Multatuli.
OF EDUCATION, WITH PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATIONS.
... I am positively forced to tell you that I think Dominie Pennewip’s lot might have been counted an extenuating circumstance had he been convicted of eight deadly sins at once.
I have noticed that a considerable number of great men began their careers as swineherds (see all biographical dictionaries); and it seems, therefore, as if this employment called out the elements of all the qualities needed to govern men—or to enlighten them. Which is not quite the same thing....
... As for comparing human beings and pigs, let the reader remember the connection between coal and diamonds, and every one will be satisfied—even the theologians!
But, since making this observation on the splendid prospects which await any one who has spent his tender youth in the society of the grunting coal-diamonds of the animal kingdom, I have several times thought it strange that, in the biographies of great men, there should be so few examples of ex-schoolmasters. For, after all, all the elements which seem to constitute a pig-pasture the nursery of genius are abundantly present in the schoolroom.
The reverse process frequently occurs. Every day we see exiled princes giving instruction to idle youth. Dionysius and Louis Philippe are not the only ones; and I myself have attempted to teach French to an American. Which proved impossible.
If elective monarchies should come into fashion again, I should like to see the people’s choice confine itself, by preference, to persons who had studied mankind from models in miniature, just as one learns geography from portable globes and atlases. All virtues, inclinations, passions, errors, misdeeds,—all points which have to be studied in human society,—are found in a small and comprehensive scale on the benches of the school; and the boasted diplomacy of many a statesman only amounts, when looked at carefully, to the tricks of which our Machiavels of three feet high make the warp and woof of their tactics.
The schoolmaster’s profession is not an easy one; and I have never understood why it is so poorly paid, or, since it seems that this is an inexorable law of nature, how it is that people are always found to fill it, instead of drawing the same pay as drill-instructors, and showing soldiers how to load their guns, which is less perplexing to the mind, and gives you more fresh air, with oxygen in it.
Or else, I should prefer to be a minister. For the latter has to do with people who are quite at one with him as to the matter in hand, and come and listen to him of their own free choice; while the teacher has to keep up a constant fight with reluctance on the part of the pupils, and also with a highly dangerous set of rivals, in the shape of tops, marbles, and paper dolls—not to mention sweets, changing teeth, scarlet fever, and weak mothers.