The Lanchester tradition

On the last day of November the much-talked-of Parents’ Committee met. Mr. Flaggon’s attention had been so fully occupied by other and more pressing affairs that he had not had time to prepare for the event as carefully as he could have wished. Indeed, the purely educational problem had lately taken a less prominent place in his mind. But some dozen parents had shown themselves sufficiently interested in the proposal to promise their personal support; and, of these, seven actually put in an appearance on the appointed day. They included Lady Bellingham, a recognised authority on Women’s Education, and Sir Philip Whaley, senior partner in a great commercial house, director of several flourishing companies, and a person of considerable importance in the city. A successful stockbroker, who happened to be visiting his boy at Chiltern on the day, was pressed, reluctantly, into the service at the eleventh hour and made the numbers even. The meeting was held in the library, a handsome room that opened out of the Great Hall, and was intended to be quite informal. The masters had all been invited to attend, but, as attendance was optional, a great many of them marked their disapproval by staying away. A sense of duty, however, brought Mr. Plummer and about a dozen others to this new kind of Parliament, and Mr. Bent was present, as he expressed it, for the sheer fun of the thing.

The headmaster stated in a few words the object of the gathering, and Lady Bellingham opened the debate. Lady Bellingham was the star of the occasion, and she had come provided with a typewritten paper which she proceeded to read with evident gusto. It was rather a lengthy paper, and before it was over Sir Philip Whaley and the stockbroker were seen to yawn surreptitiously. The gist of it was that children should be brought up among beautiful things in order that what is beautiful in them may be fostered and developed. Nature is always beautiful, and in educating the young we must trust more to Nature and less to artificial restrictions. We must not interfere with a beneficent purpose, and Nature’s purposes are always beneficent. “Nursed on the great bosom of Nature” beautiful children will grow up into beautiful men and women.

When Lady Bellingham had finished, Mr. Bent, assuming his most impressive and deferential manner, asked if he might put a question.

“Certainly,” replied Lady Bellingham affably.

“I do not press,” said Mr. Bent, “for any definition of what you call ‘beautiful things,’ because that might introduce the personal element. But, when you urge that we should impose no restrictions on Nature, I foresee difficulties. Measles, for example, are a form of Nature, and of course you would not wish us to impose no restrictions on measles.”

“Of course not,” said Lady Bellingham, with amused pity.

“Then might I ask,” said Mr. Bent, “what exactly we are to understand by Nature?”

“Nature,” replied Lady Bellingham, “is impossible to define. It is too vast, too varied. But, roughly speaking, whatever is beautiful is natural, and whatever is ugly is unnatural.”

“I see,” said Mr. Bent.

Then Sir Philip Whaley, who had long been chafing under an enforced silence, took up his parable and spoke. Sir Philip possessed, in an unusual degree, the charm of English oratory—the gift, that is, of emphasising and repeating the obvious and connecting his rounded phrases with ornamental “ums” and “ers.”

“You must look at education,” he began, “from what I venture to call the business point of view. You schoolmasters are too inclined, if you will forgive me for saying so, to ignore, to leave out of account, the—um—er—the business point of view. But, if you are going to think Imperially, if, that is, you are going to think in terms of Empire, in terms, I say, of Empire, you cannot leave the business point of view out of account—um—er—you must take it into your calculations. For, behind the Imperial problem, lies the business problem. We city men are familiar with this truth; it is a matter of common knowledge amongst us; but it is one of the things that you schoolmasters, if you will pardon me for saying so, are inclined to leave out of account.”

“You are forgetting Nature,” interrupted Lady Bellingham.

“Pardon me, madam,” replied Sir Philip, “I am not forgetting Nature, but I am looking at it from the practical point of view—from what I have ventured to call the business point of view. Let me give you a concrete instance of what I mean.” Here Sir Philip dropped his voice to a confidential tone. “When I have a post in my office to fill—I am speaking, mind you, of a post with prospects attached to it, a real chance for a young fellow—um—er—well, what kind of a man do I want to fill it? A scholar? No. A man who can read Homer and write Latin verses? No. I am saying nothing against Homer as Homer, mark you, but I am considering the thing from the practical point of view. What I want is a man who has learned shorthand and can write commercial French—um—er—and I don’t find him—that’s the point—I don’t find him in the public schools or the universities; as often as not I am obliged in the end to bring in a foreigner—a German. That’s where the Germans are ahead of us. Well, there you have it in a nutshell. The public schools of England are not seriously training their boys to take their proper place in the business life of the Empire; and the Germans are. That,” he concluded, bringing his fist down on the table in front of him, “that is what I mean by saying that you ought to look at education from the business point of view. I hope I have made myself clear.”

Sir Philip wiped his brow and looked around with a complacent smile. The headmaster, whose face while the city oracle was speaking had been a study, made no comment; but Mr. Bent leaned forward with knitted brows and began:

“I have been much interested in what Sir Philip Whaley has been telling us, but I am not sure whether I interpret him correctly. Do I understand him to say that he wishes shorthand and commercial French to form a necessary part of the school curriculum?”

“I do,” said Sir Philip, “most certainly I do.”

