Laudator Temporis Acti

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934; Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1906), Recuerdos de Mi Vida: Vol. 1: Mi Infancia y Juventud (Madrid, 1901), and Vol. 2: Historia de Mi Labor Científica (Madrid, 1917), translated as Recollections of My Life by E. Horne Craigie with Juan Cano (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 55-57:

I shall not try to excuse my mistakes. I confess publicly that for the ill success of my studies, I alone am responsible. My body occupied a place in the school rooms, but my mind wandered continually through the spaces of imagination. In vain the energetic exhortations of the teacher, accompanied by furious blows with the strap, recalled me to reality and fought to wrest me from my distractions; the blows sounded in my head like those of the door knocker in an empty house. All the efforts of Father Jacinto, who made my case a matter of personal pride, failed lamentably. Having made this confession, it may be permissible for me to declare also that to my dislike for study there contributed in considerable degree the system of teaching and of rewards and punishments employed by these Esculapian fathers. As the sole pedagogical method, pure memorization reigned supreme. Their aim was to create stored heads rather than thinking heads. To mold a mental individuality, to consent that the pupil, sacrificing the letter for the spirit, should be permitted to change the form of the recitations—that was not to be thought of. There, as still happens to-day in many school rooms, the only person who knew the lesson was he who recited it like a phonograph, that is to say, discharging it in a continuous stream with great vivacity and fidelity. The scholar who stopped the stream for a moment, or wavered in the expression, or changed the order of the statements, did not know it and was in consequence severely punished.

As infallible stimulants for sluggish memories or backward intelligences, were employed the pointer, a strap, a cat-of-nine-tails, a prison, the reyes de gallos, and other coercive and outrageous methods.

As may be seen, the old adage that knowledge enters with pain, ruled unquestioned among those good fathers; but in my case, knowledge slipped through my head without engraving itself upon my brain. On the other hand, many pupils conceived a decided aversion for Latin literature and dislike for the masters. Thus there was lost entirely that cordial intimacy, a mingling of friendship and respect, between master and pupils without which the labor of the educator is the greatest of martyrdoms.

I should be committing a great injustice if I were to say that all the friars applied these pedagogical principles with equal rigor; we had some teachers who were excellent and even kind and sympathetic. But I did not have the happiness to come into contact with them because they took charge of the higher classes and I was obliged, for reasons which I shall explain shortly, to leave the Esculapian school when I was in the second grade. Among these amiable masters, I remember Father Juan, the teacher of geography and an excellent pedagogue. He did not whip the boys, but instead he knew how to arouse their curiosity and captivate their attention.

Following, doubtless, the principle of the skilful knife-sharpener, which is to grind the knife first with the coarsest whetstone and to finish it by further treatment with finer and softer ones, the cloister of Jaca very wisely entrusted the rough-hewing of the first-year students to the harshest breaker-in of intelligences. In fact, we poor wretches of the beginners' class in Latin were handled by the most severe of all the friars, Father Jacinto, of whom I have already spoken in the preceding chapter. He was a native of Egea and had the strength and aggressiveness of the imposing youths of the Five Towns. His huge and stentorian voice stunned the class, thundering in our ears like the roaring of a lion. Into the power of this Herod fell about forty of us unhappy lads, gathered from various mountain towns, and still homesick for the attention of our mothers. An elevated bench formed his throne; his scepter was the cat-of-nine-tails; his ministers were two favorite pupils who were entrusted with keeping watch on the others.

We were divided into two bands or groups, called Carthaginians and Romans, as was announced by placards posted on each side of the schoolroom. It fell to my lot to be a Carthaginian, and I soon came to merit the name, in that I was beaten by Scipio, that is to say by the formidable dominie, who was capable of destroying all the Carthaginians and Romans single handed. For me, then, Carthage fell every day without the triumphs of Hannibal ever being experienced, and still less the pleasures of Capua.

Cowed by this reign of terror, we entered the classroom trembling, and when the lessons commenced we felt such dread that we did not remember a single thing. Woe to him who got mixed in the conjugation of a verb or who stumbled in the declension of quisnam, quaenam, quodnam or of the no less peculiar quicumque! The blows of the strap rained upon him like a cloudburst, confusing him more and more and inhibiting his weak memory completely. When we left the schoolroom our faces shone with the boisterous joy of liberation; we did not stop to consider, poor children, that on the next day, the flogging would be renewed, and that our wrists, from which the swellings of the day before had not yet completely disappeared, would be delivered again to the terrible strapping of the master.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who provided these notes:

Reyes de Gallos: Rooster Kings. The author later describes being subjected to this humiliation of the dunces (p. 66): "I was decked out with a grotesque robe and crowned with an enormous mitre decorated with many-coloured feathers. I looked like a wild Indian. My cynical tranquility at being paraded among my comrades exasperated Father Jacinto, who added for good measure some blows with the fist and slaps on the neck. I looked at him with calm indignation without blinking an eyelid. My animosity or, if you prefer it, my outraged dignity would not let me cry. What better vengeance could I take against my oppressors?"

"The old adage, that knowledge enters with pain": La letra con sangre entra. Old enough to be quoted in Don Quijote (II, 36), it was the subject of a satirical painting of that title (1780-85) by Francisco de Goya, who like Father Jacinto was also a native of Aragón. Now in the Museo de Zaragoza:

Related posts:

• Plagosus Orbilius
• Inexpensive Instruments of Instruction
• A Close Connection Between the Skin and the Memory
• Et Nos Ergo Manum Ferulae Subduximus
• A Male Puberty Rite
• Anarchy Tempered by Despotism
• Punishment in School
• More Punishments in School
• Ordeals of a Schoolboy
• Grammar Lesson
• Teaching Tools