The Goose-step: A Study of American Education — John Shaqi
The Goose-step: A Study of American EducationSinclair, Upton
History
The Goose-step: A Study of American Education
Sinclair, Upton
Education -- United States; Universities and colleges -- United States
And then the professor of Latin; he also was a terror, though his
whiskers were brown. He was a prominent Catholic propagandist, editor of
“The Catholic Encyclopedia,” and conceived a dislike for me because I
refused to believe things just because they were told me. I can see this
old gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims:
“Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!” Five hours a week for
five years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I
read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could
read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. I
look at a page of the language, and the words are as familiar to me as
my own English, but I don’t know what they mean, unless they happen to
be the same as the English.
And then the professor of chemistry; an extremely irascible old
gentleman with only one arm. There was a rumor to the effect that he had
lost the other through the misbehavior of chemicals, but I never
investigated the matter. I learned that chemistry consists of mixing
liquids in test-tubes, and seeing that various colored “precipitates”
result. After you do this you write down formulas, showing that a part
of one chemical has got switched over to the other chemical; but why
these things happen, or how anybody knows that they happen, was
something entirely beyond my comprehension, and which neither the
professor of chemistry nor his three assistants ever explained to any
member of my class. My most vivid recollection of this class has to do
with the close of the hour, when a group of us would gather with our
various test-tubes, and each put up a nickel, and guess a color; then we
would mix the contents of the tubes in one big tube, and shake them up,
and the fellow who guessed the right color won the “pot.”
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