"Neither do I," I sighed. "I can't make up my mind about anything; rather, I make up my mind to-day and change it to-morrow. And I don't want it to be otherwise; when my opinions become definite and fixed I shall be dead spiritually. The boy doesn't know his own mind! Well, how the deuce can I claim to help him to make it up when I can't make up my own? It's his mind, not mine. I don't mind telling him what I think of a subject, but I wouldn't compel him to do a blamed thing."
"You have a queer idea of education," he said with a dry laugh.
"Macdonald," I said, with real modesty, "I don't know that I have any idea of education. I am simply groping. I don't exactly know what I want, but I have a pretty definite notion of what I don't want ... and that is finality. I begin to think that what I want education to do is to train men not to make up their minds about anything."
Macdonald rose to go.
"Matrimony does that, old chap," he said with a chuckle, "and you'll soon discover that you won't get the chance of making up your mind ever."
XIII.
I feared that I was losing Jim and Janet and the others, but I have not lost them. They conform to Macdonald's reign of authority when they are in school, but they do it with their tongues in their cheeks. But only the select few have followed my banner. Jim is the only boy, and the only girls are Janet, Jean, Ellen, Annie, and Gladys. Barbara is of divided allegiance. The others are Macdonaldised. I find it a very difficult thing to define Macdonaldisation. Possibly its most distinguishing characteristic is what I might call a dour pertness. The bairns have lost their standard of values; they don't know limits. I pinched Mary's cheek when I met her this morning on her way to school, and she tossed her head in the air and looked at me with a cheeky expression which meant: "What do you think you're doing?" If I rag Eva she answers with brazen impudence. I have given up speaking facetiously to the boys, for they also were impudent. They were not like that when I had them; I could play with them, joke with them, rag them and they took it all with the best good humour; they teased me and played jokes on me, but they did it in the right spirit.
I have seen it again and again. Strict discipline destroys a child's values of good taste and bad taste. Naturally when freedom is denied them they do not know what freedom means. The atrocities committed by the super-disciplined German army are quite understandable to me; like Macdonaldised bairns they did not understand the freedom they suddenly found themselves enjoying, and they converted it into licence. I can tell the character of a village dominie when I stop to ask a group of boys the way to the next village when I am cycling.