They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and
capable of intellectual passion. They should be able to make their mark
outside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. As
things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's career as to do
that.
And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon what
we call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like an
entire absence of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, and
an unblemished record. Now, in these days, of warring opinion, these
days of gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed in
the formulae of the smaller times that have gone before, tact is
evasion, conformity formality, and silence an unblemished record, mere
evidence of the damning burial of a talent of life. The sort of man into
whose hands we give our sons' minds must never have experimented morally
or thought at all freely or vigorously about, for example, God,
Socialism, the Mosaic account of the Creation, social procedure,
Republicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed, about anything likely to
interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious
trick of the nice evasion.
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