How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from the
decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be
lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondary
schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous
and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is,
converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of
positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his
rule of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate
truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to
cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual
consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, he
hates and dreads it. I find him perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear
that boys will "do something," and in his terror seeking whatever is
dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, clipping their
reading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating their classics,
substituting the stupid grind of organised "games" for natural,
imaginative play, persecuting loafers--and so achieving his end and
turning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, apathetic,
obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark of
initiative at all, quite safe not to "do anything" for ever.
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