A Dominie's Log

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

Margaret Steel had a huge drop one Sunday, and her explanation was "Special Collection for Missions." Next Sunday the congregation was abnormally large; Margaret wrote "Change of Minister."

Few bairns have a sense of humour; their's is a sense of fun. Make a noise like a duck and they will scream, but tell them your best joke and they will be bored to tears.

I try hard to cultivate their sense of humour and their imagination. In their composition I give them many autobiographies ... a tile hat, a penny, an old boot, a nose, a tooth. To-day I asked them to describe in the first person a snail's journey to the end of the road. Margaret Steel talked of her hundred mile crawl, and she noted the tall forests on each side of the road. "The grass would be trees to a snail," she explained.

Poor Margaret! When she is fourteen she will go out to the fields, and in three years she will be an ignorant country bumpkin. Our education system is futile because it does not go far enough. The State should see to it that each child has the best of chances. Margaret should be sent to a Secondary School and to a University free of charge. Her food and clothes and books and train fares should be free by right. The lassie has brains ... and that is argument enough.

Our rulers do realize to a slight extent the responsibility of the community to the child. It sends a doctor round to look at Margaret's teeth; it may feed her at school if she is starving; it compels her to go to school till she is fourteen. At the age of fourteen she is free to go to the devil—the factory or the herding.

But suppose she did go to a Secondary School. What then? Possibly she would become a Junior Student or a University Student. She would learn much, but would she think? I found that thinking was not encouraged at the university.

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To-day I asked Senior I. to write up "A hen in the Kirk," and one or two attempts showed imagination.

Is it possible that I am overdoing the imagination business? Shall I produce men and women with more imagination than intellect? No, I do not think there is danger. The nation suffers from lack of imagination; few of us can imagine a better state of society, a fuller life.

Who are the men with great imagination?... Shelley, Blake, Browning, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Tolstoy. These men were not content with life as it was; they had ideals, and ideals are creatures of the imagination.