English Public Schools
By John O. Corliss
Under the head of “A Deplorable Position,” the London Daily Mail of December 19 contains some quite severe strictures on the kind of work done in many of the public schools of England. It says: “From an educational point of view, the present position of the average schoolboy is deplorable to the last degree.” In order to justify the use of these words, the writer goes on to state that except in some special cases where boys are “coached” for a year or more for a position in the army, they are failures wherever they go, because of their lamentable ignorance. Mr. Parkin is cited for authority of the statement that many of these become “waifs and strays,” especially when they reach the English colonies. Even the university candidates are placed in a bad light. At these places athletics seem to satisfy the largest demand for an education. Closing its criticism on the public schools, the Mail says: “Judging from the history of every career for the past century, it seems clear that the worst possible chance a struggling respectable parent or a professional man can give his boy is to send him to an expensive public school. He will find to his cost in due time that devotion to cricket and fashionable companions will give his son neither competence nor renown.” Of course the public schools here referred to are largely those like Eton, Rugby, and Cambridge, which rank with average American colleges, these being conducted much after the same order. It can hardly be said that the picture is overdrawn; for it is well known that popular games are much in custom in all advanced schools and colleges, to the detriment, it is feared, of intellectual development. It is, however, strongly urged that these are necessary accomplishments of school life, because they are beneficial to the health of the student. But with this course followed, when one is through school life, he has no practical knowledge of the trades which are necessary to public prosperity, and, unless he is heir to a fortune, to his own success as a member of society. If he ever secures this necessary knowledge, he must serve an apprenticeship for it, after having arrived at the age when he ought to be fairly launched on the sea of a prosperous living. How much better it would be for all those who seek an advanced education to connect themselves with an institution where, instead of having cricket, baseball, football, and other games of the kind for exercise, the various trades are taught, and the pupils are required to work at these, so that when they are graduated in theoretical knowledge, they will also receive commendation for having acquired some trade from which they may have an immediate income upon leaving school. There is many a man to-day who is a mere trifler, a blot on society, who, if his school education had been of a different character, would have filled a useful place in almost any community. It may be that he averaged with many others in committing to memory set lessons from authorized books, but there was a lack of the practical side, from which he was never able to recover after closing his school days. Why should not this deficit in school work be supplied with practical instruction by competent teachers? The writer just now recalls one case of a young man who had never learned a trade before attending school. Entering an industrial institution, he was put to work to learn the painter’s trade. Circumstances soon arose which prevented the young man from continuing in the school, but he was able to take up work at painting immediately after, under full pay. This is but one instance of many which might be cited to show that there is a better way to conduct schools than after the obsolete fashion of half a century ago.