the more i see of it the more i admire the co-education system. to me it is delightful to see boys and girls playing together. segregate boys and you destroy their perspective. i used to find at the university that it was generally the english public school boy who set up one standard of morals for his sisters and another for the shop-girls.
co-education is the greatest thing in our state educational system. the bairns early learn the interdependence of the sexes; boys and girls early begin to understand each other. all danger of putting women on a pedestal is taken away; the boys find that the girls are ordinary humans with many failings ("aw'll tell the mester!"), and many virtues. the girls find that boys ... well, i don't exactly know what the girls find.
seldom is there any over-familiarity. the girls have a natural protective aloofness that awes the boys; the boys generally have[pg 55] strenuous interests that lead them to ignore the girls for long periods. at present the sexes are very friendly, for love-making (always a holy thing with bairns), has come with spring; but in a few weeks the boys will be playing football or "bools," and they will not be seen in the girls' playground.
i can detect no striving after what is called chivalry (thank heaven!) if maggie and willie both lay hands on a ruler, they fight it out, but maggie generally gets it; she can say more. mr. henpeck begins life as a chick. i hate the popular idea of chivalry, and i want my boys to hate it. chivalry to me means rising in the tube to offer a typist your seat, and then going off to the city to boss a score of waitresses who are paid 6s. a week. as a nation we have no chivalry; we have only etiquette. we hold doors open for nice women, and we tamely suffer or forget about a society that condemns poor women to slave for sixteen hours a day sewing shirts at a penny an hour. we say "thank you" when the lady of the house stops playing, and we banish the prostitutes of piccadilly from our minds. chivalry has been dead for a long time now.
[pg 56]
i want to substitute kindness for the word chivalry. i want to tell my bairns that the only sin in the world is cruelty. i do not preach morality for i hardly know what morality is. i have no morals, i am an a-moralist, or should it be a non-moralist? i judge not, and i mean to school my bairns into judging not. yet i am not being quite consistent. i do judge cruelty and uncharitableness; but i judge not those who do not act up to the accustomed code of morals. a code is always a temptation to a healthy person; it is like a window by a railway siding: it cries out: "chuck a chunk of coal through me." codes never make people moral; they merely make them hypocritical. i include the scotch code.
* * *
until lately i thought that drill was unnecessary for rural bairns. it was the chief inspector of the district who converted me. he pointed out that country children are clumsy and slack. "a countryman can heave a sack of potatoes on his back," he said, "but he has no agility, no grace of movement."
[pg 57]
i agree with him now. i find that drill makes my bairns more graceful. but i am far from being pleased with any system that i know. i don't really care tuppence whether they are physically alert or not, but i want them to be graceful, if only from an artistic point of view. the system i really want to know is eurhythmics. i recently read an illustrated article by (or on?) jacques dalcroze, the inventor of the method, and the founder of the eurhythmics school near dresden. the system is drill combined with music. the pupils walk and dance, and i expect, sit to music. the photographs were beautiful studies in grace; the school appears to be full of pavlovas. i think i shall try to found a eurhythmics system on the photographs. i cannot surely invent anything more graceless than "'shun!"
grace is almost totally absent from rural dances. the ploughman takes off his jacket, and sweats his roaring way through "the flowers o' edinburgh"; but the waltz has no attraction for him. waltzing is a necessity in a rural scheme of education ... and, incidentally, in a mayfair scheme of education, now that the "bunny hug" and the "turkey[pg 58] trot" and the "tango" have come to these isles.
* * *
robert campbell left the school to-day. he had reached the age limit. he begins work tomorrow morning as a ploughman. and yesterday i wrote about introducing eurhythmics! robert's leaving brings me to earth with a flop. i am forced to look a grim fact in the face. truly it is like a death; i stand by a new made grave, and i have no hope of a resurrection. robert is dead.
pessimism has hold of me to-night. i have tried to point the way to what i think best in life, tried to give robert an ideal. tomorrow he will be gathered to his fathers. he will take up the attitude of his neighbours: he will go to church, he will vote radical or tory, he will elect a farmer to the school board, he will marry and live in a hovel. his master said to me recently: "bairns are gettin' ower muckle eddication noo-a-days. what eddication does a laddie need to herd kye?"
yes, i am as pessimistic as any schopenhauer to-night, i cannot see the sun.
