Schoolboy

“ The old relations of master and pupil describe almost exactly the feeling which youth and levity held toward instituted faith and piety, a generation or two since. The schoolboy, indeed, still thinks himself at liberty to call his master nick-names, to play tricks upon him, and to treat with great levity, among his fellow-pupils, all the teaching and all the rules of the school. But he nevertheless sincerely respects his teacher; believes in him and in his teachings, and expects to derive an indispensable benefit from them, in preparing himself for his coming career. ”

“ But it is not so if the schoolboy begins to feel or see anything. In the strivings of his soul within him he is our equal; in his power of sight and thought he stands separate from us, and may be a greater than we. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many of the evils of schoolboy life come from the sons of the rich, while the sons of poor parents are generally well behaved. But for all that, there was a rough and rude tone among some of the boys at school, arising from defects in the education at home, and this sometimes embittered what ought to be the happiest time of life, particularly in the case of delicate boys. ”

“ It is when the schoolboy proceeds to the playground, that he engages in real action and real discussion. It is then that he is an absolute human being and a genuine individual.
The debates of schoolboys, their discussions what they shall do, and how it shall be done, are anticipations of the scenes of maturer life. ”

“ The secrets you have whispered in private have become the property of the entire school; and the friend you fancied so genial and sympathising has made your open-hearted frankness the subject of a blackguard jest, and exposed you to all the agony of schoolboy ridicule! ”

“ Perhaps no epoch of a schoolboy’s life is more critical—especially if he be of the open-hearted nature of Dick and Heathcote—than that which immediately follows his first punishment at the hands of the law. ”

“ Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved by anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make the mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and ceremonial, having reference to an ideal ”

“ Ingenious Excuse of a Schoolboy.—A country schoolmaster once having the misfortune to have his schoolhouse burnt down, was obliged to remove to a new one, where he reprimanded one of his boys, who mis-spelled a number of words, by telling him that he did not spell as well as when he was in the old schoolhouse. ”

“ On Sundays there will be meetings in some prearranged point outside the town, at which each will arrive by a different route, and they will sit in a wood and talk till the afternoon has waned and the chiming of the abbey clock warns them that roll-call is imminent. It is not surprising that such an adventure should appeal irresistibly to a schoolboy. ”

“ A schoolboy may feel tempted to imitate a rough, swaggering boy a year or two older than himself rather than his teachers or parents, and in later life he may find other people worthy of imitation, according to his occupation or profession or individual taste. ”

“ A schoolboy with his "people" in tow neither expects nor desires the society of his friends. His father may be genial, his mother charming, his sister pretty; but in the jaundiced eyes of their youthful host they are nothing more or less than a gang of lepers—to be segregated from all communication with the outer world ”

“ Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the central and supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools did know what sort of boy they liked. ”

“ The truth is that it is really schoolboy humour belatedly prolonged. Vituperation is the schoolboy's idea of friendly banter. The schoolboy does not so much consider the feelings of his victim as his companions' need for amusement. But I am sure that the tendency nowadays is, somehow or other, to prolong the hobbledehoy days. There is so much more organisation of everything at schools that young men remain boys longer than they used to do. ”

“ The “breaking-up day” of the schoolboy frequently operates upon the action of the after-man; for the modest consciousness of carrying off the prize in his own class before the eager eyes of his aspiring competitors, creates a most beneficial effect upon the younger branches of the school, for whilst it recognises the Reward of Merit at all ages to the good, it stimulates the ambition and energy of the aspiring, and publicly condemns the conduct of the indolent and disobedient boy. ”

“ The village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school. ”

“ They forget that the people are as yet in the schoolboy stage, and should try and remember how, in their own schoolboy days, they offered opposition to the efforts of their masters for their improvement, and how little gratitude they felt, at the time, for all that was done for them. ”

“ "And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school." ”

“ The modern schoolboy is essentially a product of the age he lives in, and the gods he worships are constantly adding to their number. Of what does his Pantheon consist? Foremost, of course, comes the athlete. He is a genuine and permanent deity. His worshippers behold him every day, excelling at football and cricket, lifting incredible weights in the dormitory before going to bed, or running a mile in under five minutes. His qualifications are written on his brow, and up he goes to the pinnacle of Olympus, where he endures from age to age. ”

“ There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." ”

“ Such relations between the social whole and the part assume a variety of forms, and the school is the best place for introducing a child to their niceties. Those other persons whom a schoolboy is called on continually to regard may be either his superiors, equals, or inferiors. To each we have specific duties, expressed in an appropriate type of manners. Our teachers are above us,—above us in age, experience, wisdom, and authority. To treat them as comrades is unseemly. ”

