His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he
had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to
swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent
gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life,
but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can
never tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to
teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if
he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a
mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but
morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex
still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or
denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the
pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists,
plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite
of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either
to be taught as such -- or falsified.
Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order
to publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less
compel his students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the
Venerable Bede by heart.
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