THE OPENING YEARS

By William Dick, M.A., LL.B., K.C., Dux Medallist, 1889

When the original school was erected in Park Place, Science Laboratories and Workshops were non‑existent, and not until the beginning of the second year of the school was the Chemistry Department ready. It was a two storey building, with a Lecture room on the ground floor and a Laboratory with 32 benches overhead. Two years afterwards, in the year 1890, the Chemical Laboratory was doubled in size, and a Physics Laboratory and Workshop were added.

In spite of limitations, the record of successes of the school in the Government Examinations in Science was impressive and compared well with its brilliant results in the St. Andrews Local Examinations on the literary and mathematical side of the curriculum, by which in those days the success of Secondary schools was tested. The Harris Academy had an extraordinary record of successes in these examinations, its pupils taking the first place in one or other of the Grades in four out of the first five years, and securing many other high places and an impressive number of passes. Thus, from its first year, the school was able to obtain a reputation for sound teaching.

On the whole the discipline was very strict without undue harshness, and the teachers were strenuous and enthusiastic, evoking a good response from their pupils. The elementary subjects were probably better taught than in most of the Elementary schools in town, one reason being that the pupils, while mostly coming from homes with narrow means, had yet sufficient to obtain the necessary additional books and equipment that the children in the ordinary Board Schools could not afford. The curriculum of Standard VI was a year in advance of that of the like Standard in the other Elementary schools, and really corresponded to what was elsewhere known as the ex‑Sixth Class.

In the year 1886‑7 the Seventh Class for boys was divided into two; one room doing Latin with one other language, Greek or French, while the other room did French and German or French alone. In addition to the usual subjects all did the First Book of Euclid, Elementary Algebra, Elementary Chemistry‑Practical and Theoretical‑and Drawing. The average age of entry to this class was 12 to 13 years.

In July, 1889, the writer of this article and his associates had completed their four years at the Harris Academy, had passed the Senior Local Examination of St. Andrews University, and were thus qualified to enter college, being then each 15 years old, or one year younger than the normal age of entrance. It is not altogether simple to compare their scholastic standing with present‑day pupils of like age on account of variation of the curricula, but it may be of interest to indicate their progress in the three principal subjects of English, Latin and Mathematics.

In English we had learned by heart large portions of the prescribed text‑books‑"The Deserted Village," Book I of "Paradise Lost," parts of "Comus," and "L'Allegro," two plays of Shakespeare, and the "Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales." We had also read specimens of other English authors, and had an elementary yet exact knowledge of the outlines of the History of English Literature, and a fair knowledge of the growth of the English Language and the origins of the English Vocabulary. Besides being a means of literary instruction, English was made a vehicle of cultivation of the reasoning and analytic faculty, for we had constant paraphrasing of poetry into prose and the inevitable week‑end essay.

In Latin, besides a thorough grounding in Grammar and Composition (we were expected to be able to repeat correctly the first quarter of Bradley's Composition), we had read unseen portions of Cicero and Sallust, and had a good mastery of the prescribed books‑one Book of Caesar, one of Livy, one of the Aeneid, and two Books of the Odes of Horace‑and we had learned to repeat portions of these books.

Latin, as then taught in the Harris, was an invaluable training in tidiness of mental thinking, for amongst other things we learned, by what seemed to us at the time somewhat excessive strictness, that the one unpardonable offence was a false construction in composition or a grammatical error. In both these subjects, too, we somehow managed to be imbued with nascent ideas of the magic of the masterpieces of both literatures; and one can never forget the delightful readings of Mr Malloch and Mr Watt, the English Masters, and the charming interludes in our strenuous Latin exercises, when Mr Hay, the Classical Master, read choice translations of our Latin authors, and especially Conington's Translation of the Aeneid.

In Mathematics we got as far as the Sixth Book of Euclid, and, in addition, had been taught the beginnings of Solid Geometry and Conic Sections; in Algebra we had proceeded to the Binomial Theorem and had also done Plane Trigonometry. In this subject, too, we were fortunate in our teachers, for Mr Thornton and Mr Macleod actually managed to make their arid subject interesting.

Besides English with History and Geography, we all had a knowledge of two other languages and had done a two‑years' course in Chemistry. Drawing, also, was a compulsory subject, the time spent at it varying according to the requirements of the more essential subjects. Singing lessons were given once a week by that genius, Mr Frank Sharp, and one, at least, of the writers never hears a chorus from the "Messiah" without the old scene rising before his eyes of sitting with two schoolmates on a bench in the Eighth Class and trying his inefficient best to render the soprano part of some of the choruses.

The outstanding feature of all our instruction, as we have all had cause to recognise with gratitude in later life, was not so much its quantity as its pre‑eminent quality, for at the end of our career in the Harris we all had such a knowledge of the rudiments of our subjects as to render further progress easy.

(Reprinted from 1935 Jubilee Edition).