Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

If it had not been for the sense of Joan and Peter growing visibly day by day, Oswald might perhaps have displayed more of the patience of the explorer. But his was rather the urgency of a thirsty traveller who looks for water than the deliberation of a trigonometrical survey. In a little while he mastered the obvious fact that preparatory schools were conditioned by the schools for which they prepared. He found a school at Margate, White Court, which differed rather in quality, and particularly in the quality of its proprietor, than in the nature of its arrangements from the other schools he had been visiting, and to this he committed Peter. Assisted by Aunt Phyllis he found an education for Joan in Highmorton School, ten miles away; he settled himself in a furnished house at Margate to be near them both; and having thus gained a breathing time, he devoted himself to a completer study of the perplexing chaos of upper-class education in England. What was it “up to”? He had his own clear conviction of what it ought to be up to, but the more he saw of existing conditions, the more hopelessly it seemed to be up to either entirely different things or else, in a spirit of intellectual sabotage, up to nothing at all. From the preparatory schools he went on to the great public schools, and from the public schools he went to the universities. He brought to the quest all the unsympathetic detachment of an alien observer and all the angry passion of an anxious patriot. With some suggestions from Matthew Arnold.

“Indolence.” “Insincerity.” These two words became more and more frequent in his thoughts as he went from one great institution to another. Occasionally the headmasters he talked to had more than a suspicion of his unspoken comments. “Their imaginations are dead within them,” said Oswald. “If only they could see the Empire! If only they could forget their little pride and dignity and affectations in the vision of mankind!”

His impressions of headmasters were for the most part taken against a background of white-flannelled boys in playing-fields or grey-flannelled boys in walled court-yards. Eton gave him its river effects and a bright, unforgetable boatman in a coat of wonderful blue; Harrow displayed its view and insisted upon its hill. Physically he liked almost all the schools he saw, except Winchester, which he visited on a rainy day. Almost always there were fine architectural effects; now there was a nucleus of Gothic, now it was time-worn Tudor red brick, now well-proportioned grey Georgian. Most of these establishments had the dignity of age, but Caxton was wealthily new. Caxton was a nest of new buildings of honey-coloured stone; it was growing energetically but tidily; it waved its hand to a busy wilderness of rocks and plants and said, “our botanical garden,” to a piece of field and said “our museum group.” But it had science laboratories with big apparatus, and the machinery for a small engineering factory. Oswald with an experienced eye approved of its biological equipment. All these great schools were visibly full of life and activity. At times Oswald was so impressed by this life and activity that he felt ashamed of his enquiries; it seemed ungracious not to suppose that all was going well here, that almost any of these schools was good enough and that almost any casual or sentimental considerations, Sydenham family traditions or the like, should suffice to determine which was to have the moulding of Peter. But he had set his heart now on getting to the very essentials of this problem; he was resolved to be blinded by no fair appearances, and though these schools looked as firmly rooted and stoutly prosperous as British oaks and as naturally grown as they, though they had an air of discharging a function as necessary as the beating of a heart and as inevitably, he still kept his grip on the idea that they were artificial things of men’s contriving, and still pressed his questions: What are you trying to do? What are you doing? How are you doing it? How do you fit in to the imperial scheme of things?

So challenged these various high and headmasters had most of them the air of men invited to talk of things that are easier to understand than to say. They were not at all pompous about their explanations; from first to last Oswald never discovered the pompous schoolmaster of legend and history; without exception they seemed anxious to get out of their gowns and pose as intelligent laymen; but they were not intelligent laymen, they did not explain, they did not explain, they waved hands and smiled. They “hoped” they were “turning out clean English gentlemen.” They didn’t train their men specially to any end at all. The aim was to develop a general intelligence, a general goodwill.

“In relation to the empire and its destiny?” said Oswald.

“I should hardly fix it so definitely as that,” said Overtone of Hillborough.

“But don’t you set before these youngsters some general aim in life to which they are all to contribute?”

“We rather leave the sort of contribution to them,” said Overtone.

“But you must put something before them of where they are, where they are to come in, what they belong to?” said Oswald.

“That lies in the world about them,” said Overtone. “King and country—we don’t need to preach such things.”