Boys' school

“ For manners, as well as morals, relax in the greater freedom of a Public School, and at the age of fifteen one has managed to substitute ease for stiffness.
It is, indeed, impossible to say how much one learns at a Preparatory School. At the age of ten one has not the necessary detachment to view oneself as an objective reality. It is impossible, for instance, to remember where, or when, was learnt the spirit of comradeship and sportsmanship that is, perhaps, the most lovable quality of the old public school boy. ”

“ Because his school is a fixed institution, because the scope of his masters is fixed within its walls, there is a tendency to regard him as an inhabitant and not a sojourner there. That is what the schoolboy should never be allowed to forget—that he is passing through one phase of his life into another; it is because he has forgotten that that he so often pauses bewildered and irresolute on the threshold of life. ”

“ Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, why is it that a boys' school should be placed beyond the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life, that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? Have boys so strong a predisposition to grace, that society can afford to take them away from home and its influences, and turn them loose with dozens of other boys into a bare and battered boarding-house, with its woodwork dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched ”

“ The children enter the kindergarten at the end of the toddling age, and the little lads and lassies sit side by side in their delightful rooms and make their first songs of life, as they end them, together, their little arms and hands making the first efforts at rhythm together, awkward movements full of grace. They pass at eight years to the primary department and begin the toilsome upward pull of real study, and here their ways part,—the boys for the Peers’ School and the ruder ways of masculine effort. ”

“ Home and school present to the average boy two watertight compartments. They are different lives, a different technique is required. And human nature has at least one property of the chameleon.
A schoolboy sets out, therefore, to discover school life for himself. He knows what his parents expect him to make of it; he has a fairly shrewd idea of what his schoolmaster expects him to make of it. It remains for him to investigate school life as his companions have made it. ”

“ We have assumed that an ignorant and innocent boy arrives at his Public School at the age of thirteen, and, to simplify the matter further, we will assume that the boy is not particularly good-looking, and is not, therefore, likely to win the patronage of his seniors. For the first weeks everything is so strange that he lives in a world of his own fashioning. Later on, as he begins to enter the life of the school, he is puzzled by references to an offence the nature of which he does not understand. ”

“ I wonder if any feel that they would like to become boys again and go to school over again, being sure that, with their present experience of life, they would set a higher value on the education of the schools. I wonder if any feel that they would have reached higher positions and secured a larger influence if they had been more diligent at school. I wonder if there are any who can trace evil habits of thought to the companions they had here. ”

“ How many small boys of seven who have not been to a school will, when they are handed a plate of cakes, take the one nearest to them rather than the one of which they fancy the appearance. How many small boys will think of opening a door for a lady, of offering her his chair when she enters the room, of apologising to his hostess if he arrives late for breakfast. These are the little things that a boy learns at a Preparatory School and that he will learn nowhere else ”

“ The constant companionship of other boys, the hardening effect of games and sports, the observance of custom and the discipline of the school, these and other things help to rub the corners off a boy, to “lick him into shape,” and—if he has anything in him—to make a Briton of him. The Public Schools have justified their system of education in the past by the men whom they have educated and sent out into the world ”

“ To the boys, school had its chief value, in fact its only value, in its games and sports. Of course, our parents and teachers were always urging us to work. In their efforts to make us study, they resorted to every sort of means—headmarks, presents, praise, flattery, 48Christmas cards, staying in at recess, staying after school, corporal punishment, all sorts of persuasion, threats, and even main force—to accomplish this result. ”

“ Very few men under thirty can look far ahead, and the new boy at a Public School who can see his life mapped out for six years naturally does not look beyond them. He hardly realises that there is a world outside. He will have to travel so far before he reaches it. He comes to consider his Public School not as a prelude, but as the whole sphere in which his personality has to move. ”

“ Perhaps the problem of our public school system of education which has not yet been solved is the vast possibility of the directed play life of our boys. It is well known by students of boy life that the character of the boy is very largely determined by the informal education which comes from his part in sports and play. In some cities the public school has sought to give partial direction to the play life of the boy through public school athletic leagues, but even these leagues touch but a small part of the boy life of any community. ”

“ If they work, and finally justify the pains taken for them in establishing such colleges as these, it will be for the same reasons that boys work well, and come out worthy of their schooling;—because they like their studies, and enjoy the sense of mental and moral development which is so strong in school and college years; and because their training is well adapted to educe, develop, and strengthen their powers, and render them as wise and good as their natures, years, and circumstances permit. ”

“ The fact is, that the condition of a small boy at a large school is one of peculiar hardship and suffering. He is entirely at the mercy of proverbially the roughest things in the universe—great school-boys; and he is deprived of the protection which the weak have in civilized society ”

“ He looks beyond the rewards and position that his own school offers. It is not enough to be in the highest form, not enough to be in the first eleven. He must improve himself so as to be able to take a high place in the next stage of his career. A public school boy, on the other hand, regards the honours that his school has to offer as an end sufficient in themselves. ”

