Abuses in private schools.
It occurs, let it be remembered, in a work written by Erasmus to expose and hold up to public scorn the private schools, including those of monasteries and colleges, in which honest parents were blindly induced to place their children—at the mercy, it might be, of drunken dames, or of men too often without knowledge, chastity, or judgment. It was a work in which he described these schools as he had described them in his ‘Praise of Folly,’ and in which he detailed scandals and cruelty too foul to be translated, with the express object of enforcing his opinion, that if there were to be any schools at all, they ought to be public schools—in fact, precisely such schools as that which Colet was establishing. The story is introduced as an example of the scandals which were sometimes perpetrated by incompetent masters, in schools of the class which he had thus harshly, but not too harshly, condemned.
After saying that no masters were more cruel to their boys than those who, from ignorance, can teach them least (a remark which certainly could not be intended to refer to Colet’s headmaster), he thus proceeded:—
Cruelty of some schoolmasters.
Story of cruelty, wrongly attributed to Colet.
‘What can such masters do in their schools but get through the day by flogging and scolding? I once knew a divine, and intimately too—a man of reputation—who seemed to think that no cruelty to scholars could be enough, since he would not have any but flogging masters. He thought this was the only way to crush the boys’ unruly spirits, and to subdue the wantonness of their age. Never did he take a meal with his flock without making the comedy end in a tragedy. So at the end of the meal one or another boy was dragged out to be flogged.... I myself was once by when, after dinner, as usual, he called out a boy, I should think, about ten years old. He had only just come fresh from his mother to school. His mother, it should be said, was a pious woman, and had especially commended the boy to him. But he at once began to charge the boy with unruliness, since he could think of nothing else, and must find something to flog him for, and made signs to the proper official to flog him. Whereupon the poor boy was forthwith floored then and there, and flogged as though he had committed sacrilege. The divine again and again interposed, “That will do—that will do;” but the inexorable executioner continued his cruelty till the boy almost fainted. By-and-by the divine turned round to me and said, “He did nothing to deserve it, but the boys’ spirits must be subdued.”’[375]
This is the story which we are told it would be difficult to apply to anyone but Colet,[376] as though Colet were the only ‘divine of reputation’ ever intimately known to Erasmus! or as though Erasmus would thus hold up his friend Colet to the scorn of the world!
Colet’s gentleness and love of children.
The fact is that no one could peruse the ‘precepts of living’ laid down by Colet for his school without seeing not only how practical and sound were his views on the education of the heart, mind, and body of his boys, but also how at the root of them lay a strong undercurrent of warm and gentle feelings, a real love of youth.[377]
In truth, Colet was fond of children, even to tenderness. Erasmus relates that he would often remind his guests and his friends how that Christ had made children the examples for men, and that he was wont to compare them to the angels above.[378] And if any further proof were wanted that Colet showed even a touching tenderness for children, it must surely be found in the following ‘lytell proheme’ to the Latin Grammar which he wrote for his school, and of which we shall hear more by-and-by:—
Colet’s preface to his grammar.
Colet’s tenderness towards little children.