[to be continued.]
[TYPICAL ENGLISH SCHOOLS.]
BY JOHN CORBIN.
WINCHESTER.
The English public schools are not what we should call public schools at all—that is, they are not kept up at the public expense, and you can't go to them without paying. What we call public schools the English call free schools, and only poor children go to them. The kind of schools I am going to write about are attended by the sons of the richer people and of the nobility. They are not unlike the big American schools which prepare fellows for college—Exeter, Andover, St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, and others—though they are all much older, and have many quaint and interesting customs inherited from the Middle Ages. I shall give an article to each of three of these schools—Winchester, Eton, and Rugby—and then shall add an article on athletics at public schools in general.
The oldest of all the schools is Winchester. Fellows at Andover sometimes tell you that their fathers and grandfathers went there before them. At Winchester this is a common case; and since the quadrangles of the college were built, there has been time not for one grandfather but for fifteen in a line. The prim and charming buildings look every day as old as they are; but if you were to go into the dormitories and see the rows of little iron bedsteads, each with a boy sleeping in it, you would find it hard to realize that grandfathers of these boys have slept at Winchester for five hundred years back, and that all our grandfathers began by being young and small enough to sleep in these cots.
The founder of the school was William of Wykeham, Bishop of the See of Winchester, who was not only a great bishop and a great statesman, but one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages. His purpose in founding a school was to prepare boys to enter a college he had just founded at Oxford—New College, as it was called, and is still called after more than five hundred years. At both Winchester and New College the scholars are proud to call themselves Wykehamists; and when a fellow has been through both he is apt to tell you that he is a Wykehamist of the Wykehamists—which means more than you can ever understand until you hear and see a man say it. The first result of preparing boys to enter the university was to make them too far advanced for the teaching they found when they got there. To carry on their education Wykeham had to have a special body of tutors at New College. This was the beginning of the English custom of having a complete set of teachers at each of the score of colleges that make up a university. Thus Winchester is not only the father of all preparatory schools, but of the English university system of instruction by colleges.
Wykeham intended that all his scholars should be too poor to pay for their own education, and left funds to support them. Within the last generation, however, the masters have changed this. In order to get the cleverest possible pupils, they examine all boys between twelve and fourteen, and admit the best ones each year. About eight usually fail for one who gets in. The boys who succeed are, of course, those who have had the best training; and thus the fellows who get the benefit of Wykeham's money are usually sons of university graduates, and are often rich. Many people object strongly to this, and with good reason; yet the method has one great virtue. Fellows get almost as much credit in school for being studious and able, as for playing football; so that many of the richest fellows study hardest. In our schools, and even in our universities, there is still a stupid prejudice against being a first-rate scholar.
Within the school also there is keen competition. The five or six best students each year get scholarships at New College, which enable them to go through the university without expense to themselves. This is called "getting New," and is perhaps the greatest achievement of a Wykehamist. That such has been the case for at least two hundred years may be seen in the epitaph of a boy who died in 1676 from being hit by a stone, "In this school he stood first, and we hope he is not the last in heaven, where he went, instead of Oxford." When such is the case, there would seem to be little need of the motto on the wall of the old school, which Wykehamists translate, "Work, walk, or be wopped."