A Dominie Dismissed

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

These bairns are all innocent. When I looked at Jim's composition book the other day I read an essay with the title "The Church." Jim did not describe the church: he described an event in the church—his own marriage. He was an officer on short leave from the Front. He described the ceremony, then he went on:—"I spent my honeymoon in Edinburgh and a wire came telling me to go back to the trenches. Three weeks later I was wounded and sent home and found that my wife had had a baby."

I wrote at the end of the essay "The speeding-up methods of America are bad enough when applied to industry, but...."

They are innocent souls, and already Jean is affected by the damnable conspiracy of silence. And the amusing thing is that there is nothing to be silent about.

* * *

The Educational Institute has sent a deputation to London to confer with the Secretary for Scotland on educational reform. The deputies dwelt on larger areas, the raising of the school age, and the raising of the salaries of the profession. Mr. Tennant answered them at length in guarded language. Part of The Scotsman report runs thus:—

"Asked by Mr. MacGillivray for his views on the suggestion that the school age should be raised to fifteen, the Secretary for Scotland said that, however desirable that might be in the interests of the child, it was a highly controversial proposal, upon which employers and in many cases parents, and even the State, would have a great deal to say. The expenditure involved would, he was afraid, make such a proposal prohibitive at present."

It is significant to note that he places the employers first, just as in his previous remarks on education he places trade first.... "People realised that if we were going to compete in the great markets of the world, in ideas, in the progress of invention, and in the general progress of mankind and civilisation, we must improve our machinery for the training and equipment of the human being."

The Educational Institute of Scotland, like the Trade Unions, is very humble in its demands. Why, in the name of heaven, ask for larger areas? Mr. Tennant rightly replied that it was news to him that the County Council is a more progressive body than the small School Board. Introduce larger areas and your village pig-dealer and shoemaker give place to your county colonel and manufacturer ... the men who are interested in the maintenance of discipline and of wage-slavery. What the Institute should really do is to give up thinking and talking of education for this generation. The leading members come from our large city schools, and if they haven't yet realised that their damned schools are factories for turning out slaves they ought to be jolly well ashamed of themselves.

I visited a large city school a few days ago. It had nine hundred pupils, and it was four stories high. The playground was a small concrete corner; the discipline was like prison discipline; the rooms were dingy soul-destroying cages. How dare the teachers of Scotland ask that the school age be raised to fifteen when our city schools are barracks like that? I would have the age lowered to six if these prisons are to continue.