wift punishment. But I
wonder if Row has thought of the other side of the question; I wonder
if he has asked himself whether order and time-tables and obedience and
respect are really necessary. I should like to meet him and have a
chat; I think I should like him, and further, I think that I could
convert him to the other way . . . if he is under forty.

Ah! Horrid thought! Is it possible that Row is pulling our legs? No,
he writes as an honest man. Perhaps he knows all about the modern
movement; perhaps he has studied Montessori, Freud, Jung, Homer Lane,
Edmond Holmes, and found that they are all pathetically wrong. Mayhap
he has proved that the child _is_ a sinner.

"The young teacher should never address a boy by his Christian name or
nickname," he says.

Oh, surely he _is_ pulling our legs!

* * * * *

At intervals during the past few years I have been puzzled when people
congratulated me on my village school in Lancashire. I had quite a
number of misunderstandings on the subject. Then one day I discovered
that there was a village schoolmaster in Lancashire called E. F.
O'Neill. I wrote him telling him that I was coming to see his school,
and one July morning I alighted at one of the ugliest villages in the
world, and I walked past slag-heaps and all the horrors of
industrialism to a red building on the outskirts. Three or four boys
were digging in the school garden. I walked into the school, and two
seconds after entering I said to myself: "E. F. O'Neill, you are a
great man!"

There were no desks, and I could see no teacher. Half-a-dozen children
stood round a table weighing things and cutting things.

"What's this?" I asked.

"The shop," said a girl, and after a little time I grasped the idea.
You have paste-board coins, and you come to the shop and buy a pound of
butter (plasticene), two pounds of sugar (sand), and a bottle of
Yorkshire Relish (a brown mixture unrecognisable to me). You pay your
sovereign and the shop-keeper gives you the change, remarks on the
likelihood of the weather's keeping up and turns to the next customer.

I walked on and found a boy writing.

"Hullo, sonny, what are you on?"

"My novel," he said, and showed me the beginning of chapter XII.

A young man came forward, a slim youth with twinkling eyes.

"E. F. O'Neill?"

"A. S. Neill?"

We shook hands, and then he began to talk. I wanted to tell him that
his school was a pure de