Dorothy listened. With admirable clarity, and with a cynicism that was all the more disgusting because it was utterly unconscious, Mrs. Creevy explained the technique of the dirty swindle that she called practical school-teaching.
“What you’re got to get hold of once and for all,” she began, “is that there’s only one thing that matters in a school, and that’s the fees. As for all this stuff about ‘developing the children’s minds,’ as you call it, it’s neither here nor there. It’s the fees I’m after, not developing the children’s minds. After all, it’s no more than common sense. It’s not to be supposed as anyone’d go to all the trouble of keeping school and having the house turned upside down by a pack of brats, if it wasn’t that there’s a bit of money to be made out of it. The fees come first, and everything else comes afterwards. Didn’t I tell you that the very first day you came here?”
“Yes,” admitted Dorothy humbly.
“Well, then, it’s the parents that pay the fees, and it’s the parents you’ve got to think about. Do what the parents want—that’s our rule here. I dare say all this messing about with plasticine and paper-scraps that you go in for doesn’t do the children any particular harm; but the parents don’t want it, and there’s an end of it. Well, there’s just two subjects that they do want their children taught, and that’s handwriting and arithmetic. Especially handwriting. That’s something they can see the sense of. And so handwriting’s the thing you’ve got to keep on and on at. Plenty of nice neat copies that the girls can take home, and that the parents’ll show off to the neighbours and give us a bit of a free advert. I want you to give the children two hours a day just at handwriting and nothing else.”
“Two hours a day just at handwriting” repeated Dorothy obediently.
“Yes. And plenty of arithmetic as well. The parents are very keen on arithmetic: especially money-sums. Keep your eye on the parents all the time. If you meet one of them in the street, get hold of them and start talking to them about their own girl. Make out that she’s the best girl in the class and that if she stays just three terms longer she’ll be working wonders. You see what I mean? Don’t go and tell them there’s no room for improvement; because if you tell them that, they generally take their girls away. Just three terms longer—that’s the thing to tell them. And when you make out the end of term reports, just you bring them to me and let me have a good look at them. I like to do the marking myself.”
Mrs. Creevy’s eye met Dorothy’s. She had perhaps been about to say that she always arranged the marks so that every girl came out somewhere near the top of the class; but she refrained. Dorothy could not answer for a moment. Outwardly she was subdued, and very pale, but in her heart were anger and deadly repulsion against which she had to struggle before she could speak. She had no thought, however, of contradicting Mrs. Creevy. The “talking to” had quite broken her spirit. She mastered her voice, and said:
“I’m to teach nothing but handwriting and arithmetic—is that it?”
“Well, I didn’t say that exactly. There’s plenty of other subjects that look well on the prospectus. French, for instance—French looks very well on the prospectus. But it’s not a subject you want to waste much time over. Don’t go filling them up with a lot of grammar and syntax and verbs and all that. That kind of stuff doesn’t get them anywhere so far as I can see. Give them a bit of Parley vous Francey, and Passey moi le beurre, and so forth; that’s a lot more use than grammar. And then there’s Latin—I always put Latin on the prospectus. But I don’t suppose you’re very great on Latin, are you?”
“No,” admitted Dorothy.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. You won’t have to teach it. None of our parents’d want their children to waste time over Latin. But they like to see it on the prospectus. It looks classy. Of course there’s a whole lot of subjects that we can’t actually teach, but we have to advertise them all the same. Book-keeping and typing and shorthand, for instance; besides music and dancing. It all looks well on the prospectus.”
“Arithmetic, handwriting, French—is there anything else?” Dorothy said.
“Oh, well, history and geography and English Literature, of course. But just drop that map-making business at once—it’s nothing but waste of time. The best geography to teach children is lists of capitals. Get them so that they can rattle off the capitals of all the English counties as if it was the multiplication table. Then they’ve got something to show for what they’ve learnt, anyway. And as for history, keep on with the Hundred Page History of Britain. I won’t have them taught out of those big history books you keep bringing home from the library. I opened one of those books the other day, and the first thing I saw was a piece where it said the English had been beaten in some battle or other. There’s a nice thing to go teaching children! The parents won’t stand for that kind of thing, I can tell you!”
“And Literature?” said Dorothy.
“Well, of course they’ve got to do a bit of reading, and I can’t think why you wanted to turn up your nose at those nice little readers of ours. Keep on with the readers. They’re a bit old, but they’re quite good enough for a pack of children, I should have thought. And I suppose they might as well learn a few pieces of poetry by heart. Some of the parents like to hear their children say a piece of poetry. ‘The Boy stood on the Burning Deck’—that’s a very good piece—and then there’s ‘The Wreck of the Steamer’—now, what was that ship called? ‘The Wreck of the Steamer Hesperus.’ A little poetry doesn’t hurt now and again. But don’t let’s have any more Shakespeare, please!”
Dorothy got no tea that day. It was now long past tea-time, but when Mrs. Creevy had finished her harangue she sent Dorothy away without saying anything about tea. Perhaps this was a little extra punishment for l’affaire Macbeth.
Dorothy had not asked permission to go out, but she did not feel that she could stay in the house any longer. She got her hat and coat and set out down the ill-lit road, for the public library. It was late into November. Though the day had been damp the night wind blew sharply, like a threat, through the almost naked trees, making the gas-lamps flicker in spite of their glass chimneys, and stirring the sodden plane leaves that littered the pavement. Dorothy shivered slightly. The raw wind sent through her a bone-deep memory of the cold of Trafalgar Square. And though she did not actually think that if she lost her job it would mean going back to the subworld from which she had come—indeed, it was not so desperate as that; at the worst her cousin or somebody else would help her—still, Mrs. Creevy’s “talking to” had made Trafalgar Square seem suddenly very much nearer. It had driven into her a far deeper understanding than she had had before of the great modern commandment—the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: “Thou shalt not lose thy job.”
But as to what Mrs. Creevy had said about “practical school-teaching,” it had been no more than a realistic facing of the facts. She had merely said aloud what most people in her position think but never say. Her oft-repeated phrase, “It’s the fees I’m after,” was a motto that might be—indeed, ought to be—written over the doors of every private school in England.
There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. Second-rate, third-rate and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection. And though some of them are better than others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is, that they have ultimately no purpose except to make money. Often, except that there is nothing illegal about them, they are started in exactly the same spirit as one would start a brothel or a bucket shop. Some snuffy little man of business (it is quite usual for these schools to be owned by people who don’t teach themselves) says one morning to his wife:
“Emma, I got a notion! What you say to us two keeping school, eh? There’s plenty of cash in a school, you know, and there ain’t the same