* * *
[pg 59]
my pessimism has remained with me all day. i feel that i am merely pouring water into a sieve. i almost feel that to meddle with education is to begin at the wrong end. i may have an ideal, but i cannot carry it out because i am up against all the forces of society. robert campbell is damned, not because education is so very wrong, but because education is trying to adapt itself to commerce and economics and convention. i think i am right in holding that our individualist, as opposed to a socialist, system is to blame. "every man for himself" is the most cursed saying that was ever said. if we are to allow an idle rich to waste millions yearly, if we are to allow profiteers to amass thousands at the expense of the slaving majority, what chance has poor robert campbell? i complete the saying—"and the deil tak the henmost." robert is the henmost.
o! the people are poor things. democracy is the last futility. yet i should not blame the people; they never get a chance. our rulers are on the side of the profiteers, and the latter take very good care that robert campbell shall leave school when he is [pg 60]fourteen. it isn't that they want more cheap labour; they are afraid that if he is educated until he is nineteen he will be wise enough to say: "why should i, a man made in the image of god, be forced to slave for gains that you will steal?"
yet, the only way is to labour on, to strive to convey some idea of my ideal to my bairns. if every teacher in scotland had the same ideal as i have i think that the fight would not be a long one. but how do i know that my ideal is the right one? i cannot say; i just know. which, i admit, is a woman's reason.
* * *
i was re-reading an enemy of the people last night, and the thought suddenly came to me: "would my bairns understand it?" this morning i cut out bible instruction and read them the first act. i then questioned them, and found to my delight that they had grasped the theme. it was peculiarly satisfying to me to find that they recognized dr. stockmann as a better man than his grovelling brother peter. if my bairns could realise the full significance of ibsen's play, "the[pg 61] day" would not be so far off as i am in the habit of thinking it is.
i must re-read shaw's widowers' houses; i fancy that children might find much thought in it. it is one of his "unpleasant plays," but i see no reason for keeping the unlovely things from bairns. i do not believe in frightening them with tales of murder and ghosts. every human being has something of the gruesome in his composition; the murder cases are the most popular readings in our press. i want to direct this innate desire for gruesome things to the realising of the most gruesome things in the world—the grinding of soul and body in order to gain profits, the misery of poverty and cold, the weariness of toil. if our press really wants to make its readers shudder, why does it not publish long accounts of infant mortality in the slums, of gin fed bairns, of back-doors used as fuel, of phthisical girls straining their eyes over seams? i know why the press ignores these things, the public does not want to think of them. if the public wanted such stories every capitalist owner of a newspaper would supply them, grudgingly, but with a stern resolve to get dividends. to-day the[pg 62] papers are mostly run for the rich and their parasites. the only way in which 'enery smith can get his photograph into the papers is by jumping on mrs. 'enery smith until she expires. i wonder that no criminologist has tried to prove that publicity is the greatest incentive to crime.
when i read the daily papers to my bairns i try to tell them what is left out. "humour at bow street," a heading will run. ye gods! humour! i have as much humour as most men, but if anyone can find humour in the stupid remarks of a law-giver he must be a w. w. jacobs, a mark twain, a george a. birmingham, and a stephen leacock rolled into one ... with the devil thrown in. humour at bow street. i have been there. i have seen the poor magdalenes and the pitiable lazaruses shuffle in with terror in their eyes. i have seen the inflexible mighty law condemn them to the cells, i have heard their piteous cries for mercy. and the newspapers talk of the humour of the courts.
i once read that law's primary object is to protect the rich from the poor. the appalling truth of that saying dawned on me in bow street. humour! yes, there[pg 63] is humour in bow street. the grimmest, ugliest joke in the world is this.... covent garden opera house stands across the street from the court.
* * *
to-day i told senior ii. to write up the following story, i advised them to add graces to it if they could.
"a farmer went to edinburgh for the day. he was walking down the high street with open mouth when the fire engine came swinging round the corner. the farmer gave chase down the north bridge and leith street, and owing to the heavy traffic the engine's rate was so slow that he could easily keep up with it. but it turned down london road, and in the long silent street soon outdistanced him. he ran until he saw that it was hopeless. then he stopped and held up a clenched fist.
"ye can keep yer dawmed tattie-chips," he cried, "aw'll get them some other place."
mary peters began thus:—
"mr. peter mitchell went to edinburgh for the day...."
[pg 64]
mr. peter mitchell is chairman of the school board.
* * *
why did i substitute "auld" for "dawmed" tattie-chips when i told the bairns the story. art demands the "dawmed." i think i substituted the "auld" because i like a quiet life. i have no time to persuade indignant parents that "damn" is not a sin. but it was weakness on my part; i compromised, and compromise is always a lie.
