Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/278

274 ever may be thought of such criticisms as these, which come from within our public-school life, it is, I imagine, generally agreed by those who know both our national needs and the work and influence of our public schools, that there is much room for improvement in regard to methods of teaching, the cultivation of intellectual interests and tastes, and the stimulating habits of thought in the majority of their pupils. In close connection with these considerations there are two questions of practical importance which deserve a prominent place in any study of our public-school education.

The first of these is whether it is good for all boys alike to continue their life at school, especially at a boarding school, up to the age of eighteen or nineteen; and the other is whether more encouragement and pains should not be given to developing the best type of day school, or, to put it somewhat differently, whether the barrack life of the boarding school has not, through fashionable drift and class prejudice, become too predominant a part of our English education at the expense of the home life with all its finer educational influences.

As regards the first of these questions, it will be remembered that Dr. Arnold considered it a matter of vital importance to expedite the growth of a boy from the childish age to that of a man. In other words, the boy should not be left to grow through the years of critical change from fourteen to nineteen without special regard to his growth in intellectual taste and moral purpose and thoughtfulness. His education during these critical years should be such as to rouse in him the higher ambitions of a responsible manhood.

Does, then, the actual life of a public school really conduce to this early development in the majority of cases? My own experience has led me to the conclusion that it can not be confidently held to do so. The boys in any of our public schools may be said to fall into two classes—those who in due course reach the sixth form, and during their progress through lower forms have an ambition to reach it; and, on the other hand, a numerous class who do not expect to rise to the sixth, don't care about it, and never exert themselves to reach it.

For the first class, I doubt if any more effective preparation for life has been devised than that of our best English schools; but the case of the second class is somewhat different. Many of these come to the end of their school time with their intellectual faculties and tastes and their sense of responsibility as men to a great extent undeveloped. From sixteen to eighteen or nineteen their thoughts, interests, and ambitions have been largely centered in their games and their out-of-school life, with the natural results that their strongest tastes in after life are for amusement and sport. Some of these boys, after loitering at school to the age of eighteen or nineteen, go to the university as passmen, some begin their preparation for the work of a doctor or a