Back-To-School Sayings Are Older And Sharper Than They Sound

The uniforms are back on, the alarm clocks are set again, and this week the country’s schoolchildren are doing what English literature already described centuries ago: dragging themselves through the gates. It is the moment a small cluster of phrases about school and teaching gets its annual outing, and most of them are older and less cosy than they sound.

A reluctant schoolboy, several centuries early

The line about the shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school is about as direct a match for this week as English has. It pictures exactly what every parent sees on the first morning of term: a child scrubbed and presentable, moving toward the school gate at the pace of a creature that would rather be anywhere else. For this particular phrase our sourcing does not give us the fuller paper trail of dates and later citations that the others have, so it is worth saying plainly rather than padding out with borrowed detail: what we can say with confidence is that the image itself, reluctant child versus inevitable school day, has not needed updating in all the time since it was written.

The sharper version of an old dig at teachers

Anyone who has ever heard “those who can’t do, teach” has heard a watered-down version of something written on purpose to sting. The line, in the form most people actually quote, is a misquotation. George Bernard Shaw’s original is he who can, does; he who cannot, teaches, written into his 1903 play Man and Superman as Maxim 36 of the appended “Maxims for Revolutionists.” Shaw’s wording is the sharper one, aimed at the smug and the incompetent rather than at teachers as a profession, and it has been softened in the retelling ever since. Every September it gets fresh use from people who have never read the play it came from and would be surprised to find it wasn’t a folk saying at all, but one man’s deliberate jab.

Grandmothers, eggs, and dogs too old to learn

The other two phrases both take aim at the idea that some people cannot, or should not, be taught. Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs is not, as it happens, a homegrown English proverb. Its earliest known appearance in print is in Captain John Stevens’s 1707 English translation of Francisco de Quevedo’s comic works, where the line reads “You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs.” It arrived in English secondhand, as a translation of someone else’s joke, and stayed.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks goes back further still, and it started out meaning exactly what it says, with no metaphor attached. The earliest citation is John Fitzherbert’s 1534 farming manual The Boke of Husbandry, which advises training a shepherd’s dog while it is still a puppy, “for it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe.” By 1546 it was already being called an old saying in print, which makes it one of the oldest proverbs still in everyday use in English, older than the schools, colleges and grandmothers it now gets applied to.

Put together, the four phrases tell a small, consistent story: English has never been short of ways to complain about school, mock bad teachers, or dismiss the idea that anyone past a certain age can learn anything new. The complaints just keep changing hands, generation to generation, gate to gate.