Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/144

 104 dressed a little better than they were, was none other than the village schoolmaster. Surprised to find that there was even a pretence of education in this remote place, and knowing, as I did, the indispensable services which a village schoolmaster renders in an English village, I straightway hastened to find out all I could from him concerning his functions and his view of life in general. I found that he had studied at a middle school or gymnasium, but not having had facilities for going to the only university in Siberia, that at Tomsk, he was compelled to seek a living by becoming a village schoolmaster in this remote comer of civilization. His only task consisted of teaching or trying to teach thirty children, in a village of over 1000 inhabitants, how to read and write the elements of their mother tongue. He admitted that the task was not difficult in itself, but it was one for which he had never had a training, nor had he even learned himself the rudiments of the art of teaching. He gave me the number of the peasants in that village who to his knowledge were able to read and write, and they proved to be but two per cent. of the total population. Complete apathy towards education, he said, existed among these peasants, and when they know their children can write the alphabet and read a few sentences they take them away from school, in order that they may help them in their daily work upon the land. "No education is compulsory," he said, "and there is, after all, no real reason why the children should learn even what they do, because they forget it all, nor do they ever use it again in later life." And then an old peasant sitting next to me said, "Why should we trouble about our children's education? They