Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

The advocates of 'home influence' must also remember that the day boy takes his home for granted. We cannot appreciate the value of anything till we have either lost it, or become separated from it. Home means a great deal to the boarder. Holidays mark for him a complete change of life, to the day boy holidays mean little save the pleasurable cessation of certain irksome duties. He can stay in bed longer in the morning, he has not got to hurry his breakfast, a free day lies in front of him. He will not have to waste his time over Latin Prose and Thucydides. During the term-time he has, except during week-ends, very few opportunities of intimate conversation with his parents, and because he has come to regard their presence as a natural environment he does not, during the holidays, make, as the boarder does, special efforts to see as much of them as possible. The influence of a place need be no more effective because one happens to live in it than the influence of a person because one happens to be in his, or her, company. It depends on the value set on the place or person. The boarder values his home more highly than the day boy. The influence of home is more likely to be felt by him than by the day boy. Letters from home are an event in the boarder's life. They mean more than a walk on Sunday morning, and the hours are counted to the half-term visit.

The day boy also comes far less into contact with masters than the boarder does. Indeed the head master of a school can only have a superficial knowledge of the boys that are entrusted to him. He sees them in the form room and on the cricket field. But he does not watch the development of the boy's character through his reactions towards and away from the intrigues, romances, and jealousies of house politics. There is no constant theme, only a few uncertain motifs. The head master has not sufficient material upon which to work. The discovery of so many clues is denied to him. Every boy at some time or other must pause and wonder how much his head master really knows about him. It is a subject, for most of us, of disquieting conjecture. But the day boy can dismiss it with an easy conscience. School for him is a place in which he works and plays, but does not live. Indeed he is a child of no man's land, passing between two countries, a true citizen of neither.

There are those who say that parents are the only people who understand their children, and will maintain that it is criminal to take young boys away from their parents at an impressionable age and place them in charge of schoolmasters who can know nothing about them. But parents are, as a matter of fact, as likely to make mistakes as any one else.

We find in anything what we bring to it. And parents expecting their sons to be brave, truthful, obedient, clever, find them so. An outside opinion is of extreme value, and a house master or a head master is the ideal person to give it. When a house master and a father meet on equal grounds and discuss the son's welfare honestly, the auspices could hardly be more fortunate. They so rarely meet, because parents and schoolmasters do not trust each other, because they have adopted the false position of buyer and seller; the combination remains, however, none the less ideal.

I do not myself see what advantages the day school possesses over the boarding school, save those that are concerned with a particular facet of morality, and beyond the weakening of a partisanship that is inclined to put a boy in blinkers. There are some very fine day schools in the country, but the day school, especially of recent years, has tended to become an alternative for parents with large families who cannot afford to send their sons to expensive boarding schools. And, after all, the suggestion that day schools should be generally substituted for boarding schools is obviously impracticable.

Many of the finest Public Schools are situated in remote parts of the country, others in small towns that were once honoured with a monastery. How are these venerable institutions to be converted into day schools. A few retired colonels might possibly form a colony in Shoreham and send their sons to Lancing. A convenient train would take them to Brighton, where they might walk on the promenade and recall the reckless adventures of their youth. But civilisation draws us to big towns for our livelihood. However much the stockbroker might wish to send his son as a day boarder to Shrewsbury, he would find it quite impossible to do so. The town of Shrewsbury would provide no scope for his activities. He could not possibly settle there. A scheme that would involve the complete alteration of the public school system can only be called a revolution. A reformer has to work on his existing material. He cannot say—wash it out and start again. He cannot put back the clock.

Mr. Oscar Browning has said that when he went to Eton in 1851 only five schools could lay claim to the dignity of being called a Public School. There must be at least fifty first-class Public Schools to-day; they are nearly all boarding schools, and every few years a comparatively unknown school proves itself a worthy competitor to older foundations. It is not the slightest use to say, even if we believed it, that day schools are better than boarding schools and leave the matter there. A politician might with equal ability draw up an elaborate defence of the feudal system. It may very well be that we should be all more happy if we could reconstruct society on a feudal basis: we might just as well express a belief that our efficiency would be increased were a kindly providence to dower us with wings. It may be, though I doubt it, that the advocates of the day school are in the right, that under such a system of education immorality and the blood system would pass. But it is for us to discover some method by which the existing system may be so modified as to produce of itself the required change.

Now it is very tempting for a controversialist, when he has completed the arraignment of his enemies, to slip hastily over the policy he himself proposes to adopt. I wonder how many letters have been addressed to the press during the last seven years in which the writer, having stated in strong terms the calamities to which a certain line of thought or policy has reduced the country, has demanded in a final paragraph that 'something should be done before it is too late.' He suggests perhaps a 'change of spirit.'

It is a good weapon that 'change of spirit.' We can all of us, when occasion demands, indulge in spirited invective; we can all detect numberless flaws and inequalities in the existing social system. Why, for instance, does our income run to three instead of to four figures. Why are we paying away a third of that small sum in income-tax? The flow of indignation is swift, and by the time we have written our 950 words, it is not hard to devote the remaining '50' to a general appeal for 'some one to do something before it is too late.' Every contributor to the press has saved his argument like that some time or another. And, in the case of Public Schools, the trouble is that we can do little save repeat the parrot cry of 'a change of spirit.' For it is 'a change of spirit' more than anything else that is needed.

We are kept wondering, however, how that change is to be effected. S. P. B. Mais used to say that 'Literature would save us.' But literature is only a part of life, one channel of self-expression, and in the case of Mr. Mais one is troubled by the knowledge that he, himself, is in many ways the ideal schoolmaster. He has a genius for teaching. He happens to have taught literature and mathematics, and because he taught them so successfully he has imagined that they are the panacea. He is too modest to realise any subject that he taught would have assumed the qualities of a panacea, that it was he and not his subject that was important. He could rouse his form, if he wished, to a high pitch of enthusiasm by a lecture on the properties of Cherry Boot Polish. But 'he is alone, the Arabian Bird.'