“There, it is to be feared, they will find the parents most in their way. The normal father may endure his son being taught poetry, but he will object to the instilling of opinion other than his own.” Outlook.

“Fancy some imp of fifteen or sixteen assailing the author of his being, a court-worn barrister or ‘rattled’ stockbroker, at his evening meal: ’Father, I think Lord Bryce’s bill for the reform of the House of Lords radically unsound,’ or suddenly asking his mother, who, good, easy woman, is revolving in her mind the merits of a coat and skirt she has seen that afternoon at Debenham’s: ’Mother, what is your opinion of the Trading with the Enemy Bill?’” Saturday Review.

“Youth is asking questions as never before asking awkward, burning questions, which put its seniors in a flutter. The seniors, under question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer these things out, and perchance clear their own minds in the process.” Westminster Gazette.

By way of epilogue an appeal to the parents.

What is it that the parents want from the schools? The question is all-important; for by the spiritual law of demand and supply, what they want they will get. It has been said that every nation has the government it deserves. So it is with the press, and so it is with the schools: we get what we want, and what we want is what we deserve. What do we want?

There are some parents who take the public schools quite seriously as places of professional training, places where their sons will be taught to earn their livings, and they are encouraged in this notion by the fact that several professional bodies insist on successful candidature in some pass examination in school subjects as a first step towards entrance into the profession, and thereby rivet these examinations upon the schools. The result is not altogether bad. The examinations make for a deplorable ossification of the curriculum; but they also set a certain low standard, and drive a certain type of boy and master to work, and, though the type of work is not very exalted, it is better than nothing at all. On the individual boy the effect will be various. “Look here,” says the house master, “there’s London Matric. at the end of next term. Hadn’t you better give up all this foolery with politics and do a little real work?” The advice was taken, and perhaps we are not sufficiently impartial to offer a valuable opinion on the result. However, the boy was no fool, and the first part of the advice need never have been given. Except in the case of boys, far too numerous, who are taking examinations that ought never to have been imposed on them, “modern aiders” and the like who are mugging up “prepared books” of Virgil and Euripides, work for a pass examination ought not to mean the cessation of all other intellectual activity.

There is another much more old-fashioned type of parent who stands for everything that is traditional, who is seriously disturbed if his boy wanders far afield from the old classical curriculum, who regards all new subjects as foolish fads. It is this parent, helped by an old-fashioned type of house master, who retains in a mild torture of boredom the boys who linger wasting their time in the lower reaches of the classical side.

But anything is better than nothing, and the attitude of many more parents is purely cynical. They just leave it to the schoolmaster. “Cynical” might seem a hard word with which to repay this compliment of trust; but it is not, for there is really no compliment and no trust. The parent does not really believe in the school-master’s judgment. He believes in him so little that he thinks it simply does not matter what happens in the class-room, provided the boy seems to enjoy himself how many parents really know whether their boys do enjoy themselves at school? and provided the house master is not actively complaining.

Now, there is only one hope, and that is that the parents should come to look at this matter of their son’s education politically. School-time is a training, and we are all familiar enough with the idea of training now. Before the war, as since, schools had their O.T.C.’s. But these O.T.C.’s were wretched perfunctory affairs, boring everybody, because we hardly any of us seriously envisaged them as a training, only as an incubus. Now, we all see them as training for a part that has got to be played, and the whole spirit is different. But the country will soon be calling upon our public school boys to play another and perhaps even more difficult part, and where is the training for that? When the war is won we shall plunge into another maelstrom; and it will all be politics, politics, politics. The leaders of labour have roughly charted their course; they mean to make a new world for the masses whether we like it or not, and they mean in the main right. But what part are the public school men going to play? It is an extremely difficult position, and the difficulties crop up not only in the details, of which only mature experience can give a knowledge, but in the elementary principles regulating our outlook, our attitude. And that is where the public schools could come in with irresistible effect if only they would brace themselves to the task. “Your king and country need you,” said the old recruiting poster of 1914. “Good God! have they never wanted me till now?” was the natural rejoinder. In any case they will not cease to want the public school boy when the war is over.

In this task the parents must co-operate. The normal father, we are told, will object if his son brings home opinions other than his own. But, in sober truth, if the son brings home the same opinions as the fathers have always held, we are in a poor way. It was the fathers and the grandfathers who brought the world to its present pass. It is the sons who, starting with new principles from new beginnings, have got to set it on a better road. The Saturday Review and The Westminster Gazette offer us, in the quotations at the head of this chapter two little vignettes of parentage. Which would you have?

The holidays occupy rather more than a quarter, and rather less than a third of the year. If you asked what the boys do in the holidays, you would ask a question that puzzles many boys themselves to answer. The waste of school holidays is even more striking than the waste of school terms. For education should not be, indeed, cannot be, limited to term time. The proportion of boys who require “rest” in the holidays, even for the first week or two, is small. A slack time, prolonged beyond a week or so, bores most boys consumedly and ought to bore them all. We are not thinking here of the favoured few who get their fill of fishing and field sports. Such things have their limitations, perhaps, but they offer at least a time of activity, resourcefulness, and keen enjoyment. Most boys, however, live in quiet homes in towns, far from the opportunity for such things, and how these pass the time is a mystery even to themselves, as many have confessed to us. In plain words, they kill the time, and thereby acquire a most dangerous accomplishment. Some few, it is true, make themselves endlessly useful to their parents, and nothing could be better. But only a few homes provide scope for an “odd-jobs man” of this type. For the bulk, holidays are simply times of unemployment.

Now, when a schoolmaster ventures to offer advice about the holidays, he might seem to be stepping presumptuously outside his own province; but that plea for reticence is one we cannot admit. Term and holidays alike are an education, and they interact upon one another so closely that the schoolmaster not only may, but must, form his judgment upon both. It is not for us to compile a detailed “Parent’s Assistant.” Heaven forbid! Every home has its own problems and its own opportunities, but surely there is no home in which the parents have not a range of activities, professional, commercial, political, or literary. So often, as it seems, from various motives, good and bad, the boy remains more or less excluded from these long after he has become capable of a certain partnership in his parents’ interests. The drawback of life at a public school is that it is highly artificial. Call it as you please a barrack or a monastery, a boarding-school is something cut off from the main streams of ordinary life. In the holidays the boy renews contact with ordinary life, and that periodic renewal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays should bring him into contact with some more of life than its superficial frivolities.

The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as fascinating as the child of two, and the parents’ time and energy devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent.

And it will, we believe, bring a new happiness to many parents themselves. As school-masters, our widest experience of parents not that we pretend it is very wide is our experience of boys’ talk about their homes. Boys speak of their parents with deep affection and respect, as a rule; but so very often they leave an impression that they do not really know them. It is the commonest thing in the world for fathers and sons, without any positive estrangement, to get entirely out of touch with one another during the latter part of a boy’s school-time. The boy develops rapidly, and the greater part of his development is quite concealed from the father. He returns home to find his father “just the same,” and apparently quite unable to divine the new developments which the son is too proud to reveal uninvited. Or maybe he does attempt to reveal them, and, bungling his task, finds himself misunderstood, and lays the blame on the father. So often, as it seems, the father might have helped matters by playing a rather more active part, and going half, or even three-quarters, of the way to meet his son’s confidences. But there is a natural shyness of fathers towards their sons at this stage, and shyness on one side begets shyness and misunderstanding on the other. More than once a boy has said to one of us, “What am I to do to get into touch with my father? Last holidays we found we’d nothing sensible to talk to each other about at all.” It is difficult to advise, but the most obvious thing to say is, presumably, to remind the boy that his father is but a human being like himself; that possibly the boy is himself rather unnecessarily enigmatic, and that instead of expecting the father to make all the moves, the son might himself hold out a hand and help the father to understand the changes that had taken place within him. That is how the matter stands on the boy’s side, and it may help some fathers to know it.

One of our boys, we remember, wanted to discover something at first hand of the real interests of employees in his father’s firm. Whatever he discovered, it made an excellent holiday interest for him. Among other things, he attended some W.E.A. lectures, because he found that the more intelligent men were interested by them. This was a boy of rather unusual initiative; but we believe there are many boys who would find a genuine interest in such matters, if the fathers gave them the lead. Thus the wretched tradition that the holidays are for unemployment would be gradually broken down, and games would take their proper place in holidays and term alike. Perhaps, too, the father on looking back might find that there had been some “education” in it for himself also.

The principle from which we started was that the public schools were full of glorious possibilities, to-day largely unrealised. Is not the same true of many homes?