THE NEW TYRANNY
"Of course you needn't Work, Fitzmilksoppe; but Play you must and shall."
The costly inefficiency of the public schools came up again in 1880, à propos of a correspondence in The Times, in which a "disappointed mother" recounted the experience of her two sons who, on leaving a public school at the age of nineteen, had forgotten all they knew before they went there:—
Hence a justly "Disappointed Mother" naturally enough concludes that "Our great schools want inspection sadly." Experience has certainly given her some cause to compare them unfavourably with private schools; although as to the latter she generalizes rather widely in saying that they "must teach, or close." Too many of them do neither.
Her boys, at any rate, both of them learned at a Private Boarding School enough to enable them to pass the Junior Oxford Local Examination at an early age. Unquestionably they were taught so much; but then how were they taught it? In such a style that they have now, at an adult age, to be taught it over again.
So it seems that a "Disappointed Mother's" two sons were educated at the Private Boarding School as the bottles are aërated in a soda-water manufactory. Information must have been forced into the former as carbonic acid gas is pumped into the latter. The gas is retained in the bottles whilst corked down, but escapes on the removal of pressure; so, if the boyish minds are left open, their school-learning, set free from forcible compression, goes off in youthful effervescence. Admirable system, by which our youth at an early age are enabled to pass the examinations, for which at maturer years they have to be crammed all over again!
Classics v. Commerce
The inspection of public schools has remained a subject of acute controversy ever since; and it is not clear whether Punch's approval would have extended to Government inspection. It was in the same year, by the way, that Du Maurier illustrated the dialogue between Sir Gorgius Midas and an aristocratic Colonel. Sir Gorgius's main regret was that he had never been at a public school; the Colonel, who was once at Eton, laments that he suffers from a neglected education. Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of Punch in 1880, was also an old Etonian, but was not on that account prepared to grant his old school a complete immunity from criticism. The "Diary of a Present Etonian," which appeared in 1885, is in the main jocularly descriptive, but illustrates a prevalent Philistinism, the habits of ragging and borrowing money, and tells of a week with only one whole school-day and two whole holidays. Yet while fully alive to the waste of time and money which went on at the public schools, Punch was very far from embracing the creed of the revolutionary utilitarians who would scrap the old curriculum wholesale. In 1887 he printed an ironic account of the "Public School of the Future," thoroughly impregnated with the Commercial Spirit. The hero, the new "Tom Brown," develops a talent for finance so remarkable that his father longs to see him loose on the Stock Exchange.
Punch did not believe in compulsory classics, because he disliked dons, pedants and academics; but in his parody of "The Isles of Greece" from the point of view of a British schoolboy, he made it abundantly clear that he had no love of the purely commercial "bread-study" view of Education:—
Oh feed me not on mythic lore,
But Science and the Modern Fact;