LEARNING AT SCHOOL
At first tutored by a clerical uncle,
Shaw basically rejected the schools which he later attended, and by the age
of 16, he was working in a
estate agent’s office. His education was irregular due to his dislike for any
organized training. After working in an estate agent’s office for a while, he moved
to London as a young man. (1876) where he established himself as a leading music and
theatre critic and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society for which he composed
many pamphlets.
Both in church and at Sunday school, he was taught to believe that God was a Protestant and a gentleman. All Roman Catholics would go to hell when they died, neither of which beliefs placed the Almighty in a very favorable light. Certain doctrines aroused his immediate antagonism. On one occasion, the raising of Lazarus was described by the boy’s maternal uncle as a clever ruse on the part of Jesus who had arranged with Lazarus to sham death and then come to life at the right moment. This view of the incident appealed to Shaw’s sense of humor.
His secular education was equally senseless. It began with a governess. He knew more Latin grammar than any other boy in the First Latin Junior, to which he was relegated and which after few years he had forgotten most of it. At the age of ten, he entered in the Wesleyan Connexional School (now Wesley College) of Dublin, where he remained for a while and was labelled a total failure as a schoolboy. In his memory, school was worse than a prison. He was famous in the school as a first-class liar.
At home his growth was unimpeded by discipline.
As a child he had to find his way in a household where there was neither hate nor love, fear nor reverence, but always personality. He was a romanticist which could be attributed to his early love for literature.
"I cannot learn anything that does
not interest me. My memory is not indiscriminate : it rejects and selects; and
its
selections are not academic. I have no competitive instinct nor do I crave for prizes and
distinctions. Consequently, I have no interest in competitive examinations.
I am firmly persuaded that every unnatural activity of the brain is as mischievous as any unnatural activity of the body, and that pressing people to learn things they do not want to know is as unwholesome and disastrous as feeding them on sawdust."
He further asserted that even "experience fails to teach, where there is no desire to learn.
"He came to the conclusion that schools existed for the sake of the parents, who did not wish to be plagued with their children’s curiosity, yet were anxious to keep them out of mischief for the sake of the masters, who had to earn their living; and for the sake of the institutions themselves because they made money out of the pupils. He was still quite positive that he had learned absolutely nothing at school, that school had only interrupted his real education, and imprisoned him.
awoke each morning and saw the strips of sunshine between the window shutters, he jumped out of bed, opened it and read in bed until he was called. He grappled with Dickens ‘Great Expectations’ at about the same time and gained his first knowledge of the French revolution from a Tale of Two Cities. He gained his knowledge of English history from Shakespeare as he learned French history from Dumas. One Sunday afternoon, Shaw’s father turned up with a mild fit on the doorstep. Gone was his theory of teetotalism. Then his father do promised that he would stop drinking. He did so and remained sober for the rest of his life. But even then he could not evoke the sympathy of his wife. In 1872 she broke up and went to London with her two daughters. Mrs. Shaw was anxious to earn a living as a music teacher. One of her daughters had died shortly after leaving Ireland. She died of T.B. in 1876 at the age of 21, and the other was a promising singer. And the family hoped that with Lee’s assistance she would become a prima donna. |
Bernard Shaw and his father settled in lodgings in Dublin. When his mother sold the household furniture and went for London, she left the family piano behind. After his mother’s departure, Bernard Shaw suddenly found out that there was no music in the house and there would be none unless he made it himself.
So he began to teach himself how to play the piano.
