The Doings of David and Peter

VI  THE WORLD OF SCHOOL

It was with immense reluctance that I delivered David at the door of an Infants!School, and returned home without him. 

For months before hand, the subject of his education had been of prime importance; I had discussed it with friends and relations, Ii had studied it in text books with the result that [ was completely unable to form any conclusion from the contradictory data that I had accumulated. 

The seething indictments of state education in the works of such revolutionaries as Dora Russell and A. S. Neill were certainly — backed up by the horrified protests of more well-to-do relatives, to i whom the term “council school” immediately suggested slums, bad language and vermin. But what were these against the first-hand evidence of neighbouring mothers who, one by one, had sent their sons to the nearest Infants' School, with no apparent contamination of mind, language or body, and a noticeable improvement in happiness? 

With a worried mind, I hung over railings at play-time, trying to gauge the schools from the outside, and when I fled in horror from a state teacher whom I overheard confiding: "Neow, what I always say is ... " I found little to reassure me among the teachers of the few private schools. 

"Miss X" enquired a single friend. “Oh, she has a charming little school, dear. I'm sure your boys would be happy there. What qualifications has she? I don't know, dear. She never went to college, of course, or anything like that -- but does that matter with the tiny ones? She is so sweet with them, and they would be with such nice children." 

Somehow it seemed to me that it did matter, and I was secretly comfortable in my mind as to our welcome in such a select circle. Could my boys possibly be described as “such nice children"? David, at his saintliest, perhaps, but Peter, incorrigible urchin, with his loud voice and blatant discussion of physical functions? Never. 

There seemed no choice, so, feeling that,I had let down the whole cause of free and intelligent education, I set off for the despised Infants' School, and after an interview with an unexpectedly charming and gracious Head, left David in her keeping. 

With heart beating in nervous anticipation, I waited for him at twelve Would he have found it unbearable, poor babe, left on his own for the first time, subject to that discipline against which the moderns so raged? 

David, emerging, smiled at me placidly, took my hand and accompanied me silently home. To a few leading questions he gave none committal answers, and when somewhat tactlessly pressed for an explanation, said, with emphasis: 

"I cant tell  ~ I can't tell anything at all." 

This attitude he stoutly maintained, and I, knowing his reticence of old, ceased from even leading questions, and picked up such scraps as he let fell about the strange doings inside his prison. Such casual scraps they were! A Bible story mentioning Peter and Andrew drew the comment: 

"We heard about them at school.” 

A nursery rhyme brought an even more cryptic remark:

 "I've done Little Miss Muffet now, and I'm starting on Simple Simon." 

Painfully, I tried to piece up the bits, but they made a senseless patchwork. 

A term passed, and day by day Peter trailed round the house after me, chanting:

 “What'll we do now?” And, as soon as it was finished: "And what'll we do next?" 

The engines, the building bricks, with which he and David had passed hours together, were ignored, and any suggestion of them was met with the definite statement: - "I can't play at buildings, No. I can't play with my engine." 

Nothing could he do alone but draw or paint, and I found myself with a permanent under~housemaid or kitchen-maid. In the kitchen he proved a competent cook, but it seemed scarcely the most amusing occupation for a four-year-old. 

The holidays came, and railways came into their own again, but, David once more back at school, the problem became just as acute, and with amazement we faced the fact that, though we had clung to David up to the last minute the law would allow, we must, for his own good, part with Peter nearly a year too soon. Tentatively we suggested that he might like to go with David, and enthusiastically he received the suggestion. 

If I had been worried about David, I was more apprehensive about Peter, still fat and chubby and so very much a baby. But Peter needed no one to worry about him. Holding firmly to David's hand, he came beaming out at twelve o'clock and, transferring his warm clutch to mine, began at once:

 "I drawed a picture." 

Now, at last, I was to-know the inner mysteries, and I held my breath while he chattered on. Out it came, in Peter's cheerful, conversational way:

 "I drawed Miss Muffet, but I couldn't do the spider properly, cos she hadn't got a brown for it. It ought to have been woolly brown, but there was only a reddish sort of a brown.”

 "Did the teacher think you had made a nice picture?” I asked, and David answered for him, in his off-hand way: 

"She said it was quite good.” 

Then, suddenly, feeling that Peter had made confidence possible, he told me of his own drawing too. 

From that day, Peter took to it like a duck to the water, and every day had something new to tell, and by force of the attention he so drew on himself, made David anxious to share the telling. It became a duel at times which was almost impossible to disentangle, but in which Peter always won, not only because he had the louder voice, but because of his invincible persistence. Faced with a competitor, he continued steadily with his own account, merely getting louder and louder, while David struggled  vainly to interrupt, beginning again and again, and pleading: 

"Make Peter stop. I can't tell properly when he's talking." 

"I can't stop,” was the calm reply, "'cos I haven't finished." And Peter's narrative went on.

Even in the early morning, there uprose sounds of song, and Peter could be heard chanting interminably: “Great A, little a, bouncing B, The cat's in the cupboard and she can’t see me." 

As I helped with buttonsI sang it too, and asked:

”What’s that? I haven’t heard it before.”

David, intent on his braces, shrugged a shoulder. 

“We often play that at school,” he remarked, and left it at that, seeming to think it quite sufficient explanation of something he had apparently played many times in a term and a half. Peter, with one week's experience stopped his dressing to demonstrate with fat arms the action for "Great A" and “little a", “bounced” realistically for B, and told, quite lucidly, how one child was the cat and of the chasing game at the end. David continued his dressing and remarked, when he finished:

 "Oh, yes, we often do that." 

Much the same happened when, on his first Friday, Peter came excitedly running out to confide: 

“We just sung ‘Now the day is over’. I know that ‘cos you sing it at bedtime sometimes."

David smiled a gentle acquiescence. 

“We always sing it at the end on Fridays," he confirmed, a fact which he had not thought worthy of comment before, though the hymn had been a cradle-song since their babyhood.

So too, we came to know more of David's actual lessons. Before many days were past, Peter was showing off the phonetic sounds of the letters, making strange burring and clicking sounds with immense pride, Perhaps our admiration was a little noticeable, for David suddenly threw off his reticence and, standing up, recited the entire phonetic alphabet in one breathless rush. 

"I know all those,” he said at the end, simply. "That's why I'm doing nursery rhymes now." 

Day by day, Peter brings home a fresh story of accomplishments, and day by day he draws Devid out of his reticence by the sheer necessity of suppressing this altogether too bouncy brother. Clear-cut and vivid are the pictures that Peter gives, for Peter can “see” what he did when away from school and finds it easy to describe the picture in his mind. Muddled, breathless and incoherent come David's painfully built-up explanations, as he fumbles for the accurate phrase, the telling word, as he stops short at any interruption, put out of his stride so much that he must begin all over again, harassed and sometimes reduced to tears when Peter calmly begins a fresh narrative as his reaches its climax. Out of it all I am piecing the world of school, and, as I have done time and again since they were born, and shall, if I am to be of any use, continuously do throughout their lives, I am sifting and discarding my text-book theories and trying to make my own first-hand conclusions on the difficult problem of education.