Frank Thomson is what the village would call a funny sort o' a billie. His eyes are always twinkling, and he tries to see the funny side of life. He hasn't much humour, but he has a strong sense of fun, and he loves to chaff the youngsters.
"Weel, Wullie," is his invariable greeting when his boy returns from school in the evening, "Weel, Wullie, and did ye get yer licks the day?"
On a Saturday Frank always has a troop of girls hanging on to his coat tails, and he is always playing practical jokes on them—locking them in the stable or covering them with straw.
"Goad!" he will cry, "ye're an awfu' pack o' tormentors; just wait er Aw tell the dominie aboot ye!" and they yell at him.
Mrs. Thomson tells me that he is inordinately proud of having me for a cattleman, and at the cattle mart he boasts about having an M.A. as feeder. I took two stots into the mart yesterday, and when they entered the ring a wag cried: "Are they weel up in the Greek, think ye, Frank?" and the farmers roared.
"Oh, aye," shouted Frank, "they're weel crammed up wi' a'thing that's guid!"
I think that the Scotch Education Department should insist on every teacher's going farming every three years. Inside the profession you lose perspective. The educational papers are full of articles about geography and history and drawing, but teachers seldom show that they are looking beyond the mere curriculum. The training colleges supply the young teacher with what they call Mental Philosophy or Psychology, but it is quite possible for an honours graduate in mental philosophy to have no philosophy at all.
The question for the teacher is: What am I aiming at? Macdonald is aiming at what he calls a bright show before the inspector. To be just to the man I admit that he is honestly trying to educate these bairns according to his lights. He wants to produce good scholars, but when I ask him what he considers the goal of humanity he is at sea.
He tells me that education should not be made to produce little Socialists as I seemed to try to do. But I deny that I ever tried to make my bairns Socialists. I told them the elemental truth that a parasite is an enemy of society; I told them that the world was out of joint. And I gave them freedom to develop their personalities in the hope that, freed from discipline and fear and lies, they might become a better generation than mine has been.
The Macdonalds of life have failed to produce thinking that is free; I merely say: Let the children have a say now; stop thrusting your stupid barbaric Authority down their little throats; let the bairns be free to breathe. Give up all the snobbish nonsense about manners and respect and servility you ram into the child; if he refuses to lift his hat to you, who the devil are you that you should coerce him into doing it?