REAL EDUCATION
Mr. Punch is of opinion that a polite and easy bearing towards the opposite sex (tempered, of course, with propriety and discretion) cannot be inculcated at too early an age. He therefore recommends that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen, they should all be formally introduced to each other, and allowed to take their walks abroad in company.
Co-education had not yet emerged on the horizon of practical educational politics, and the plea put forward in a picture by Du Maurier for a mixed "crocodile" cannot be seriously entertained. The artist suggests that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen they should all be formally introduced to one another and allowed to take their walks abroad in company. The question of corporal punishment was raised by a lively correspondence in The Times, towards the close of 1872, on the Winchester practice of "tunding" with a ground-ash or cricket-stump. The action was general, the father of the boy whose punishment by a prefect had started the correspondence, the headmaster, Dr. Ridding, "in English less classical than queer," and sundry old Wykehamists all joining in. Punch was at first scandalized by the brutality with which the prefects exercised their disciplinary powers, but the spirit and good sense showed by the victim caused him to modify his view:—
His punishment, while he feels it unjust
He takes without blather or ban:
Yes, out of the lot who've kicked up a dust,
The boy is the Man.
At the beginning of the same year the invasion of the public schools by the new plutocracy, as described by a correspondent in the Morning Post, who assumed the unfortunate pseudonym of "Pavidus," impelled Punch to some outspoken comment. "Pavidus" complained that the standard in tips and pocket-money had been unduly raised by the young cotton-lords—boys who came back with £5 as a minimum. Punch finds the root of the evil in the perversion of the public schools from their original intention—to educate the sons of poor gentlemen—and suggests that if the "nobs" don't like their sons associating with young plutocrats, they should get up poor schools of their own and keep the high-bred paupers select. A similar situation has arisen since the war, but the difficulty has been solved without snobbery or squealing. Parents who cannot afford to send their sons to schools with which their families have been associated for generations, send them elsewhere, but they do not "make a song about it."
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