First of all, the members of that once despised race, the teachers of Science. Formerly these maintained a servile and apologetic existence, supervising a turbulent collection of young gentlemen whose sole appreciation of
this branch of knowledge was derived from the unrivalled opportunities which its pursuit afforded for the creation of horrible stenches and untimely explosions. Now they have uprisen, and, asseverating that classical education is a pricked bubble, ask boldly for expensive apparatus and a larger tract of space in the time-table.
Then the parent. He has got quite out of hand lately. In days past things were different. Usually an old public-school boy himself, and proudly conscious that Classics had made him "what he was," the parent deferred entirely to the Headmaster's judgment, and entrusted his son to his care without question or stipulation. But a new race of parents has arisen, men who avow, modestly but firmly, that they have been made not by the Classics but by themselves, and who demand, with a great assumption of you-can't-put-me-off-with-last-season's-goods, that their offspring shall be taught something up-to-date—something which will be "useful" in an office.
Again, there is our old friend the Man in the Street, who, through the medium of his favourite mouthpiece, the halfpenny press, asks the Headmaster very sternly what he means by
turning out "scholars" who are incapable of writing an invoice in commercial Spanish, and to whom double entry is Double Dutch.
And lastly there is the boy himself, whose utter loathing and horror of education as a whole has not blinded him to the fact that the cultivation of some branches thereof calls for considerably less effort than that of others, and who accordingly occupies the greater part of his weekly letter home with fervent requests to his parents to permit him to drop Classics and take up modern languages or science.
The united agitations of this incongruous band have called into existence the Modern Side—Delilah Number One. Now for Number Two.
Until a few years ago the State confined its ebullience in matters educational to the Board Schools. But with the growth of national education and class jealousy—the two seem to go hand-in-hand—the working classes of this country began to point out to the Government, not altogether unreasonably, that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. "Why," they inquired bitterly, "should we be the only people educated? Must the poor always be oppressed, while the rich go free? What about these public schools of yours—the seminaries
of the bloated and pampered Aristocracy? You leave us alone for a bit, and give them a turn, or we may get nasty!" So a pliable Government, remembering that public-school masters are not represented in Parliament while the working-classes are, obeyed. They began by publicly announcing that in future all teachers must be trained to teach. To give effect to this decree, they declared their intention of immediately introducing a Bill to provide that after a certain date no Headmaster of any school, high or low, would be permitted to engage an assistant who had not earned a certificate at a training college and registered himself in a mysterious schedule called 'Column B,' paying a guinea for the privilege.