“ The attitude to morality on the part of masters is intimately connected with athletics, and on the boy's part, the belief that a member of a school side is, ipso facto, an invaluable asset to the school, allows the blood to do very much what he likes; as long, in fact, as a boy can satisfy his companions and himself that he is exerting all his power on the football field, he can amuse himself in other ways as he thinks fit. ”

“ The era of the high school course is being succeeded by the era of the high school boy and the high school girl. First, last, now and always, the boys and girls, not the course, deserve primary consideration. Whatever their needs, the high school must supply them if it is to become a public servant, responsible for training children of high school age in the noble art of living. ”

“ But the day boy can dismiss it with an easy conscience. School for him is a place in which he works and plays, but does not live. Indeed he is a child of no man's land, passing between two countries, a true citizen of neither.
There are those who say that parents are the only people who understand their children, and will maintain that it is criminal to take young boys away from their parents at an impressionable age and place them in charge of schoolmasters who can know nothing about them. But parents are, as a matter of fact, as likely to make mistakes as any one else. ”

“ A boy who leaves before he has been a house prefect fails to put the coping stone to his education. The responsibilities of prefectship are an invaluable experience. And when the house master begs the parent to let 'Arthur stop on another year,' the parent naturally gives way. And it is, of course, always the wrong type of person who stays on that extra year. It is the clever, the brilliant, the athletic boy, the boy who already stands out above his contemporaries and in the course of the next year will be even more prominent, that is encouraged to remain. ”

“ He knows that the emotions he feels for a small boy are of a different nature altogether from the friendship that he feels for his contemporaries, and the fact that there are boys in the school old enough to have defined these emotions, provides a hot-house atmosphere for the development of younger boys.
To most people life comes at second hand. They learn from books, cinemas, and plays what are the appropriate emotions and the correct procedure for any given situation. The public school boy is no less conventional than his elders. ”

“ Greater honesty between boys, parents, and masters would undoubtedly achieve much. But more than a change of spirit is required. If no boy was allowed to stay on at school after the term in which he became seventeen years old, I believe that the moral question would, to a large extent, simplify itself. ”

“ The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I a private school-master, I should say, Let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest. ”

“ He lets his parents think what they like and his schoolmasters think what they like. He goes his own way. And it is thus that school life as it is, differs so enormously from the traditional concept of it. There must be always a gulf between the reality and the imagined idea. But in public school life the gulf is between, not the schoolboy reality and his idea of it, but between the schoolboy reality, and the confused idea of it that is held by parents and masters. ”

“ The boys regard themselves as the school, and regard the masters as necessary figureheads; and in any large school, where the mass and volume of young life rolls on without much possible interference from above, there is a good deal of truth in the conception.
When one hears other people talking about their pet school there is a personal ring to the conversation which does not always please us. The truth is that the foundation of a school is a matter of personal magnetism, and that any school becomes a sort of clan or clique. ”

“ They have forgotten their own schooldays, and for so long they have been persuading parents of the value of a public school education that they have come to believe in their own advertisements. And yet what they have come to believe is far more remarkable than the truth. In sermons and addresses they assure the boy and his parents that school life is a miniature of the larger world ”

“ There may be two boys in a school, both good boys; one, may be going on well in his classes, while the other, from the concurrence of some accidental train of circumstances, may be behindhand in his work, or wrongly classed, or so situated in other respects that his school duties perplex and harass him day by day. Now how different will be the feelings of these two boys in respect to coming to school. The one will be eager and prompt to reach his place and commence his duties, while the other will love much better to loiter in idleness and liberty in the open air. ”

“ If he is successful, he is a bird of passage, on his way to some rich head-mastership. He may become a house master for a while, but he is always looking beyond his immediate surroundings. He is ambitious. He does not regard one school as his compass. Always he is just outside the drama.
The second class, however, forms the backbone of tradition. The old boy comes back to his old school with an intense loyalty and with the intention of staying there for the rest of his life. His ambition is to have the best house in the best school in the best county. ”

“ One of the things that strike visitors to the School is the look of happiness on the boys’ faces, and there is no doubt that there is none of the usual feeling of dislike for school life which one finds in institutions where the only object held before the boys is the passing of examinations. Examinations have been abolished in the lower classes, except once a year when tests of each boy’s progress are made by the teacher who has been teaching the boy himself. ”

“ The loyalty of a boy for his house or school is a fine thing, but it renders athletic worship almost inevitable. Were there not this intense house and school feeling individual boys would cultivate their individual tastes; forty boys would be grouped [Pg 89] together for convenience of boarding—that is all a house would be. But as soon as a boy comes to regard himself as a member of a fine community, he feels a natural pride and loyalty in its performances and in its welfare. ”