A Dominie Dismissed. Alexander Sutherland Neill
all about my presence after that; in the old days they used to talk to each other as if I weren't there. Once they discussed likely sweethearts in the village for me, and I am sure they forgot that I was there.
"He's nice to the lassies, Ellen," said Jean, "but not to the boys."
"What did he strap Jim Jackson for?" asked Ellen.
"Aw dinna ken," said Janet, "but he was needin' the strap. Jim Jackson's a cheeky wee thing."
"Eh!" said Jean, "haven't we to sit awful quiet, Jan?"
"Weel," said Janet nodding her head sagely, "and so ye shud sit quiet in the schule. Ye'll no be learning yer lessons if ye speak."
I went on sketching.
Janet is already being Macdonaldised. She accepts his authority without question. Ellen and Jean are critical as yet, but in a week both will have adapted themselves to the machine.
They wandered off to pluck flowers. I finished my sketch and hailed them. Then they came to me and took my arms and we took the cows home.
In the evening I was mucking out the byre when Jim Jackson came for his milk.
"Good morrow, sir," I called from the byre door, "you didn't happen to see Mr. Thomson's elephant as you came up the road?"
He looked interested.
"Elephant?" he asked brightly.
"Yes. The white one; strayed away this afternoon from the chicken coop. Have you seen it?"
"No," he said, "not the white one, but the grey one and the tiger are sitting at the dyke-side down at the second gate. I gave the tiger a turnip when I passed it."
"Good!" I cried, "always be kind to animals."
"Yes, sir," he said, and he glanced down to the second gate. I think that he wouldn't have been very much surprised if he had seen a tiger there. Jim has the power of make-believe developed strongly. A few weeks ago he found a dead sparrow in the playground. He came to me and asked for a coffin. I gave him a match-box and he lined the class up in twos and led them with bared heads towards the grave he had dug. The four foremost boys carried the coffin shoulder high.
Jim laid ropes over the grave and the coffin was lowered reverently. A boy was just about to fill in the grave when Jim cried: "Hold on!" Then he took a handful of earth and sprinkled it over the coffin saying: "Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes."
I blew the Last Post over the grave afterwards. Jim was as serious as could be; for the moment he seemed to think that he was burying his brother.
When he had got his milk he came to the byre door and watched me work for a little.
"Please, sir," he asked, "do you like that better than teaching?"
I told him that I didn't.
"I wish Mester Macdonald wud be a cattleman," he said fervently.
"Some folk might say that he is," I remarked.
"He gave me my licks the first mornin' he cam," he continued. "We got an essay 'How I spent my holidays,' and I said that I was in France and helped the Crown Prince to loot places. We quarrelled about how much we should get each and I shot him. The Mester gave me three scuds for tellin' lies."
"He would," I said grimly.
"But you used to tell me to tell lies!" he cried.
"I did, Jim. And you see the result. … I muck out a byre."
When Jim went away I came to a sudden resolution: I would fight for Jim. I'll do all in my power to help the lad to preserve his own personality. … Frank Thomson is his uncle and I'll try to get Jim to see me often. Professional etiquette! Professional etiquette be damned! I'm not in the profession now anyhow, and all the professional etiquette in the world is as nothing to the saving of a soul.
* * *
I find that I enjoy my food now. Formerly I looked on a meal as an appetiser for a smoke; now I look on a meal as an event. I feel healthier than I ever did in my life before. The land dulls one, however. The old cry "Back to the Land" means "Back to Elemental Mental Stagnation." I spent this forenoon cutting turnips, and I know that I thought of nothing all the time. I have a theory that great thoughts are the product of disease. Possibly this is only another way of saying that genius is allied to madness. Shelley was a physical weakling; Ibsen and Nietzsche went mad. Yes, geniuses are diseased folk, but the converse does not hold.
Macdonald came up to see me to-night; he wanted to ask a few things about the school. We lay on a bank and lit our pipes.
"I can't find your 'Record of Work,'" he said.
"I never kept one."
"But … the Code demands one!"
"I know … but I didn't keep one. My record of work is my pupils in after life."
"Yes," he said drily, "I know all about that, but you are supposed to keep a record that will show an inspector what you are doing to produce this after life record."
"Macdonald," I said impatiently, "if you mean to tell me that any man can tell what I am doing to prepare children for after life by squinting at a crowd of entries of the Took-the-History-of-the-Great-Rebellion-this-week order … well, I don't understand your attitude to life in general."
"That's all very well," he protested, "but we aren't there to make the rules; we're paid servants who have to administer the laws of wiser men."
"How do you know that they are wiser?" I asked.
"They're wiser than I am anyway," he said with a smile.
"I'm not so sure of it, Macdonald; they are more unscrupulous than you are. They know what they want, definitely and finally; they want efficient wage-slaves."
"That's merely a Socialistic cry."
"It may be, but it's true. Who rule us? A definite governing class of trained aristocrats."
"H'm! I shouldn't call Lloyd George and that Labour man Hodge trained aristocrats."
"They aren't born aristocrats I admit, but they are aristocratised democrats. They've adapted themselves to the aristocratic tradition. They are on the side of aristocracy; you won't find them alienating the good opinion of the moneyed classes. We are governed from above; do you admit that?"
"In the main … yes," he said grudgingly.
"Very good! Well, then, our rulers believe in two kinds of education. They send their sons to the public schools where boys are trained to be governors, but they send the rest of the sons of the community to State schools where they are trained to be disciplined and content with their lot."
"That's nonsense."
"Possibly, but I suppose you know that the members of the House of Lords and the Cabinet don't send their sons to L.C.C. schools."
"You are simply preaching class war," he said.
"I am. There is a class war—there has been for generations—but it is a one-sided war."
"It is," said Macdonald grimly.
"The upper class took the offensive long ago, and it keeps it yet. Look at the squire down in the village. He won't ride in the same railway compartment with you or me; he won't sit beside us in the theatre … why, he won't lie beside us in the kirkyard: he's got that railed-off corner for his family. I don't blame him; he has been educated up in his belief, just as you and I have been educated up in the belief that we are his inferiors. When I was down in the school I lectured the whole class one day because I saw a boy doff his cap to the squire and nod to his mother three seconds afterwards.
"Don't you see that this village is a little British Empire? Here there are only two classes—the big house and the village … the ruling class and the ruled. The school trains the ruled to be ruled, and the