FIRST YEAR AT HARROW
Sir Winston Spensor Churchill was a great English political leader and an outstanding personality in the 20th century politics. He remained Premier of England twice. Besides being a great politician, he was also a great writer and painter. He wrote many publication of worldwide importance. In 1953, he was knighted and was awarded Nobel Prize for literature IN 1953.
The present essay has been taken from his book, “M y Early Life,” that is based upon early days of his school life. The writer frankly talks about his feelings when he entered a first-rate public school. Harrow. Churchill is of the view that the teaching of English language should be stressed upon students.
Churchill says that examinations proved a great trail for him and he remained much afraid of them. At the age of twelve, He had to appear for entrance test at Harrow. In the test, he cut a sorry figure because the subjects in whom he was examined were totally against his taste. He was interested in displaying his knowledge in poetry, history and essay writing. He could prove his ability in these subjects but the examiners; perhaps, they wanted to expose his unawareness. They asked questions from Latin and Mathematics and he could not attempt any question.
In the beginning, he only wrote his name on the top of the page. Then he wrote number of the question “1” and put a bracket around it. For the rest of the time, He kept on staring at his paper. The paper was completely blank except a few marks of ink that might have appeared due to his nervousness.
At last, the papers were collected and were taken to the headmaster, Mr. Welldon. He was very intelligent, broad-minded and had the capability of looking beneath the surface of the things. Churchill had great admiration and regard for him. When he saw the paper of Churchill, he did not reject him from the list of candidates. He decided to take him in the English class of the Fourth Form in the lowest division. Churchill says that he was very thankful to the headmaster for that favor as it proved very useful in his later life. According to the alphabetical order of the list, his name was put at No.3 from the bottom. After a few days, the last two boys also left the school and his name come bottom in the list.
Churchill says that in English classes, Mr. Somewell, a very capable and hardworking teacher taught him. He knew how to teach English even to the dull students. He gave stress on the grammar particularly, on the formation of the basic structure of the sentence. He used to write various parts of a sentence as subject, object verb and different types of clauses with colored chalk individually and demonstrated it to the whole class. Due to this method, the students started taking interest in sentence formation. Churchill remained in that class for three terms. Thus he had three times as much benefit of that class as compared to any other student. He got basic structure of the sentence thoroughly and in later life he appeared as a successful person as compared to those who were taught Latin and Mathematics.
At the end of the essay, Churchill clearly declares that he is biased in favor of English. All the students should create inclination towards the learning of English and if they do not do so it should be taught even by force.