I mentioned the matter next to Mr. Swain, when I was in the bank. He, too, was a true New Englander, of a different class from Bert, but with the fundamental conservatism–to give it the pleasantest name possible.
“There’s too much fol-de-rol in the school now,” he said. “If they’d just try to teach ’em Greek and Latin and the things you need for a liberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn’t have had to send my boy to Andover.”
“Your boy, yes,” I answered. “How many other boys and girls in his class are going to college?”
“Well, there’s another one,” he replied.
“Out of a class of how many?”
“Twenty,” said he.
“Hm–you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?”
He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew at human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn’t believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are grounded in the fetish of the old “humanist” curriculum (which when it originated was strictly vocational). He didn’t believe that trade instruction educated. There was no “culture” in it. I left him, wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn’t done as much harm as good in the world.
After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We brought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchard afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.
“Yes,” he said, “there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you’ve got to get your arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy, they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than we do in rural New England!”