Delphi complete works of.., p.826
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 826
In all this I am not wandering from the point. I am explaining where I got my Upper Canada College education from; well, that’s where it came from, from the theologians and the classical scholars and Isaac Newton and the Nautical Almanac.
But the thing that especially consolidated the position of the classical education of England, as it presently did also that of America, was the discovery, by experience, that it was a great training for leadership. This applied particularly to a nation which had grown not democratic, but parliamentary, a nation where oratory in the legislature counted for more and more, and where forensic oratory in free and open counts was one of the great highways to success and political preferment.
To this was added presently the power of the press, the value of the written word and the persuading paragraph, things for which the classical education had, and still retains when most else is gone, a commanding eminence.
Side by side with classical education, in a position that has slowly grown from the lowest to the highest, grew up medicine and medical education: from its earliest beginnings, in black art and barbers’ surgery with its red-and-white rags, out of the mists of astrology and the incantations of superstition, out of empirical remedies and old wives’ tales, till with the age of science it began to build on definite organised truth and on knowledge gathered from the facts of dissection and the observations of anatomy. But medicine was no part of the education of a cultivated man, and till far down the nineteenth century the social status of a doctor, other than a court physician, was dubious and humiliating.
Science remained for the few, for the investigators, for the Royal Society founded under Charles II as Prince Rupert, a factor in the national advance of England second only to the Royal Navy, for people who, like Benjamin Franklin, with electricity, wanted to know. The list of the great names in science — Priestley, Faraday, Lyell, Darwin — lies outside of the orbit of academic education.
Such was the classical education. It is my opinion that the world moved it on just in time and that England especially was saved in the nineteenth century from degenerating into intellectual stagnation only by the fact that other forces in the nation, clear outside of its scholars and all that they stood for, pursued science for science’s sake; promoted invention, applied it to industry and transport, and presently — by the dead weight of circumstance and opinion — thrust it into the schools and colleges.
A chief trouble with the classical scholarship was its infernal conceit. The typical classical scholar developed under encouragement into a sort of pundit. He knew it all — not part of it, all of it. What he didn’t know wasn’t college. The phrase was used long after by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, but it might have been used by any of them from the days of Dr. Busby of Westminster, in the days of Charles II, down to their last octogenarian successors of yesterday. They knew it all. That is to say, they knew nothing whatever of medicine and would have roared with laughter over their own ignorance of it, with a neat Latin quotation to cap it. They knew nothing whatever of the geographical and geological globe about them, replacing it with an intimate knowledge of the Aegean Sea as of 500 B.C. They knew nothing of modern languages, regarding them as a thing for couriers or dragomen. They knew nothing of the investigations of natural science, had no vision as to where it was leading, nothing of its application to industry, nothing of industry itself, nothing of finance — in fact, looked at in a proper focus, all that they did know was nothing as compared with the vast portentous knowledge that was rising on the horizon of a changing world.
Even for literature and the drama, all that goes with the republic of letters, their point of view was turning hopelessly astray by their persistent tradition that of course Latin and Greek literature was far superior to that of our own day. To say this in A.D. 1500 was to state a plain truth. To say it in A.D. 1900 was to say pure unadulterated nonsense.
The old classical education had at least the advantage that it was hard and difficult with no royal road. It was as hard as ever a teacher liked to make it. For witness call in anyone who has studied Greek moods and tenses or tried to translate the Greek dramatists into something intelligible. In all this it was miles above a great deal of the slush and mush, which has in part replaced it, the effortless, pretentious studies of things that can’t be studied at all, the vague fermentations that tend to replace stern disciplinary work when education is all paid for and free for all and popular and universal, provided that it is not made difficult.
The classical curriculum had also the advantage, to be rightly or wrongly used, that it lent itself admirably to competitive study, to examinations, to marks, to prizes, to going up and down in class. It was from that aspect that I made my Upper Canada College education even less beneficial than it need have been, accentuated its faults by utilizing its weakness. We had at Upper Canada College the system whereby each day’s class consisted mainly of questions and answers, that is, either questions on homework done the night before or on something done at sight in class. The boys sat all along one side or all across the front of the room. If the master asked a boy a question and he couldn’t answer it, then it was passed on, “Next! Next!” till somebody did answer. The boy who thus answered correctly moved up above the ones who had failed to answer. Theoretically, but very rarely in practice, a question might be asked of a boy at the top of the class and be passed on, “Next! Next!” with increasing excitement all the way to the bottom boy of the class, who might answer correctly and “Go up ahead” in one swoop. Hence the system had in it a certain element of sport, something of the attraction of a horse race. At least it kept the class from going to sleep and it made the class do the work and not the teacher. It always seems to me that in a lot of the revised education of today, which quite rightly undertook to modify the severities, the rigor, the physical punishment, and the needless difficulties of the older teaching, the mistake is made in the contrary direction. Everything is made too easy. The teacher has to “sell” the subject to the class, and in trying to make everything clear and simple it is forgotten that there are some things that can’t be made clear and simple because they are by nature difficult and complex.