“ Throw not aught on the Street, as Dirt or Stones. If thou meetest the scholars of any other School jeer not nor affront them, but show them love and respect and quietly let them pass along."
[219]
Boys took a good deal from their preceptors, and took it patiently and respectfully; but I can well imagine the roar of disgust with which even a much-hampered, eighteenth-century schoolboy read the instructions to show love and respect to the boys of a rival school and not to jeer or fire stones at them.
This book of manners was reprinted in Worcester by Isaiah Thomas in 1787. ”

“ So has Herbert: so, in short, has everyone who has ever been at school. You will soon get over it all, and like your school life, although of course it is not so pleasant as home. Most schoolboys are selfish and bad-mannered, and there are always plenty of snobs and bullies amongst them; but there is always a minority of nice fellows. ”

“ You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. ”

“ Yon know, Leeming, you’re talking bosh. The thing’s solving itself. All over the world schoolboys are getting wider interests at school. In their homes they’re taking a more equal place in family life. It is no longer a matter of being seen and not heard. ”

“ Since that incident all the boys have been teasing him about the ‘wisp of tow.’ Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless. ”

“ The school-boy even, instead of stopping to throw stones or climb fences or wrestle with another boy, walks along to school, at eight o'clock in the morning, with his square hair-covered satchel on his back, as orderly as if he were the teacher setting an example to his pupils. The laborers, in blouse-frocks of blue or gray homespun, make no noise, no confusion. All is done quietly, orderly and correctly; each one knows his duty and does it. ”

“ In this book I have endeavored to relate the story of a boy's early experiences in college life—a boy who was neither unnaturally good nor preternaturally bad, wholesome, earnest, impulsive, making just such mistakes as a normal boy would make, and yet earnest, sincere, and healthy. We all have known just such boys and are grateful that they are neither uncommon nor unknown. ”

“ for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall. ”

“ 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, for he may not complain ”

“ In college mind meets mind in the severe competition of recitation and annual examination. The bright boy—one of a small class at home, who had it all his own way there—now finds a score or more of leaders whose unvoiced challenge he is compelled to accept, and how he does knit his brow, close his eyes, summon his strength, school his will, force his flagging energies, and grapple problems that he may hold his own, outstrip his rivals, and win prize and place for the sake of his family’s fame and for his personal satisfaction! ”

“ Aside from the curriculum, what is the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often lacking. ”

“ When singsong reading was going on, pupils echoing responsively the teacher’s voice, some wild boy would suddenly redouble his effort with gusto, and his voice, like that of a strangled chicken, would soar away up, to the great merriment of the rest. And then often a boy, whose mind was occupied with a hundred and one things except the book, engaged [Pg 42] in some sly communication with another, unconscious of the teacher’s approach, when he would literally jump into the air as the master’s whip descended sharply on his desk. ”

“ The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster. ”

“ 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 do not remember that any boy ever was. He alone could expel a boy; and he alone could give leave out from college; as was testified by the appearance every Sunday of a great folio sheet, on which were inscribed, in his own peculiar great square characters, each letter standing by itself, the names of those who had been invited by friends to dine in the town, and who were thereby permitted to go out from, I think, one to five. To go out of the college gates without that permission was expulsion. ”

“ The student who holds himself apart from it all in blasé fashion, affecting to look with cool contempt on the joyous fervor of his fellows is either diseased or else his show of indifference is only skin deep. The sneering, flippant, cynical young person is as much of a freak as would be a ten-year-old boy bald-headed, with a long white beard. Intensity, enthusiasm, absorption, belong to college life and they work their good [Pg 36] results in transforming youth into manhood. ”

“ I was not interested, and the teacher did not make it interesting.
[322] In the boys' books I was fond of reading I came across all sorts of heroes, and I sympathized with them all. The boy who ran away to sea; the boy who delighted in the society of ranchmen and cowboys; the stage-struck boy, whose ambition was to drive a pasteboard chariot in a circus; the boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn money for books; the bad boy who played tricks on people; the clever boy who invented amusing toys for his blind little sister—all these boys I admired. ”

“ Boys of the undefinable age we are talking about highly appreciate the title "Mr." Their greatest horror is petting; their greatest aversion is nagging. A young man, set to teach a class of boys, will approach them with a sense of comradeship; will at once make himself, if he is a teacher at all, "hail fellow well met" among them; and yet, as the boys say, "there is no nonsense about him." ”