girls,” said Mrs. Creevy, “this is your new teacher, Miss Millborough. As you know, Miss Strong had to leave us all of a sudden after she was taken so bad in the middle of the arithmetic lesson; and I can tell you I’ve had a hard week of it looking for a new teacher. I had seventy-three applications before I took on Miss Millborough, and I had to refuse them all because their qualifications weren’t high enough. Just you remember and tell your parents that, all of you—seventy-three applications! Well, Miss Millborough is going to take you in Latin, French, history, geography, mathematics, English literature and composition, spelling, grammar, handwriting and freehand drawing; and Mr. Booth will take you in chemistry as usual on Thursday afternoons. Now, what’s the first lesson on your time-table this morning?”
“History, Ma’am,” piped one or two voices.
“Very well. I expect Miss Millborough’ll start off by asking you a few questions about the history you’ve been learning. So just you do your best, all of you, and let her see that all the trouble we’ve taken over you hasn’t been wasted. You’ll find they can be quite a sharp lot of girls when they try, Miss Millborough.”
“I’m sure they are,” said Dorothy.
“Well, I’ll be leaving you, then. And just you behave yourselves, girls! Don’t you get trying it on with Miss Millborough like you did with Miss Brewer, because I warn you she won’t stand it. If I hear any noise coming from this room, there’ll be trouble for somebody.”
She gave a glance round which included Dorothy and indeed suggested that Dorothy would probably be the “somebody” referred to, and departed.
Dorothy faced the class. She was not afraid of them—she was too used to dealing with children ever to be afraid of them—but she did feel a momentary qualm. The sense of being an impostor (what teacher has not felt it at times?) was heavy upon her. It suddenly occurred to her, what she had only been dimly aware of before, that she had taken this teaching job under flagrantly false pretences, without having any kind of qualification for it. The subject she was now supposed to be teaching was history, and, like most “educated” people, she knew virtually no history. How awful, she thought, if it turned out that these girls knew more history than she did! She said tentatively:
“What period exactly were you doing with Miss Strong?”
Nobody answered. Dorothy saw the older girls exchanging glances, as though asking one another whether it was safe to say anything, and finally deciding not to commit themselves.
“Well, whereabouts had you got to?” she said, wondering whether perhaps the word “period” was too much for them.
Again no answer.
“Well, now, surely you remember something about it? Tell me the names of some of the people you were learning about in your last history lesson.”
More glances were exchanged, and a very plain little girl in the front row, in a brown jumper and skirt, with her hair screwed into two tight pigtails, remarked cloudily, “It was about the Ancient Britons.” At this two other girls took courage, and answered simultaneously. One of them said “Columbus,” and the other “Napoleon.”
Somehow, after that, Dorothy seemed to see her way more clearly. It was obvious that instead of being uncomfortably knowledgeable as she had feared, the class knew as nearly as possible no history at all. With this discovery her stage-fright vanished. She grasped that before she could do anything else with them it was necessary to find out what, if anything, these children knew. So, instead of following the time-table, she spent the rest of the morning in questioning the entire class on each subject in turn; when she had finished with history (and it took about five minutes to get to the bottom of their historical knowledge) she tried them with geography, with English grammar, with French, with arithmetic—with everything, in fact, that they were supposed to have learned. By twelve o’clock she had plumbed, though not actually explored, the frightful abysses of their ignorance.
For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing, like the Dadaists. It was appalling that even children could be so ignorant. There were only two girls in the class who knew whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth, and not a single one of them could tell Dorothy who was the last king before George V, or who wrote Hamlet, or what was meant by a vulgar fraction, or which ocean you crossed to get to America, the Atlantic or the Pacific. And the big girls of fifteen were not much better than the tiny infants of eight, except that the former could at least read consecutively and write neat copperplate. That was the one thing that nearly all of the older girls could do—they could write neatly. Mrs. Creevy had seen to that. And of course, here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small, disconnected islets of knowledge; for example, some odd stanzas from “pieces of poetry” that they had learned by heart, and a few Ollendorffian French sentences such as “Passez-moi le beurre, s’il vous plaît” and “Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau,” which they appeared to have learned as a parrot learns “Pretty Poll.” As for their arithmetic, it was a little better than the other subjects. Most of them knew how to add and subtract, about half of them had some notion of how to multiply, and there were even three or four who had struggled as far as long division. But that was the utmost limit of their knowledge; and beyond, in every direction, lay utter, impenetrable night.
Moreover, not only did they know nothing, but they were so unused to being questioned that it was often difficult to get answers out of them at all. It was obvious that whatever they knew they had learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves. However, they did not seem unwilling, and evidently they had made up their minds to be “good”—children are always “good” with a new teacher; and Dorothy persisted, and by degrees the children grew, or seemed to grow, a shade less lumpish. She began to pick up, from the answers they gave her, a fairly accurate notion of what Miss Strong’s régime had been like.
It appeared that, though theoretically they had learned all the usual school subjects, the only ones that had been at all seriously taught were handwriting and arithmetic. Mrs. Creevy was particularly keen on handwriting. And besides this they had spent great quantities of time—an hour or two out of every day, it seemed—in drudging through a dreadful routine called “copies.” “Copies” meant copying things out of text-books or off the blackboard. Miss Strong would write up, for example, some sententious little “essay” (there was an essay entitled “Spring” which recurred in all the older girls’ books, and which began, “Now, when girlish April is tripping through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds,” etc., etc.), and the girls would make fair copies of it in their copybooks; and the parents, to whom the copybooks were shown from time to time, were no doubt suitably impressed. Dorothy began to grasp that everything that the girls had been taught was in reality aimed at the parents. Hence the “copies,” the insistence on handwriting, and the parroting of ready-made French phrases; they were cheap and easy ways of creating an impression. Meanwhile, the little girls at the bottom of the class seemed barely able to read and write, and one of them—her name was Mavis Williams, and she was a rather sinister-looking child of eleven, with eyes too far apart—could not even count. This child seemed to have done nothing at all during the past term and a half except to write pothooks. She had quite a pile of books filled with pothooks—page after page of pothooks, looping on and on like the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.
Dorothy tried not to hurt the children’s feelings by exclaiming at their ignorance, but in her heart she was amazed and horrified. She had not known that schools of this description still existed in the civilised world. The whole atmosphere of the place was so curiously antiquated—so reminiscent of those dreary little private schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few text-books that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid-nineteenth century. There were only three text-books of which each child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre-War but fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The Hundred Page History of Britain—a nasty little duodecimo book with a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait