Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

“But what the King signifies—if he signifies anything at all—and the aim of the country,” urged Oswald. “And the Empire! The Empire—our reality. This greatness of ours beyond the seas.”

“We don’t stress it,” said Overtone. “English boys are apt to be suspicious and ironical. Have you read that delightful account of the patriotic lecture in Stalky and Co? Oh, you should.”

A common evasiveness characterized all these headmasters when Oswald demanded the particulars of Peter’s curriculum. He wanted to know just the subjects Peter would study and which were to be made the most important, and then when these questions were answered he would demand: “And why do you teach this? What is the particular benefit of that to the boy or the empire? How does this other fit into your scheme of a clear-minded man?” But it was difficult to get even the first questions answered plainly. From the very outset he found himself entangled in that longstanding controversy upon the educational value of Latin and Greek. His circumstances and his disposition alike disposed him to be sceptical of the value of these shibboleths of the British academic world. Their share in the time-table was enormous. Excellent gentlemen who failed to impress him as either strong-minded or exact, sought to convince him of the pricelessness of Latin in strengthening and disciplining the mind; Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely. Lippick, irregularly bald and with neglected teeth, a man needlessly unpleasing to the eye, descanted upon the Greek spirit, and its blend of wisdom and sensuous beauty. He quoted Euripides at Oswald and breathed an antique air in his face—although he knew that Oswald knew practically no Greek.

“Well,” said Oswald, “but compare this,” and gave him back three good minutes of Swahili.

“But what does it mean? It’s gibberish to me. A certain melody perhaps.”

“In English,” Oswald grinned, “you would lose it all. It is a passage of—oh! quite fantastic beauty.”...

No arguments, no apologetics, stayed the deepening of Oswald’s conviction that education in the public schools of Great Britain was not a forward-going process but a habit and tradition, that these classical schoolmasters were saying “nothing like the classics” in exactly the same spirit that the cobbler said “nothing like leather,” because it was the stuff they had in stock. These subjects were for the most part being slackly, tediously, and altogether badly taught to boys who found no element of interest in them, the boys were as a class acquiring a distaste and contempt for learning thus presented, and a subtle, wide demoralization ensued. They found a justification for cribs and every possible device for shirking work in the utter remoteness and uselessness of these main subjects; the extravagant interest they took in school games was very largely a direct consequence of their intense boredom in school hours.

Such was the impression formed by Oswald. To his eyes these great schools, architecturally so fine, so happy in their out-of-door aspects, so pleasant socially, became more and more visibly whirlpools into which the living curiosity and happy energy of the nation’s youth were drawn and caught, and fatigued, thwarted, and wasted. They were beautiful shelters of intellectual laziness—from which Peter must if possible be saved.

But how to save him? There was, Oswald discovered, no saving him completely. Oswald had a profound hostility to solitary education. He knew that except through accidental circumstances of the rarest sort, a private tutor must necessarily be a poor thing. A man who is cheap enough to devote all his time to the education of one boy can have very little that is worth imparting. And education is socialization. Education is the process of making the unsocial individual a citizen....

Oswald’s decision upon Caxton in the end, was by no means a certificate of perfection for Caxton. But Caxton had a good if lopsided Modern Side, with big, businesslike chemical and physical laboratories, a quite honest and living-looking biological and geological museum, and a pleasant and active layman as headmaster. The mathematical teaching instead of being a drill in examination solutions was carried on in connexion with work in the physical and engineering laboratories. It was true that the “Modern Side” of Caxton taught no history of any sort, ignored logic and philosophy, and, in the severity of its modernity, excluded even that amount of Latin which is needed for a complete mastery of English; nevertheless it did manifestly interest its boys enough to put games into a secondary place. At Caxton one did not see boys playing games as old ladies in hydropaths play patience, desperately and excessively and with a forced enthusiasm, because they had nothing better to do. Even the Caxton school magazine did not give much more than two-thirds of its space to games. So to Caxton Peter went, when Mr. Mackinder of White Court had done his duty by him.