Labor Day does double duty in childful households of being the last day of summer vacation, the day before the first full day of school. In past years I've marked the occasion with an apposite quotation in memory of Grandmother Laquedem, who carried her support for the working classes to the point of dying on Labor Day itself, some years ago. (Cigarettes, rather than protest songs, were the actual culprit.)
This year, instead, I offer a passage from A.P. Herbert's essay, "What is Education?" As with many of his essays, it's in the form of a judicial opinion set in the 1930s. Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs, operators of two cargo boats on the canals between Birmingham and London, have been charged with not sending their children to elementary school, and in their defense they ask the question, "What is elementary education?" as defined in the Education Acts of Great Britain. The government asks the court to say that elementary education is "education in those elementary subjects which are ordinarily taught to our defenceless children, as reading, writing, and arithmetic." Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs argue that "elementary education" means education in "the elements or first parts to be learned of any subject which may be useful or necessary to the good citizen in that state of life for which he is destined by Providence, heredity, or inclination." The court describes the education of the Bloggs children as follows:
Now, the children of Mr. Bloggs, though they have not attended a school, have already acquired the rudiments of their father's and grandfather's trade, that is to say, the handling of boats and the navigation of canals; they are able in an emergency to steer a boat into a lock, to open or close a lock-gate, to make bowlines and reef-knots, clove hitches and fisherman's bends, and to do many other useful and difficult things which the members of this Court, we admit, are unable to do. Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs are instructing them slowly in reading and writing, and even, with reluctance, it seems, in arithmetic. It is not contended that in these subjects they are so far advanced as children of the same age who attend the public elementary schools; on the other hand, the evidence is that those children are quire unable to make a bowline-on-a-bight, to distinguish between the port and starboard sides of a vessel, or to steer the smallest boat into the largest lock without disaster.
As to what the Bloggs children cannot do, the court says:
They are unable, it is true, to read fluently the accounts of murder trials in the Sunday newspapers; they cannot write their names upon the walls of lavatories and public monuments; they do not understand the calculation of odds or the fluctuations of stocks and shares. But these acquirements may come in time. * * * As for writing, there is too much writing in our country as it is; and it is a satisfaction to contemplate three children who in all probability will never become novelists nor write for the papers.