Pat has a cat.
It is fat. It is on the mat.
The cat ran at the rat.
It bit the fat cat.
Pat hit the rat.
The rat ran. The cat ran at it.
The rat bit the fat cat.
Cats and rats used, I remember, to be favourite subjects in the readers of my own early school days; and so were dogs. It is still so in Ireland, as Lesson Eight will show:
Is it a dog?
It is a fox.
Was the fox in a box?
The dog was in the box.
He was in the mud.
Rub the mud off the dog.
He ran at the fox in the mud.
The dog ran at the fox and bit it.
My principal objection to this is that it is nonsense: how, for example, if the dog was in the box, could it have been also in the mud? These questions occur to children even more readily than to adults, and to teach them nonsense is wrong and unjust. Also these lessons tell no story; they have no continuity; they ask questions without answering them; they change the subject almost as often as the dictionary. Here, for instance, is the first lesson of the second term:
Tom put the best fish in a dish.
The cat sat near it on a rug.
Let the hen rest in her nest.
Frank rode a mile on an ass.
He went so fast he sent up the dust.
The last sentence shows it was an Irishman made this book; but why, in this lesson, did he not continue with the story of the fish in the dish, which the cat was plainly watching from the rug with malicious intent, instead of branching off to a wholly irrelevant remark about a hen, and then to an account of Frank's adventure with an ass? Perhaps the first step to be made in educational reform in Ireland is the adoption of better school-books, and there is no reason why this step should be delayed.
I went back, presently, to the other room where the larger boys and girls were reciting in small sections, standing shrinkingly before the shrivelled little teacher, whose fierceness, I am sure, was assumed for the occasion, and he got out for me a sheaf of compositions which the boys and girls had written on the subject, "My Home," and of which he was evidently very proud. They were written in the round, laborious penmanship of the copy-book, and the homes which they described were, for the most part, those poor little cabins clinging to the rocky hillsides, which I have tried to picture; but here the picture was drawn sharply and simply, with few strokes, without any suspicion that it was a tragic one. For instance, this is John Kerrigan's picture of
My Home.
My home is in County Galway and is placed in Ganaginula. It is built on a height near the roadside. The length of it is eighteen feet and the breadth is six feet. It is about ten feet high. The covering is timber and thatch. It is built with stones and mortar. There are four windows, two in the kitchen and two in the room. The floor is made of sand and gravel.
That was all that John Kerrigan found to describe about his home, and I dare say there wasn't much more; but it is easy to picture it standing there on the bleak hillside, with its low walls of rubble and its roof of thatch, and its two little rooms, nine feet by six, with dirt floor and tiny windows. And at one end of the kitchen there would be an open fireplace, with some blocks of turf smoking in it, and above the turf there would be hanging a black pot, where the potatoes are boiling which is all John will have for supper. . . .