For me the old-fashioned system of going up and down and trying to move up to the head of the class and stay there proved altogether too congenial and attractive and helped to give a false bias to my education. In the junior form, the first and second, I took my studies easily, didn’t bother whether I went up or down, and got a very good place without trying for it. But from the third form on, I got more and more drawn into study and over-study till presently I filled all my time outside of school as well as in. After the third form, by this continuous industry, I ranked first in everything except mathematics, and after the fourth form first in everything by learning by heart in mathematics every possible thing that would let itself be learned by heart.
Study by this pattern knocked all the reality out of certain subjects. History for me just turned into an underlined book of which I knew by heart all the underlined tags, headings, and dates. I knew them then and I still know all the clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, and all sorts of dates and lists, and all kinds of headings. The reality of history gradually was lost from sight behind this apparatus of preparation for examinations.
The very thoroughness of the old classical system made it still worse suited for modern education.
TEACHING SCHOOL
I SPENT TEN and a half years of my life (February 1889-July 1899) in teaching school, and I liked the last day of it as little as I liked the first. As a consequence I have spoken and written very often and very bitterly about schoolteaching and the lot of the schoolteacher. Looking back on it all, I think I ought to retract about one half of all I said, for I think now that one half of the fault was with me and only one half with the profession as such. Even at that, it seems to me a shame that schoolteaching cannot be organised as a profession which a person can enter as a lifework and in which success should bring at least the main part of what success means in the other learned professions such as medicine, law, and the church. As it is, schoolteaching offers too much at the beginning, too little as the years go by. The initial salary is better than what anyone could hope to gain in his opening years at law or medicine. The final salary is nowhere beside the great prizes the other professions offer. It is true that in the other professions they may fall by the way, lawyers without a case and medical men forced out of their profession by lack of opportunity and glad to earn a living in any other kind of way. In teaching very few fall by the way; very many rise out of it; but those who remain in it for a lifetime find, as the years go on, that it gives them less than what is fair, less than what is commensurate with other pursuits.
There are certain things without which the life of a person who has grown up in cultured surroundings and received a cultivated education is not properly complete, does not stand on a fair level with other lives and opportunities. Every career should look forward to marriage as a thing that can in due course and time be accepted, with all that it brings in the way of children and a home, without a pinch and a semi-poverty that reduces it to a status not good enough to rank with that of other professions. With marriage should go a sufficient command of money to allow for the amenities of life, to permit one to belong to a club, to buy, within reason, books, et cetera, furniture and house things, to enjoy art and the theatre and such special holiday “blowouts” as punctuate the monotony of life’s routine. Most necessary of all is money enough to launch one’s children in the world.
Any man who has that much need ask for no more. Granted that much of ease and affluence, the rest depends on himself, on what kind of mind and personality he has. The trouble with our schoolteaching in Canada is that up to now it does not offer these things. Hence its characteristic features — too much at first, too little later. An in-and-out profession through which a series of bright young men pass on to something better, and in which a certain number of young men, too dull or too devoted, remain forever. The running stream leaves its deposit as it flows on, but is the deposit gold or mud?
In my case I went into schoolteaching with my eyes wide open, as into something temporary on the way to a real career. To go into teaching was a matter of sheer necessity. My education had fitted me for nothing except to pass it on to other people. And as I have explained, my mother’s finances had come to a full stop with the final exertion of getting enough money to give the one year of full undergraduate status at the university for which my scholarship of one hundred dollars was quite inadequate. Meantime, as my father had vanished into space, my mother was still on the old farm with eight children younger than I to look after and with an income of, I think, eighty dollars a month to do it on. Of my two elder brothers, Jim was in Winnipeg with some small job in the courthouse, but quite unable to send money home, and Dick in the Northwest Mounted Police had nothing to spare from his pay. How my mother managed in the ensuing years before any of us could help her I do not know. I imagine the answer is that she drifted into debt and stayed there. Even when we could presently give her money it was merely applied over the surface of the debt below like a warm growth of Arctic flowers in the sun over cold frozen muskeg.
