I was never taught at school.
Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty
stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as
obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the
blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And
if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy
at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.

Schoolmasters of Genius

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for
"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I
have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is
being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all
as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near
Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils
with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill
commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music,
live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their
several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated
living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music
for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques
Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants,
knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so
or else break his heart (not somebody else's, observe), yet his school
is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims "Oh, why was I
not taught like this!" and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves
as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors
to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start
off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever
Monsieur Daleroze calls out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about these
wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of,
and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but
adore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris
and Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from
thi