old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks
to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could
translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater
part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education,
another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under
pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and
a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school.
Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty
stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as
obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the
blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And
if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy
at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.




Schoolmasters of Genius

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for
"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I
have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is
being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all
as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near
Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils
with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill
commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music,