“To begin with I thought, none of these other fellows really know how to run a school. I will, I said, make a nest of Young Paragons. I will take a bunch of boys and get the best out of them, the best possible; watch them, study them, foster them, make a sort of boy so that the White Court brand shall be looked for and recognized....”
He sipped his faintly seething wine and put down the glass.
“Five per cent.,” he said; “ten per cent., perhaps.” He touched his lips with his dinner-napkin. “I have turned out some creditable boys.”
“Did you make any experiments in the subjects you taught?”
“At first. But one of the things we discover in life as we grow past the first flush of beginning, is just how severely we are conditioned. We are conditioned. We seem to be free. And we are in a net. You have criticized my curriculum today pretty severely, Mr. Sydenham. Much that you say is absolutely right. It is wasteful, discursive, ineffective. Yes.... But in my place I doubt if you could have made it much other than it is....
“One or two things I do. Latin grammar here is taught on lines strictly parallel with the English and French and German—that is to say, we teach languages comparatively. It was troublesome to arrange, but it makes a difference mentally. And I take a class in Formal Logic; English teaching is imperfect, expression is slovenly, without that. The boys write English verse. The mathematical teaching too, is as modern as the examining boards will let it be. Small things, perhaps. But you do not know the obstacles.
“Mr. Sydenham, your talk today has reminded me of all the magnificent things I set out to do at White Court, when I sank my capital in building White Court six and twenty years ago. When I found that I couldn’t control the choice of subjects, when I found that in that matter I was ruled by the sort of schools and colleges the boys had to go on to and by the preposterous examinations they would have to pass, then I told myself, ’at least I can cultivate their characters and develop something like a soul in them, instead of crushing out individuality and imagination as most schools do....’
“Well, I think I have a house of clean-minded and cheerful and willing boys, and I think they all tell the truth....”
“I don’t know what I’m to do with the religious teaching of these two youngsters of mine,” said Oswald abruptly. “Practically, they’re Godless.”
Mr. Mackinder did not speak for a little while. Then he said, “It is almost unavoidable, under existing conditions, that the religious teaching in a school should be—formal and orthodox.