The very model of an English schoolmaster

I got my hands on a very interesting book, “Letters to Schoolmasters” by one F.W. Felkin, who, it seems, had had a very long career as a teacher, and somewhere in the 1930s published this book. Each chapter is a letter to a different type of teacher: the headmaster, the new master, the subject teachers, etc. It’s exactly the sort of stuffy pomposity that you would expect from an old schoolmaster in the 30s.

He opines:

“Some Headmasters, when a complaint is preferred against a boy by a master or against a master by a parent, feel an instinctive desire to find the master in the wrong. The desire should not be instinctive; it should be forced from the Headmaster by sheer justice and his more instant desire should be to back his colleague. The discipline of such Headmasters is usually bad: it is founded on some hazy notion of love for the boys, whereas a schoolmaster’s love should be that high form of love which we usually call justice.”

I love the “hazy notion of love for the boys”! You wouldn’t want a teacher to be fond of the pupils, that’s just namby-pamby and beyond the pale, frankly!

He also offers this opinion about the newfangled tendency for accepting foreign pupils:

“A dangerous stunt, with special temptation for Headmasters of newspaper reputation, is the international one. Foreign teachers and boys have much to learn from us, but we have little to learn from them and that little is better left unlearnt. …Of course our public schoolboy has his vices, but they are not the continental ones which emasculate.”

Appalling, isn’t it, how continental sins just seep into decent public schools, infecting good English boys with their foreign ways.

…Wouldn’t you love to have this teacher at your school? In role-play, the teacher characters are often quite stuffy and pompous, but they have a lot to learn from this guy.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a little glimpse into F.W. Felkin’s attitude to discipline.