Calculations of temperatures by isotherms, geological strata, even numerical facts about other races, all of these things will strike home and be found of paramount interest to boys and girls, but most especially will this be the case when, as will always happen, the form decide to work out and write up in detail the accurate history and geography of their school and the district immediately surrounding it. This will give so much, such ample opportunity for the rousing of and keeping keenly alive their faculties, that of all subjects, history and geography will be the hardest from which to tear the ardent enthusiasts. The nature of the soil, the various winds that blow, the effect of these winds on the weather, that is, what weather to expect after different winds, the rainfall, the contour of the outlying lands, the agricultural state, the condition of the crops—the list might be magnified into a book by itself, all these things will help the child to a better and truer understanding of the making of history and geography than any textbook, and will prove of lasting worth to him as a useful citizen of the future. After this period there will follow an entirely free time, when the school will be at liberty to follow its own devices until lunch-time: there will be voluntary lectures on all sorts of subjects that appeal to the stamp-collector's or the natural historian's mind by men and women who have made their mark. Great explorers and big-game hunters will themselves come and give an account of their exciting experiences. Perpetual pianolas, perpetual cinematograph films will be in use during these hours in which the school is at liberty. In the afternoon, free time will be given for games of every description to be played, no particular partiality being extended to one over another. Running, swimming, tennis, basket-ball, racquets, fives, golf, cricket, shooting, all will be equally accessible and equally encouraged.
Tea-parties daily from 4 to 4.30 will be given by masters and mistresses, and by pupils to other pupils or to their elders, a time of social intercourse and polite society: the neighbouring populace will then be entertained by the youthful hosts, and courtesy and gallantry have a special chance of being adequately cultivated. After tea school will again be continued in the science hour, where each pupil will proceed to experiment under the care of an expert with the produce which he or she has been concerned with in the morning. It may be to-day that the Modern Shell are trying to discover a use for the millions of rotten bananas that are shipped into this country week by week in order to economize in produce or to discover a new fertilizer: it may be that they wish to discover how to eliminate from the water of the neighbourhood certain properties that have been found to have an evil effect on the health of the populace; once you see the bugbear, the nightmare of examination, is removed the child can occupy himself doing something really useful, something which will in all probability be, in the end, of great service to the State and at the same time train the youthful mind in the way it both wishes and ought to go.
The French period which finishes up the afternoon school will be of great use, for reminiscences will be indulged in of the last visit to a French school, village or town on the part of those members of the form who went last year, in the annual foreign tour; they will by these reminiscences, told of course in French, whet the minds of the neophytes, so that they will look forward more than ever to the holidays which will see them as a body transported to a land where so many fascinating customs may be witnessed. Conversation both in and out of school will be carried on in both German and French as much as possible, helped of course by the fact that there will be so many natives of these countries always in the school.
The evening will sometimes be spent in quiet reading, sometimes in lectures, sometimes in cinematograph shows (as a matter of fact the cinema will be very much in evidence throughout each and every day), sometimes in concerts, pianola and real, very often in theatricals; but on this particular evening of which I am speaking the Modern Shell have decided to do the English that the present-day form did in morning school before breakfast. This English period is, if anything, looked forward to more than any other period in the day.
The reason is that, in its many-sidedness, it is even perhaps more entrancing than geography. First there is the writing and editing of the form magazine, which is an intricate periodical with a daily news-sheet merging into a more serious-minded weekly, which itself turns into a monthly magazine of extraordinary bulk. News, verses, stories, long and short, novels, drawings, essays, debates, dialogues, all are heaped into this production.
Plays are written, produced and acted by each form, supervised only at the rarest intervals by the form master, parts for which are thought out and debated about spiritedly in form as part of the subject. Extracts from the great masters are discovered, learnt and declaimed by the discoverer to the rest of his confederates; everywhere and in every branch of this subject there is the fresh air and fierce pleasure of the explorer and pioneer, carving out for himself a gigantic task to be performed, disciplining himself for that task by repeated smaller undertakings. In such an atmosphere of feverish excitement and interest, is it to be wondered at that the result is so magnificent? For our youthful poetry is real poetry written in the white heat of passion, the literature of our youth is real literature written while the fire of life is still burning strongly and furiously inside. Each boy and girl finds in him or her self something that he or she must say, something sacred that must be expressed after attempts which may often be futile, volatile, fluid; at length there emanates a solid, lasting record in sentences that will ring through the world of a generation that had risen out of the slough of sullen acquiescence in an age that cared not for learning or things of the soul, to the highest heights that had ever been dreamt of by the human race, and our schools of the future had shown how nearly godlike indeed are these puny mortals when they put their shoulders to the wheel and help God to grind His mill.
So we leave our dream-children and this sketch of Utopia in the fervid hope that something of truth exists in this vision that I have seen, and the last and most fervent prayer of my life is that I may live long enough to take part in a revolution that shall make such a vision possible, and see it in the initial stages starting on its godlike course; then shall I, like Simeon, be content to depart in peace, for I shall have, in little at any rate, O God, have seen Thy salvation.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: