Character
Impressively built and inclined to be set in his opinions, he earned the nickname 'Boss', but was respected for his scrupulous fair-mindedness and capacity for hard work. Legends generated around him, such as the yarn that he once caned the entire school in an attempt to put down smoking. Despite Anderson's successful academic and career record, one short-term junior teacher who was learning his trade at Scotch College later caricatured him as unimaginative, a charge which does not tally with his apparent fair-mindedness and which has been rejected by eminent educators. The majority held Anderson in great respect even during his last difficult wartime years.
Anderson brought to Scotch College a model of 'godliness and manliness', for he was a ‘typical product of a Scottish Presbyterian background’, tall at 6’4’’, a strong disciplinarian whose main interest was in sport, and, although not an educational innovator, he was a 'reliable' leader. The notion of 'godliness and manliness' is at the heart of late nineteenth-century 'muscular Christianity', a term coined in response to the work of Charles Kingsley, associated with magazines like the Boys' Own Paper and a host of popular books like Tom Brown's Schooldays and Coral Island, and in recent years portrayed in films like Chariots of Fire.
Read more about this topic: P.C. Anderson
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“When a man’s feeling and character are injured, he ought to seek a speedy redress.... My character you have injured, and further you have insulted me in the presence of a court and large audience. I therefore call upon you as a gentleman to give me satisfaction for the same.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)