“I want to do the very best I can for this boy. I feel very strongly that it’s my duty to him and the country to turn him out—as well as a boy can be turned out.”
Mr. Mackinder nodded his head and continued to listen.
This was something new in private schoolmasters. For the most part they had opened themselves out to Oswald, like sunflowers, like the receptive throats of nestlings. They had embraced and silenced him by the wealth of their assurances.
“I have two little wards,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I want to make all I can of them. They ought to belong to the Elite. The strength of a country—of an empire—depends ultimately almost entirely on its Elite. This empire isn’t overwhelmed with intelligence and most of the talk we hear about the tradition of statesmanship——”
Mr. Mackinder made a short snorting noise through his nose that seemed to indicate his opinion of contemporary statesmanship.
“You see I take this schooling business very solemnly. These upper-class schools, I say, these schools for the sons of prosperous people and scholarship winners, are really Elite-making machines. They really make—or fail to make—the Empire. That makes me go about asking schoolmasters a string of questions. Some of them don’t like my questions. Perhaps they are too elementary. I ask: what is this education of yours up to? What is the design of the whole? What is this preparation of yours for? This is called a Preparatory School. You lay the foundations. What is the design of the building for which these foundations are laid?”
He paused, determined to make Mr. Mackinder say something before he discoursed further.
“It isn’t so simple as that,” was wrung from Mr. Mackinder. “Suppose we just walk round the school. Suppose we just see the sort of place it is and what we are doing here. Then perhaps you’ll be able to see better what we contribute—in the way of making a citizen.”
The inspection was an unusually satisfactory one. White Court was one of the few private schools Oswald had seen that had been built expressly for its purpose. Its class rooms were well lit and well arranged, its little science museum seemed good and well arranged and well provided with diagrams; its gymnasium was businesslike; its wall blackboards unusually abundant and generously used, and everything was tidy. Nevertheless the Catechism for Schoolmasters was not spared. “Now,” said Oswald, “now for the curriculum?”
“We live in the same world with most other English schools,” Mr. Mackinder sulked. “This is a preparatory school.”