Chapter 254 — Betty Studies Hard
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Gao Yang set down the last engineering report that required his personal sign-off, rolled his neck to loosen the stiffened vertebrae, and looked around.
The study was very quiet, but he was not, in fact, alone. Not far from Gao Song's great desk, against the wall, stood a small table. Betty was bent over it, head down, earnestly writing out the words whose spelling she had most recently learned.
Two hours at night school every evening to study spelling, then practice writing against the textbook whenever she had spare time during the day—this had become Betty's daily routine. And to give this studious girl a more convenient place to study, Gao Yang had specifically permitted her to practice her writing in his study, and had set up a little desk there that belonged to her alone.
This was plainly beyond what a maid ought to receive, yet no one in this place would question Gao Song's decisions—and as for Betty herself, her mind did not seem complicated enough to ponder questions like "overstepping the proper bounds."
Betty truly was not a clever girl. In fact, she was a bit slow. There was a word Gao Yu used to describe such girls: "adorkable." But he took not the slightest pleasure in Betty's adorkableness. The girl had no congenital defect; her slowness was simply the result of malnutrition and a family life of hardship from childhood on.
Like most of the destitute children of this age, like most kitchen maids, low-ranking menials, the sons and daughters of serfs—nutritional deficiency during the critical stages of development and a lack of education during life's most important learning years tended to blight them for life. They lacked experience, their curiosity was extinguished, they had no capacity to learn and no notion of independent thought. Nobles routinely regarded the "lower orders" as stupid and benighted, took this as an inborn defect, and even used it as evidence to support the "truth" that "nobles are born noble." There was surely exaggeration in this, and senseless discrimination—but as he came to understand this world better, Gao Yang had to admit one fact:
There really was a gap between the destitute and the well-off children of nobles in learning ability and speed of thought. It had nothing whatsoever to do with any "superiority of bloodline," yet the gap itself was an inescapable reality.
So Gao You worked to narrow that gap. Whether promoting free special meals for children at the night school or distributing food subsidies to children under six in the domain, it was all part of the effort. First solve the children's malnutrition, let their minds develop as fully as those of noble children, and alongside that, roll out education—this was the most effective method he could think of. But what of those already grown, or nearly grown?
Gao Yang rose and came to stand behind Betty, watching this clumsy girl struggle to spell out word after word. Her mistakes were few, and her handwriting was far neater than at the start—but she had to spell a single word dozens of times before she could remember it. To this day she was still learning what the night-school children mastered in their first two months.
Betty had already come far beyond the vast majority of her class. She was nearly grown, yet still possessed keen curiosity, and she took to learning of her own accord, spontaneously. She loved writing, longed to read and write as fluently as Rebecca and Hedy and the others—and yet learning remained exceedingly difficult for her. She was no buried genius; she had already missed the best age for learning, and no amount of later effort could make up for that.
Indeed, if not for a great calamity in the domain, if not for Gao Yang bringing her to see so many things of the "outside world," Betty would likely never in her life have learned that any way of living existed besides doing rough work in a kitchen.