Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/26

 a religious heretic and in my second year obtained a remission of the duty to attend chapel. It is perhaps worthy of mention that the earliest of my published writings consisted of two articles in the Westminster Review, dealing with religious topics, one entitled “Dr. Temple on Religion and Science” (discussing his heretical paper in Essays and Reviews), the other “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis.”

My education in the local Grammar School under a head master who hastened to shed the low title “Grammar,” and to convert the school into a public school, with a reputable body of boarders to qualify the “local” dependence, helped me to some further understanding of social-economic distinctions. For the head master was a persistent “snob” of the crudest order. A classical scholar with no taste for literature, he devoted his teaching energy into imposing the prestige of the dead languages upon as many boys as possible, irrespective of their tastes or aptitudes. Mathematics was taught with “scholarship” success to a little group of able boys, including my elder brother, afterwards a Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The natural sciences comprised a little chemistry, less physics, and virtually no biology. History was almost entirely English, stopped dead before modern politics began to emerge, and consisted only of the dramatic activities of kings and the ruling classes. A minimum of ancient history accompanied the classics. There was nowhere any attempt