The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: proofs of Flemish gratitude and magnanimity in showers of Brabant
saliva and handfuls of Low Country mud. You might smooth to the
utmost the path of learning, remove every pebble from the track;
but then you must finally insist with decision on the pupil
taking your arm and allowing himself to be led quietly along the
prepared road. When I had brought down my lesson to the lowest
level of my dullest pupil's capacity--when I had shown myself the
mildest, the most tolerant of masters--a word of impertinence, a
movement of disobedience, changed me at once into a despot. I
offered then but one alternative--submission and acknowledgment
of error, or ignominious expulsion. This system answered, and my
 The Professor |