Mr. Mackinder spoke of his own youth. Quite early in life had come physical humiliations, the realization that his slender and delicate physique debarred him from most active occupations, and his resolve to be of use in some field where his weak and undersized body would be at no great disadvantage. “I made up my mind that teaching should be my religion,” he said.
He told of the difficulties he had encountered in his attempts to get any pedagogic science or training. “This is the most difficult profession in the world,” he said, “and the most important. Yet it is not studied; it has no established practice; it is not endowed. Buildings are endowed and institutions, but not teachers.” And in Great Britain, in the schools of the classes that will own and rule the country, ninety-nine per cent. of the work was done by unskilled workmen, by low-grade, genteel women and young men. In America the teachers were nearly all women. “How can we expect to raise a nation nearly as good as we might do under such a handicap?” He had read and learnt what he could about teaching; he had served for small salaries in schools that seemed living and efficient; finally he had built his own school with his own money. He had had the direst difficulties in getting a staff together. “What can one expect?” he said. “We pay them hardly better than shop assistants—less than bank clerks. You see the relative importance of things in the British mind.” What hope or pride was there to inspire an assistant schoolmaster to do good work?
“I thought I could make a school different from all other schools, and I found I had to make a school like most other fairly good schools. I had to work for what the parents required of me, and the ideas of the parents had been shaped by their schools. I had never dreamt of the immensity of the resistance these would offer to constructive change. In this world there are incessant changes, but most of them are landslides or epidemics.... I tried to get away from stereotyping examinations. I couldn’t. I tried to get away from formal soul-destroying religion. I couldn’t. I tried to get a staff of real assistants. I couldn’t. I had to take what came. I had to be what was required of me....
“One works against time always. Over against the Parents. It is not only the boys one must educate, but the parents—let alone one’s self. The parents demand impossible things. I have been asked for Greek and for book-keeping by double-entry by the same parent. I had—I had to leave the matter—as if I thought such things were possible. After all, the Parent is master. One can’t run a school without boys.”
“You’d get some boys,” said Oswald.
“Not enough. I’m up against time. The school has to pay.”
“Can’t you hold out for a time? Run the school on a handful of oatmeal?”
“It’s running it on an overdraft I don’t fancy. You’re not a married man, Mr. Sydenham, with sons to consider.”
“No,” said Oswald shortly. “But I have these wards. And, after all, there’s not only today but tomorrow. If the world is going wrong for want of education——. If you don’t give it your sons will suffer.”
“Tomorrow, perhaps. But today comes first. I’m up against time. Oh, I’m up against time.”