HOLIDAYS AND SCHOOLDAYS.[[1]]
By Canon Barnett.
July, 1911.
[1] From “The Daily Telegraph”. By permission of the Editor.
Holidays, as well as schooldays, help to form the minds of the citizens. Habits, tastes, friendships, are fixed in the hours when restraints are relaxed, and the Will takes its shape when it is most free. Our school holidays, when in play we commanded or obeyed, when we learnt to know the country sights and objects, when, with different companions, we travelled to new places, have been largely responsible for such satisfaction as we have found in life.
Men and women are what their holidays have made them, and a nation’s use of its holidays may almost be said to determine its position in the world’s order of greatness. A nation whose pleasures are coarse and brutal, whose people delight in the excitement of their senses by actions in which their minds take no part, and where solitude is unendurable, can hardly do great things. It is not likely that it will be remembered, as the poets are remembered, by its care for any principle of action. It will hardly be generous in its foreign policy or happy in its homes.
The use of holidays is thus most important, and everywhere there are signs of their increase. The schools for the richer classes lengthen the period of their vacations till they extend, in some cases, to a quarter of the year. The King asked that his Coronation year may be marked by an extra week of exemption from school. Business people shorten hours of business, and workmen’s organizations demand more time for holidays. Seaside resorts grow up which live mainly by the pleasures of the people, and a vast and increasing body of workers find employment in the provision of amusement.
More time and more money are being given to holidays. Their use or misuse is a matter of importance, and it is reasonable to demand that more thought should also be given to this subject. People—this fact is often forgotten—need to be taught to play as they need to be taught to earn or to love. Leisure is as likely to produce weariness as joy, and the Devil still finds most of his occupation among the idlers.
The public schoolboy who has eight weeks’ vacation, and this year an extra week, will hardly be happy if he acquires habits of loafing at the seaside shows or picks up acquaintance with despisers of knowledge, or comes to think that learning is a “grind,” and he certainly will not in after years bless his holiday givers. The workman who obtains holidays and shorter hours will hardly be the better if he spends them in eating and sleeping, or in exciting himself over a match or race where he does not even understand the skill, or in watching an entertainment which calls for no effort of his mind.
Rich people, who can do what they like in the time they themselves choose, add excitement to excitement; they invent new methods of expenditure; they go at increasing speed from place to place; they come nearer and nearer to the brinks of vice; they have what they like; and yet, like the millionaire in the American tale, they are not happy. People need to be taught the use of leisure. The question is, how is such teaching practicable?... I would offer two suggestions: one which may be applied to the schools of the rich and of the poor, and the other to the free provision of means of recreation:—