and detrimental and delightful. They drew them kicking about and doing all sorts of things. They drew them with squinting eyes and frightful noses. Sometimes they would sort of come like people they knew. They made each other laugh. Peter would draw nonsense things to amuse the older girls. When he found difficulties with hands or feet or horses’ legs he would look secretly at pictures to see how they were done. He thought it was wrong to do this, but he did it. He wanted to make his pictures alive-er and liker every time; he was unscrupulous how he did it. So gradually the two children became caricaturists. But in their school reports there was never anything about their drawing except “Untidy,” or, in the case of Joan, “Could do better if she would try.”

Peter was rather good at arithmetic, in spite of Miss Mills’ instruction. He got sums right. It was held to be a gift. Joan was less fortunate. Like most people who have been badly taught, Miss Mills had one or two foggy places in her own arithmetical equipment. She was not clear about seven sevens and eight eights; she had a confused, irregular tendency to think that they might amount in either case to fifty-six, and also she had a trick of adding seven to nine as fifteen, although she always got from nine to seven correctly as sixteen. Every learner of arithmetic has a tendency to start little local flaws of this sort, standing sources of error, and every good, trained teacher looks out for them, knows how to test for them and set them right. Once they have been faced in a clear-headed way, such flaws can be cured in an hour or so. But few teachers in upper and middle-class schools in England, in those days, knew even the elements of their business; and it was the custom to let the baffling influence of such flaws develop into the persuasion that the pupil had not “the gift for mathematics.” Very few women indeed of the English “educated” classes to this day can understand a fraction or do an ordinary multiplication sum. They think computation is a sort of fudging—in which some people are persistently lucky enough to guess right—“the gift for mathematics”—or impudent enough to carry their points. That was Miss Mills’ secret and unformulated conviction, a conviction with which she was infecting a large proportion of the youngsters committed to her care. Joan became a mathematical gambler of the wildest description. But there was a guiding light in Peter’s little head that made him grip at last upon the conviction that seven sevens make always forty-nine, and eight eights always sixty-four, and that when this haunting fifty-six flapped about in the sums it was because Miss Mills, grown-up teacher though she was, was wrong.

Mr. Robert Mond, who has done admirable things for the organized study and organized rearing of infants, once told me that a baby was the hardest thing in the world to kill. If it were not, he said, there would be no grown-up people at all. “But a lot,” he added, “get their digestions spoilt, mind you, or grow up rickety.”... Still harder is it to kill a child’s intelligence. There is something heroic about the fight that every infant mind has to make against the bad explanations, the misleading suggestions, the sheer foolishness in which we adults entangle it. The dawning intelligence of Peter, like a young Hercules, fought with the serpentine muddle-headedness of Miss Mills in its cradle, and escaped—remarkably undamaged.... Joan’s, too, fought and escaped, except perhaps for a slight serpentine infection. She was feminine and flexible; she lacked a certain brutality of conviction that Peter possessed.