Laudator Temporis Acti

G.G. Coulton (1858-1947), Fourscore Years: An Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 50:

The compulsion did me good in the long run, but I was too undeveloped to take long views. Later experience has taught me the value of compulsory virtue: I wonder whether any more specious falsehood was ever invented than the flattering parrot cry that nothing good has ever been done under compulsion. Therefore I have no grudge against the dullness of many classroom hours; there, the clay was as much at fault as the potter, the boy as the teacher. Dr Johnson noted how men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money; and boys are seldom doing things better than when they listen to older folk struggling to impress older folk's ideas. Great is the importance of merely listening to what we do not immediately understand; how many grown-up people do we meet who have really learned to listen to each other? There is a deep psychological truth in the cry reported from one modern boy, weary of a modern school which deifies originality: 'Must I always do just what I like?' And I admit myself grateful to those who, in the classroom, dragged me through paths of Greek and Latin which I should never have trodden by mere unforced choice.

Id., p. 81 (on A.W. Rowe at Felsted Grammar School):

Yet, even at the time, I could not resist a certain gratitude towards the strong hand which took me by the scruff of the neck and carried me through pages of Herodotus and Thucydides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace and Livy and Cicero, which I should never have had half the courage and perseverance to attack by myself.

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