"
This quotation is conclusive.
Sec. 3
I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing
against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing
against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed
upon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe,
could I put the thing directly to the profession--"Do you not yourselves
feel needlessly limited and dull?"--should receive a majority of
affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a
schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and
there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any wide
value can be done until that is done.
In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.
We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leaders
and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man of
intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases,
that he has done "good work," as they say--the sort of good work that is
usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing,
stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. We
must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of
insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good
novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in
theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor
things.
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