Nor was that conference alone in applauding. The national association of teachers, on the same authority, preferred to praise the average; the journalists handled the matter for a few days and then went back to the weightier question, of course, whether teaching French later in school endangers the concord of the nation. Meanwhile, as the same paper reports, only sixty-five per cent of pupils reach the minimum level of competence in mathematics, the sciences and reading. The rest, more than a third, do not even reach that. The Zurich writer reaches for the old proverb: among the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

He also offers causes, which I report as his opinion and not as established fact; for this is one writer in one paper, and no teacher or parent answers him. After 2000, he says, the frightened Swiss passed a great many measures, and the numbers improved; but the education economist Stefan Wolter showed that the credit belonged chiefly to the children of well-educated foreigners who had come under the agreement on the free movement of persons. Now, he says, the bottom quarter of pupils does miserably, and many of them come from poor families who speak none of the country's languages at home; and a study by the University of Basel found that seventy per cent of children whose mother tongue is not German need language support when they first enter school.

What am I to make of this? First, something about the mean, which I love if any man does. "There is a measure in things; there are, in short, fixed limits, beyond which and short of which the right cannot stand." The mean is the measure of what is right, not the middle of the neighbours' crowd. I once laughed at the miser who thought himself poor because his neighbour had more; these directors have turned my fable inside out and think themselves rich because their neighbours have less. So the man who stands above the average, when the average itself is falling, merely falls with everyone else, only from a little higher up.

Next, the children. I, a freedman's son from Venusia, did not learn the speech of the city in my cradle. My father, a man of small means, would not send me to the local school, where the centurions' sons went with their tablets slung over their arms; he took me to Rome and walked me to my teachers himself, the most incorruptible of guardians, and showed me what was done well or badly by the examples of the neighbours. A language is learned by labour, not by nature. That seventy per cent need help is no fault of the children but a duty of the school; and a school that does not exact that duty, that hides the worst figures in a corner of its report, keeps faith neither with the newcomers nor with the citizens.

But the Zurich paper names another vice too, one dearer to my editor: the hatred of effort among the rich. This I readily believe. Poverty drives a boy to his books; wealth flatters him, excuses him, smooths every path beneath him. My father, had anyone sat counting coins at his table, would have said something else, I think. I fear my old ode may have been a prophecy for the Swiss: "Our parents' age, worse than our grandfathers', bore us, more worthless still, soon to bring forth offspring more vicious yet."

The remedy is ready to hand, and it is not new. Let the language of the country be taught before all else, from the first day, to every child, without indulgence and without contempt; let the truth be examined, not the average; and let the magistrates who praise themselves read out that third by name before they argue about French. I do not ask for Orbilius and his rod, which I can still feel; I ask for a teacher who does not flatter. What forbids a man to tell the truth laughing? The one-eyed man is king among the blind; but the one-eyed man who praises his eye while keeping it shut will soon be the equal of the blind.