“I realise,” continued Mr. Bent, “that for anybody who is aspiring to a post in Sir Philip Whaley’s office, shorthand and commercial French are a necessary branch of culture. But what about the boys who are going in for the learned or other professions—the Church, for example? Might not commercial French be, to a future bishop, what Homer is to Sir Philip himself, an ornamental but irrelevant accomplishment? And we must not ignore the bishops.”

“You must specialise,” said Sir Philip grandly. “You must be prepared to fit every boy with the special knowledge that he—um—er—will require in the profession of his choice. You schoolmasters, if you will forgive me for saying so, do not sufficiently realise the importance of specialising.”

“The difficulty of specialising beyond a certain point,” said Mr. Flaggon, “lies in the additional expense: and public school education is costly enough already. Our problem is to find a common basis of education for all.”

Sir Philip was not accustomed to have his judgment disputed, and he met the objection by repeating his previous remarks with amplifications. When he had finished for the second time, a Mrs. Sparrow, who had been making chirruping little noises to herself all the while, seized the opportunity to say that, for want of somebody better, she had come to represent the mothers’ point of view; and what mothers cared most about were just the little things that men so often didn’t notice. She was sure that the food was all that could be wished for or desired, and she wasn’t for a moment complaining about that. But she did think that the boys weren’t given enough time to eat it in. She was horrified at the way her own boy had learned to gobble his food in the holidays, and all doctors were agreed about the importance of eating slowly and biting properly. That was one thing. And, then, she did think that, for a big school, the sick-house was rather a dreary place—such bare unfurnished rooms and floors. When her boy was ill last Easter Term and she came down to see him, she went away feeling quite depressed. Of course everybody was most kind, and she knew that the school doctor was a very clever man; but she did think that the sick-house might be made a little more cheerful. That was the mothers’ point of view, and she hoped that Mr. Flaggon would not mind her putting it; for, after all a mother did know more about her own children than anybody else did.

Mr. Flaggon said that he was always delighted to hear what the mothers had to say, and he would give due weight to Mrs. Sparrow’s suggestions; but he thought that they were perhaps straying a little beyond the scope of the meeting, and he invited the other parents to give their view on the main subject under discussion, namely, education.

The other parents, thus appealed to, explained that they had come to listen and not to talk; but the stockbroker, who had from the first exhibited symptoms of acute boredom, remarked that, as he was there, he might as well say what he knew that most people thought, though apparently they were afraid to say so. “If you ask me,” he said, leaning back in his chair and thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, “if you ask me, I don’t think it matters a rap what you teach ’em. When I was at school, I never did a stroke of work—had a jolly good time, and I can’t say that I’m sorry for it. And I’m worth now” (here Mr. Flaggon winced visibly)—“well, it doesn’t matter what I’m worth; but I know that I could buy up half the swots—that’s what we used to call them in my days—half the swots who worked ’emselves silly over their Latin and Greek and all that sort of gibberish. And when I sent my youngster here, I said to him: ‘You may work if you like; you can please yourself about that, and it’s a point you’ll have to settle with your masters; but, if you want to please your dad, remember that I’d a da—jolly sight sooner see you head of your eleven than head of the school.’ That’s what I said; and I don’t believe, Mr. Headmaster, that you’ve got a finer little sportsman in your school than my youngster.”

Long before the discussion was over Mr. Flaggon realised that it had been a mistake and would only give the enemy cause to blaspheme. And he was not mistaken. Lady Bellingham was the joy of Common Room for weeks afterwards, and it was humorously assumed that she had made a convert of the headmaster. When a new chimney appeared on the Lodge, everybody said, “Flaggon is surrounding us with beautiful things”; when the rhododendrons at the far end of Colonus were thinned out, it was, “Flaggon is uncovering the great bosom of Nature.” And again, when a notice came round about the wearing of great-coats, somebody remarked that Flaggon was looking at education from the mothers’ point of view. Mr. Chowdler, who had not been present at the meeting, picked up all the best things and added them to his repertory. In fact there was a regular carnival of wit, and the wags had the time of their lives.

Only Mr. Bent affected to be agreeably surprised. “They were,” he said, “an unusually intelligent set of parents—quite unusually intelligent. Lady Bellingham, of course, talked an amazing lot of drivel; you would expect that from a woman. Still, she knows a great deal more than Chowdler does; for, though she can’t express herself rationally, she does realise in a vague way that beauty is a form of truth, and that education ought to mean something more than Balbus-built-a-wall and the off-theory. Even Mr.—I can’t remember his name—the stockbroker, has grasped what education is not; which is more than Chowdler ever has. They offered him an inferior substitute at the school where he spent his dazzling youth, and, with the intuition of genius, he divined that it was not worth his acceptance. And probably it wasn’t. And, then, the silent ones! How seldom you find four people in any given room who are wise enough to keep silence about a subject of which they know nothing. Whaley was the only really hopeless failure. Yes, they certainly were an unusually intelligent set of parents.”

“That’s all very well,” protested Mr. Plummer, “but if I had said so, you would have cursed me for my unreasoning optimism and made out that I was blinded by my infatuation for the middle classes.”

“Perhaps,” replied Mr. Bent airily, “perhaps. And very likely I should have been right.”