Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/677

Rh and supper there are about two hours allowed for recreation. While it must be remembered that, when we speak of boys being engaged in study for ten hours, those who are lazy are not closely and continuously engaged in their work, and that if the master is not strict the strain is not necessarily severe, I can not but think that it would be better for the health of the scholars in this school if the total amount of time engaged in school or study did not exceed eight or at most nine hours. I am quite alive to the danger attending too liberal an amount of time being left at the disposal of schoolboys; they do not find it difficult to get into mischief. Still, under proper supervision, three hours' relaxation between 9 and 9  does not seem to me an extravagant allowance for growing lads.

I have referred to the encroachment of book-work on play-hours. Having taken great pains to get at this point in various schools, my conclusion is that, what with back lessons, impositions, and extra subjects, this encroachment becomes in many instances a serious burden. I have been puzzled at first to explain the ill health of some boys when I examined the time-table, and did not succeed in explaining the mystery till I discovered how much of the play-time was really spent by them in work. This is, no doubt, often the fault of the boy, who has not properly. learned his lessons, and has to relearn them when he might have been at play. It would be well, however, if the masters would consider whether they do not sometimes, by the amount of work set the boys, render it difficult to those who have only average ability to do all that is expected of them without encroaching on the time of recreation.

In one school I find, as might be expected, that some boys do and some do not complain of the pressure put upon them out of school. I believe this arises in these instances from a difference in facility of learning and not indisposition to work. One pupil, who has left school, and loyally observes, in writing to me, "I feel bound to stand up for a system to which I owe so much," reluctantly admits that the number of lines of poetry and prose which have to be committed to memory is quite unreasonable. The danger of overtasking the brain is here, I believe, by no means an imaginary one. The repetition, which goes on gradually accumulating during the term, of some sixteen or eighteen lines of Greek or Latin verse at each lesson, becomes at last a heavy load for the memory; and my informant adds, "At the end of term I have known over one thousand lines demanded, with only a day's time to look them over in, the usual amount being four hundred to seven hundred lines in the upper forms on the classical side." Another scholar, in a different school, writes: "I have never known more than thirty new lines of Greek or Latin set for one lesson. No time is specified for learning the lines, but they have always to be done between evening school one day and morning school the next, unless the master chooses to set the lesson before." Here we see how