Let us drop a tear over the dominie, who in the last generation or two has been vanishing from the world of fact. His place is now taken by Normal-school teachers of both sexes, well-trained, well-inspected, and less ill-paid than their predecessors. Every young Scot gets such mouthful of learning as can be crammed into him; but, to copy Johnson’s coarse metaphor, I am not sure that there were not better bellyfuls going under the old dispensation of scholarship. With all his faults, of which whisky was apt to be the worst, the snuffy dominie had sometimes the knack of turning out silk purses among sows’ ears, and with the most imperfect tools. The general run of his pupils perhaps profited most by being kept out of mischief, wholesomely hardened to chastisement, and awed by the mysteries of Effectual Calling, while the choicer natures had their chance to be brought into touch with an inspiring example that showed them the way to learning, a more important course of education than the cleverness of teaching which goes to load the minds of a whole class with not always fruitful instruction.
And those rude schools of old days had this educational advantage, that the minister’s bairn, and even the laird’s, might tumble and quarrel with the cottar’s, picking up the local vernacular and accent, but little more harm at an age when all sons of Adam are in the savage state of development, not easily inoculated with the curse of snobbery that sets classes apart, barred from the kindly intercourse of the older generations, among whom gentle and simple knew their place too well for troublesome presumption or uneasy stand-offishness. The parish school at least was a little republic, tempered sometimes, indeed, by grudges of favouritism on the part of its president. While English squires and parsons still looked suspiciously on the three R’s for peasants, barefooted Scottish laddies, sometimes lassies, would tackle Latin, even Greek, under the village dominie, who sent forth some of his pupils into the world equipped at least with a turn of mind and a stirred ambition that put them at advantage wherever they went. But now they go out into a new world, in which man may not be so much master of his own fate. What self-help could do for him is, it seems, to be done rather by the State, conceived of as a national Trades Union, which need not consider the chance of national bankruptcy in providing for the general welfare. The very virtues that winged a prosperous career--thrift, industry, enterprise, force of character--become suspected for vices in the interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers, who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.