Page 57 - Gullivers

that my wild imagining? When St John Manley suddenly ceased our regular Latin grammar study sessions in my home (St John and I had planned to go
up to Oxford together and spent many evenings contriving word games and translating Cicero), I concluded that he was ashamed to be my friend. Years later I discovered that his father decided that it was more fitting for a shopkeeper’s son to learn to cipher and to count than to do declensions, but how was I to know that then? Father’s talk had first met with wonder and amazement, and because of his reputation as a decent, truthful man, it was given some credence. And it was rumoured that the headmaster of Rotherhithe Grammar School – my own school - had called to hear an account of the enlightened educational system of the Lilliputians while I was taking the air at my Uncle John’s home aster a bad bout of the croup.
Father had displayed considerable interest in certain aspects of education, and was anxious to share them with anyone who would listen. Lilliputian parents, he informed us, are the last of all to be trusted with the education of their own children. They are discouraged from fondling or indulging their young and are encouraged to place them in communal nurseries and school, to be returned home only at a marriageable age, or when they are to be apprenticed
or prepared for trade, as befits their status. However, in Lilliput removing
the children from their homes dœs not remove from parents the financial burden children generate. As Father pithily put it to the good Dr Marsh, our headmaster, ‘nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burthen
of supporting them on the public’. Father deduced from this philosophy that children should not be under any obligation to their fathers for begetting them, or to their mothers for bringing them into the world.
My father would probably be pleased to know that I applaud the rationality of the Lilliputians. I am struck by the boldness of their determination to instill bravery and sound sense into their young women, rather than foolishness and
III. Lemuel Gulliver’s Children 51