Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/280

276 boys in good homes at Clifton College. There they enjoyed all the advantages of the cultivated home, which I need not here enumerate, and at the same time, through the arrangements we made for them, all the best elements in the life of a great boarding school. In the upper school of 500 boys, we had about 160 day boys living at easy distances from the school. These boys were divided into two houses—North Town and South Town—about eighty boys in each house, and they were treated for school purposes just as if they were living together in a boarding house. They were under the same rules as boarders in regard to hours of locking up, or the bounds beyond which they might not go without a note from their parents giving express leave. Their names were printed in a house list, a master was appointed as their tutor, whose duty it was to look to their educational needs and progress, to their reports and conduct, just as if they had been boarders and he their house master. Each house had its own room or library on the college premises, with books of reference, and so forth, for spare hours, and took its part with the boarding houses, and held its own in all school affairs, games and other competitions. And my experience of this system compared with others has led me to the conclusion that the form of education which may on the whole claim to be the best is that of a well-organized day school, in which it is clearly understood to be the duty of the masters to give their life to the boys in school and out of school, just as if they were at a boarding school, and in which the boys are distributed into houses for school purposes, just as if they were living in a boarding house. Under such a system they get the best of both worlds, home and school.

From the public school we pass naturally to the universities, and the first question that meets us is the influence they exercise on school education, through their requirements on admission or matriculation and the bestowal of their endowments and other prizes. On this part of my subject I have seen no reason to alter or modify what I said at Glasgow three years ago, and therefore I merely enumerate and emphasize the suggestions which I put forward on that occasion for the improvement of education both at school and college. I hold that it would be equivalent to pouring a new stream of intellectual influence through our secondary education if Oxford and Cambridge were to agree on some such requirements as the following:

1. In the matriculation examination (a) candidates to be free to offer some adequate equivalent in place of Greek. (b) An elementary knowledge of some branch of natural science, and of one modern language to be required of all candidates, (c) A knowledge of some period of English history and literature also to be required of every candidate, and ability to write English to be tested, (d) The examination in Latin and any other foreign language to include questions on