‘Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.’
W.B. Yeats
I have a big brother who once, while messing around with some matches and a spider’s cobweb, managed to set fire to an old tree between two sports fields at our school. He must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. The headmaster, who lived in a house next to these fields had to get up in the middle of the night to douse the flames that came from the day’s embers. Mr Peacock was a lovely man with a superb curly grey beard and it is said that in the course of his fire fighting he ruined his best pair of trousers.
In the UK, apparently there are three arson attacks on schools each day. Certain information outlets on this topic cite deprivation, drug or alcohol abuse, problems at home and disgruntled revengistas as reasons for those students who decide to have a go at burning down their school. I’m not sure which category my brother fits into. Other reasons might be to cover up a crime, pranks or even insurance fraud – imagine those rogue teachers on the make.
But surely the truth has been evident for a while. I would now like to condemn Mr Yeats as an arson agitator. Just look at the quotation above and all is revealed. The problem is not so much delinquents and discontents but rather nineteenth century Irish poetry. It’s evident from his writing: his poem To some I have talked to by the fire (that blazing science block no doubt); in A Man Young and Old he tellingly says ‘put all Troy to wreck’, and we all know what happened to Troy once the Greeks got inside; in The Two Trees there is talk of flaming circles – once again the tell tale signs of the pyromaniac.
No wonder he doesn’t want any pails to be filled with water.
