Ryerson Memorial Volume: Prepared on the occasion of the unveiling of the Ryerson statute in the grounds of the Education department on the Queen's birthday, 1889Hodgins, J. George (John George)
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Ryerson Memorial Volume: Prepared on the occasion of the unveiling of the Ryerson statute in the grounds of the Education department on the Queen's birthday, 1889
Hodgins, J. George (John George)
Education -- Ontario; Ryerson, Egerton, 1803-1882
Then the recitation--what a scene of confusion and stripes, tears
and bellowings. Perhaps it was the column of spellings. A few,
fitted by nature with memories adapted for that kind of work, would
make their way in triumph to the head of the long semicircular
class. But woe, woe to the dullards and the dunces, under a regime
whose penalty for missing a word a foot and a half long would
be, very likely, two or three strokes on the tingling fingers or
aching palm with the pitiless hardwood ferule, this process being
occasionally varied as some noisy or idling youngster was called up
from a back seat to be visited with a still sterner chastisement
for some trifling misdemeanor.... The writer can recall instances
and experiences innumerable, the infliction being sometimes
accompanied with a caution to tell no tales at home under pain of
a worse infliction. In his own case he well remembers the wrath
of his father, who would have thought it wrong and encouraging
insubordination to listen to any complaints against the master,
when, on occasion of the victim of a tendency to juvenile pranks
being dangerously ill with scarlet fever, and that father being
called on by the doctor to annoint his back with some soothing
lotion, he found said back striped and checked with a network of
"black and blue." It is needless to add that at this point ended
both the writer's experience under that schoolmaster and the
schoolmaster's term of engagement in that district.
As a significant comment upon the moral effects of the regime of
the schoolmasters of the old school the writer may add that one of
his most vivid memories of the mental status produced by the school
training referred to is that of an intense longing for the day when
he should be large enough to repay that old schoolmaster in his
own coin. That day came. The flagellated boy, transformed into a
tolerably lusty youth, found himself face to face with his quondam
tormenter. But his long cherished wrath speedily gave place to pity
for the decrepit, friendless and lonely old bachelor, whose days
were drawing to a close, with no loving hand of wife or daughter to
minister to their feebleness.
THE PIONEER TEACHERS, AND THE TRIALS OF "BOARDING ROUND."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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