schools

There's a touch of the priesthood in the academic world, a sense that a scholar should not be distracted by the mundane tasks of day-to-day living. I used to have great stretches of time to work. Now I have research thoughts while making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sure it's impossible to write down ideas while reading "curious George" to a two-year-old. On the other hand, as my husband was leaving graduate school for his first job, his thesis advisor told him, "You may wonder how a professor gets any research done when one has to teach, advise students, serve on committees, referee papers, write letters of recommendation, interview prospective faculty. Well, I take long showers."

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence.

To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don't pay the price, day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop and educated mind.

Yet with great toil all that I can attain By long experience, and in learned schools, Is for to know my knowledge is but vain, And those that think them wise, are greatest fools.

Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

"I cannot go to school today," Said little Peggy Ann McKay. "I have the measles and the mumps, A gash, a rash, and purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry, I'm going blind in my right eye. . . . . "What's that? What's that you say? You say today is . . . Saturday? G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

We learn not in the school, but in life.

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, - but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way.