The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Edmond Holmes, a former inspector of schools, reported back to the Board of Education on a pioneering system being developed in Italy.
Edmond Holmes resigned from the Board of Education in 1911, after his trenchant critique of fellow Elementary school inspectors leaked out. He took the opportunity to visit Maria Montessori’s pioneering schools in Italy, and prepared a paper for the Board (his experience was still highly valued there) in which he urged them to lose no time in adopting her methods.
Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.
In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.
Inspired by an avid interest in English warrior heroes, the fifteen-year-old Guthlac recruited a band of freebooting militiamen.
As a boy, so his biographer Felix tells us, St Guthlac (673-714) had been a mild-mannered child, a credit to his pious and well-to-do parents Penwald and Tette. But when he was fifteen, Guthlac began to be fascinated by stories of warriors and heroes and deeds of arms, and soon it became apparent that they were having a very negative effect on the blithe and innocent boy.
St Pega welcomed a royal servant with a serious eye condition to the monastery founded by her brother, St Guthlac.
After the death of St Guthlac in 714, his sister St Pega was left in charge of his hermitage at Crowland in modern-day Lincolnshire. For many years, exiled Mercian prince Æthelbald had been a frequent guest, so when one of his servants developed an eye problem which had all the doctors baffled, Crowland was their first thought.
The villagers of Mabutso in Southern Africa begged Dr David Livingstone to rid them of a menacing pride of lions.
On February 16th, 1844, Scottish missionary David Livingstone was digging a water channel at his mission near the South African village of Mabotsa when the villagers rushed up, crying that lions had again raided their village and slaughtered their sheep and goats. Livingstone ‘very imprudently’ agreed to go with them and demoralise the pride by shooting one of the dominant males.
Diplomat William Eton warns his fellow Englishmen that shutting down debate does not make for a more united society.
In 1798, diplomat William Eton published some observations on life in the Ottoman Empire. He warned readers back home that no society can be made harmonious by silencing dissenting voices; in such societies loneliness, drug abuse and distrust spiral out of control, sneering passes for debate, and only fashionably coarse comedians are allowed to raise a laugh.