That the athlete is a school hero and the scholar is not, is most certainly true. The scholar may once in a way reflect glory on the school by success in an examination, but generally he is regarded as a self-regarding person, who is not likely to help to win the matches of the year. But the hero-worship is not undiscriminating; conceit, selfishness, surliness will go far to nullify the influence of physical strength and skill. Boys' admiration for physical prowess is natural and not unhealthy. The harm is done by the advertisement given to such prowess by foolish elders. Foremost among such unwise influences I should put the press. Even modest boys may begin to think their achievements in the field are of public importance when they find their names in print. Some papers publish portraits of prominent players, or a series of articles on "Football at X—" or "The prospects of the Cricket Season at Y—". The suggestion that there is a public which is interested in the features of a schoolboy captain, or wishes to know the methods of training and coaching which have led to the success of a school fifteen, is likely to give boys an entirely exaggerated notion of their own importance and to justify in their minds the dedication of a great deal of time to the successes which receive this kind of public recognition.
Next there is the parent. Our ever active critics are apt to forget that schools are to a large extent mirrors, reflecting the tone and opinion of the homes from which boys come. The parent who says when the boy joins the school, "I do not mind whether he gets in the sixth, but I want to see him in the eleven," is by no means an uncommon parent. I have no objection to his wanting to see his boy in the eleven, the deplorable thing is that he is indifferent to intellectual progress. I have heard an elder brother say, "Tom has not got into his house eleven yet, but he brought home a prize last term. I have written to tell him he must change all that, we can't have him disgracing the family." When a candidate has failed to qualify for admission to the school at the entrance examination, I have had letters of surprised and pained protest, pointing out that Jack is an exceptionally promising cricketer. It is assumed that we should be only too glad to welcome the athlete without regard to his standard of work. If we could get the majority of parents to recognise the schoolmaster's point of view, that while games are an important element of education, they are only one element, and that there are others which must not be neglected, we should have made a real step forward towards the elimination of the excessive reverence paid to the athlete.
After the press and the parent comes millinery. Perhaps it is Utopian to suggest that "caps" can be entirely abolished; but the enterprise of haberdashers and the weakness of school authorities have led to a multiplication of blazers, ribbons, caps, jerseys, stockings, badges, scarves and the like, which certainly tend to mark off the successful player from his fellows, and to make him a cynosure of the vulgar and an object of complacent admiration to himself. Success in games should be its own reward. In some cases it certainly is. And the paradox is that very often it is those who are least bountifully endowed by nature who profit most. Some there are who have such natural gifts of strength and dexterity, that from the first they can excel at any game. Triumphs come to them without hard struggle, and they breathe the incense of applause. But others have a clumsier hand, a slower foot, and yet they have a determination to excel, a resolution in sticking to their task that brings them at the last to a fair measure of skill. Such a boy is already rewarded by the toughening of the will that perseverance brings: he does not need a ribbon on his sweater. To give the other, the natural athlete, a coloured scarf, is to run the risk of making him over-value the gifts he owes to nature.
There is no reason why a boy who excels in games should not excel in work. The two are not competing sides of education, they are complementary. The schoolmaster's ideal is that his boys should gain the advantages of both. The athlete who neglects his work, grows up with a poorly furnished mind and an untrained judgment. The student who neglects his games, grows up without the nervous development that fits his body to be the instrument of his will, and without the knowledge of men and the habit of dealing with men which are indispensable in many callings. It has been proved again and again that it is possible to get the advantages of both these sides of school life. There is no reason why the playing of school games should be anything but a help to the intellectual development of a boy.
But the constant talking about games is by no means harmless, though it is true boys might be talking of worse things. It is related that a French educational critic was once descanting to an English head master on the monotony of the conversation of English public school boys: "they talk of nothing but football." But when he was asked, "And of what do French school boys generally talk?" he was silent. But if "cricket shop" saves us from worse topics, it certainly is destructive of rational conversation on subjects of more general interest. In great boarding schools we collect a population of boys under quite abnormal conditions, cut off for the greater part of their social life from intercourse with older people. It is, I think, a general experience that boys who have been at day schools and are the sons of intelligent parents, have their minds more awakened to the questions of the day in politics, or art, or literature than boys of equal ability who have been at a boarding school. They have had the advantage of hearing their father and his friends discussing topics which are outside the range of school life. Boarding schools are often built in some country place away from the surging life of towns, where the noise of political strife and the roar of the traffic of the world are but dimly heard. In such seclusion the life of the school, particularly the active life of the playing fields, occupies the focus of a boy's consciousness. The geographical conditions tend to narrow the range of his interests, and he remains a boy when others are growing to be men. Those who have the wider tastes, are deterred from talking about them by the ever present fear of "side." They will talk freely to a master of architecture or music or Japanese prints, but they are chary of betraying these enthusiasms to their fellows. And masters are not free from blame: I suppose we all of us sometimes bow down in the house of Rimmon, and when the conversation languishes at the tea-table, fall back on a discussion of the last house match. It is the line of least resistance, and after a strenuous day's work it is not easy to maintain a monologue about Home Rule. Not the least of the boons of the war is that it has ousted games from the foremost place as a topic of conversation. I have not noticed that they are less keenly played, although the increase of military work has diminished the time given to them; but they have ceased to monopolise the thoughts of boys. The problem then of reducing the absorption in games is the problem of finding and providing other absorbing interests. We cannot, fortunately, always have the counter-irritant of war. Where we fail now, is that the intellectual training of a boy does not interest him enough in most cases to give him subjects of conversation out of school. We give some few new interests by means of societies, literary, antiquarian or scientific. But the main problem is to make every boy see that the work he does in school is connected with his life, that it is meant to open to him the shut doors around him through which he may go out into all the highways and byways of the world.
Do school games produce the man who regards games as the main business of life? We must emphasise "main." It is certain that they do encourage Englishmen to devote some part of their working life to healthy exercise—and few, I suppose, would wish them to do otherwise. The Indian civilian does not make a worse judge for playing polo, nor is Benin worse administered since golf-links were laid out there. But there are men who never outgrow the boyish narrowness of view that games are the things that matter most. These remain the ruling passion, because no stronger passion comes to drive it out. For this the schools must bear part of the blame, for they have not taught clearly enough that athletics are a means but not an end. Not all the blame, for surely some must rest on a society which tolerates the idler, and has no reproach for the man who says "I live only for hunting and golf." And here as elsewhere, I believe we are judged more by a few failures than by many successes. We can all of us in our experience recall many an honest athlete who is now doing splendid service to Church or State, doughty curates, self-sacrificing doctors, soldiers who are real leaders of men. When they became men they put away childish things, but they have not forgotten what they owe to the discipline of their boyish games. Games are not the first thing in life for them now, but they have no doubt that they can do their work better from an occasional afternoon's play. They see things in their right proportion, because they know that the first thing is to have a job and do it well. If we can teach boys to begin to understand that truth while they are at school, we shall have exorcised the bogey of athleticism. I should expect to find (though I do not know) that the authorities at Osborne and Dartmouth do not need to bother their minds about that bogey. Their boys play games with all a sailor's heartiness, but their ambition is not to be a first-class athlete, but to be a first-class sailor, and the games take their proper place. It may be desirable to reduce the time devoted to games, though as I have said I doubt if there is any need to do so, except for cricket. It may be that we should give more time to handicraft, or military drill. But these things will not change the spirit. What we need to do is to make clearer the object of education in which athletics form a part, that there may be more sense of reality in the boy's school time, more understanding that he is at school to fit himself manfully and capably to play his part on the wider stage of life.
C.W. Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture, pp. 62, 63.