I found out, by asking those who knew, that my college status as a third-year undergraduate — for I had taken the first and second years in one, as already explained — would entitle me to teach in a high school or collegiate institute, provided I put in three months as a teacher in training. This new feature was still quite recent, as was the first instalment of that qualification in “education” (so called) superadded to the academic qualification of time spent and examinations passed at the university. From the modest three months of technical education as a qualification for teaching, the requirement has now been lengthened in Ontario, as it has in most similar jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, to one year. It thus represents as much as 25 per cent of the academic qualification itself. I have always thought, and still think, this is out of all proportion. I have always had a very low opinion of the educational qualification — too low, I am sure — always looked upon it as about 10 per cent solid value and 90 per cent mixed humbug and wind. I have always felt that the only way to learn to teach is to go and do it, just as Mr. Squeers, immortalized by Dickens, taught his pupils to spell windows by going and cleaning them. In so far as the educational qualification helps to close the profession and keep out superfluous numbers, I am convinced that the same time and money spent on an extra academic year would be more to the point.
I sent in my application and was duly assigned in September of 1888 as one of a group of half a dozen men and women teachers allotted for three months’ training to the Strathroy Collegiate Institute, Strathroy being in western Ontario, beyond London.
So in due course I got on the train and went to Strathroy. Apart from trips up and down to Sutton, it was my first railway journey. I had a wooden trunk tied with a clothesline and something called a valise — I forget whether of imitation straw or of imitation something else. It is the kind of baggage I still use. I have never risen to the luxury of aristocratic baggage as a mark of status. For years I was too poor to buy it, and when I could I didn’t any longer care for it. I think that Dr. Johnson once said something like that in a letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, about having a literary position. I feel just as he did about having a pigskin valise: “Had it been early it had been kind, but now I am known and do not need it.” If it is true that a man is known, as is indicated in romantic novels, by his baggage, then my valise places me every time.
So, as I say, I arrived at Strathroy. I left my trunk at the station and walked up the street, and presently I saw a sign, Rooms with Board, and went in and took a room with board. I think the price was three a week. I went upstairs and unpacked my valise and wrote a letter home and said, “Dear Mother, I arrived at Strathroy all right, but the boardinghouse I am in looks a pretty rotten place, so I don’t expect to stay long.” Then I went down to supper, and after I had finished it I met the landlady coming downstairs and she said, “If you find this boardinghouse such a rotten place I guess you better not stay in it,” so I was on the street again, less twenty-five cents, moving on to the next sign Rooms with Board.
That was the beginning of my contact with boardinghouses, which spread intermittently over many years and from which presently I found much food for reflection. Some readers may recall my Boarding House Geometry, in which was laid down the axiom that all Boarding Houses are the same Boarding House and the postulate that a bee line may be made from any one boarding house to any other boarding house. No doubt the origin of those truths reaches back as far as Strathroy.
When I duly found a boardinghouse (across the lapse of years I quite forget it and where it was), and had entered the Teachers School next day, I found it all very simple and easy beyond words after the hard study to which I was habituated. The little group of teachers in training moved about the school, listened to sample lessons (in no wise different from the lessons and classes we had all taken for years), and presently were entitled to stand up and “take the class” themselves under the supervision of the teacher.
In doing this I learned on the side a lesson on how not to be funny, or the misuse of a sense of humour which lasted me all my life and echoed back to me in a strange way nearly thirty years later. The principal of the Strathroy Collegiate was Mr. James Wetherell, the well-beloved “Jimmy” Wetherell whose memory is still dear to the heart of a thousand pupils. He seemed to us old at the time, as all adult people do to the eyes of eighteen, but he must have been relatively young, for he lived on and on, passed the opening century, still in harness when the Great War came, and died at a ripe age later on. He was a fine scholar, his chief subject, at least the one he liked best to teach, being English. But he had acquired, as most scholars do if absorbed in their work and exulting in the exposition of it, little tricks of speech and manner all his own and all too easy to imitate. I had at that time a certain natural gift of mimicry, could easily hit off people’s voices and instinctively reproduce their gestures. So when Jimmy Wetherell, halfway through a lesson in English, said to me most courteously, “Now will you take the lesson over at that point and continue it?” I did so with a completeness and resemblance to Jimmy’s voice and manner which of course delighted the class. Titters ran through the room. Encouraged as an artist, I laid it on too thick. The kindly principal saw it himself and flushed pink. When I finished he said quietly, “I am afraid I admire your brains more than your manners.” The words cut me to the quick. I felt them to be so true and yet so completely without malice. For I had no real “nerve,” no real “gall.” It was the art of imitation that appealed to me. I had not realized how it might affect the person concerned. I learned with it my first lesson in the need for human kindliness as an element in humour.
