By Cloudesley Brereton

Education Foundations January 1909

Our grammar school was but lately re-opened. The town itself was a peculiar one, wholly given up to the making of 'brass.' To such worshippers of the brazen image, Latin was but a stumbling block and literature foolish. Learning was worth what it would fetch. Money was the measure all things. Mind, spirit and character were things to be ignored because they could not be counted on the price list of mammon. So these parents were constantly demanding their boys should learn telegraphy instead of physics, bookkeeping instead of arithmetic, shorthand instead of essay writing.  Parents making a thousand, eighteen hundred, two thousand dollars a year, sent their boys to the higher school board and then on to us for a year to be 'finished.'

It was natural here that the boys asked me why it was worth while to learn Latin. I felt forced to ask myself the reason why. Why had I toiled through all the dry waste of grammar on to understanding faintly and more fully the spirit of the ancient classics when these boys could scarcely hope to reach that promised land? It teaches one to think! No finer mental exercise can be imagined, with the exception of Euclid.

There are some delightful boys to teach. They are like sponges, they absorb and retain all you say, you absolutely feel arid at times, for they have exhausted all your conundrums. If the sponges were only original. If they only could distil something of their own.

I felt more and more that cross examination on the Socratic method was more important than mere lecturing with a view to imparting knowledge.

I began more and more to comprehend the real pleasure of teaching, the sensation of contentment and rest after a hard day's work, when one feels conscious of having taught something or done something, a kind of sensation. All this is apart from the keen pleasure that arises when the whole form seem to hang on your lips. But the chief pleasure of all is to feel that by searching cross examination you have built up in the mind of some great duffer a fairly clear idea, or better still leavened him with  the hope that he has learned something and can learn something more.

Another important fact that was brought home to me was the necessity of absolute clearness on the part of the teacher; as all knowledge has to come through him it is necessary that he, as medium, should be as clear as possible. One is therefore obliged to analyze one's own knowledge and explain everything adequately to one's self before one can hope that the boy will understand. To shelter oneself behind the wording of the book and punish the boy because he cannot take in what you have taken in only in a slovenly manner yourself is to punish the boy for your own shortcomings.

Editor's Note (A former teacher turned domestic science specialist, Brereton decided to work for the private sector, the gas industry, ...