It seems as if our schools were doomed to be the sport of change.

Charles Dickens in the Penguin Classics Selected Short Fiction. Included are some travel sketches of his return to scenes of his youth. Here he has returned to his childhood school. Page 152. It captures the the contemporary sense of helplessness in the face of implacable progress and shows that that sense was extant a century and a half ago.

We went to look at it, only this last Midsummer, and found that the Railway had cut it up root and branch. A great trunk-line had swallowed the playground, sliced away the schoolroom, and pared off the corner of the house: which, thus curtailed of its proportions, presented itself, in a green stage of stucco, profilewise towards the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without a handle, standing on end.

It seems as if our schools were doomed to be the sport of change. We have faint recollections of a Prepatory Day-School, which we have sought in vain, and which must have been pulled down to make a new street, ages ago.