A Schoolmaster's Diary: Being Extracts from the Journal of Patrick Traherne, M.A., Sometime Assistant Master at Radchester and Marlton.Traherne, Patrick
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A Schoolmaster's Diary: Being Extracts from the Journal of Patrick Traherne, M.A., Sometime Assistant Master at Radchester and Marlton.
Traherne, Patrick
Traherne, Patrick, 1885-1917
In the first place it must be borne in mind that one great difference
in the attitude of this form to life in general in the future will be
caused by the fact that it will be a mixed class of boys and girls,
and will be recruited from all sections of the people, so that there
will be every chance of there being practically no divergence in
age, physique or intelligence between the top and bottom, to use the
existing phraseology, between A and Z, as they will then be placed.
The boys and girls will be permitted to get up as early in the morning
as they like, but not later than 7.30 in the summer months. Breakfast
will follow at once in different Houses, boys and girls sitting at
the same table as much mixed as possible, friend with friend. Chapel
for those who wish to go will follow, a service short, devotional,
sincere, containing a few personal prayers, a rousing well-known hymn
and a lesson of particular applicability not necessarily taken from
the Bible alone, but from any of the great masterpieces of the world.
Masters and mistresses who feel inspired to give a personal address
of not more than five minutes on any problem that may have been
occupying their minds may interpolate their sermonette in the place of
this lesson. This, the only service of the day, will not take longer
than twelve minutes. If the weather is fine most of the work of the
day will be done out of doors, some of it, such as the manual labour
classes, the digging, road-mending, gardening, will necessarily be so,
but in favourable circumstances the intellectual side of the curriculum
will be as far as possible carried out in the open air. If, however,
this is to-day impossible, the Latin hour will be conducted in a
classroom, where inspiring pictures, replicas of old masters and pieces
of sculpture will make an already bright, airy, cheerful, healthy
classroom still more so.
The master, mistress, girls and boys will all be dressed in those
clothes considered most sane and healthy from the eugenics point of
view; flannels and gymnastic dress will probably be most popular.
The Latin taught will certainly not be of the grammar-grind sort:
conversation will go on between girl and boy, others in the same class
will be constructing a Roman amphitheatre, or working out, on a sort of
_Daily Mail_ war board, a campaign of Pompey or Cæsar.
The life of a Roman citizen will be enacted and written about by the
classes: all the time the boys and girls will be doing the work; the
teacher only flitting about from group to group as his or her presence
is required, encouraging here, pointing out errors there, all the time
acting as any real teacher ought to act, that is, not foisting his or
her opinion on to the form but developing their own ideas on the lines
most desirable for them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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