Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems are not structurally changed—facility and convenience, speed of transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain, but more obvious, the science of covering ground....

I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient and the obscene.

The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:

One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.

I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife, designed to smother that which was real in the heart.

Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children, having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut the loaf evenly—to every one his equal part. The first crime was favoritism....

I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain, tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place; the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a tithe of its tissue.

The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.

The boy next had not done well in school. The word dreamer was designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me—the mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of almost phenomenal reproduction—and yet he had listened sleepily. Of course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual, in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded schools.

I had been one who thought my own work most important—to the exclusion even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere—tension wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had he only known it.