THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL PRODUCT.

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL MASTER.

I am not using a form of words when I say that I could have wished that the choice of the editors of this volume had fallen upon some one better qualified than myself to write this article. To deal with the subject adequately one needs long and wide experience, less as a headmaster than as a housemaster, and above all as a housemaster who, not being a headmaster as well, has been able to give a great deal of his time out of school and his undivided interest to the boys in his house, above all to the younger members of it. As, however, I am begged, notwithstanding the absence of this qualification, to write, I will do what I can, if only from a sense of the deep debt of gratitude which the public schools owe to preparatory school masters.

For there can be no question that the whole face of public school education has been changed since the days when it was the common custom to plunge little boys of 8 and 9 without any preparation into all the dangers and difficulties of a great school. I do not go back to that period. When I began work at Marlborough thirty years ago, the preparatory school was already a recognized institution: less universal, however, and less thoroughly organized by far than now. At that time it was possible-as it is possible in a much diminished degree still-to compare the preparatory school product, as handed on to the public school, with the product of home training, or of individual tuition, or of the local grammar school (or private school), where boys of all ages attended.

Even then there was no doubt as to the superiority of the training from the strictly educational point of view. Ten years earlier a contemporary of my own, a boy then as he is a man now of conspicuous ability, had been told on arriving at a great school to try for an entrance scholarship that he might as well go home again if he had not been to a preparatory school. Even in these early days, moreover, the cry was not unknown of cramming and overwork, and it was said that boys thus specially prepared often failed to fulfil their promise: but we found that the excellent grounding in grammar, in the principles of composition, in the elements of mathematics, and so on, in the case at once of abler and less gifted boys, were an abiding foundation which made the superstructure sounder and the process of building it up infinitely easier. Since those days, in spite of many difficulties caused by the differing requirements of different schools, by shortness of time and inequality of material, a systematic preparation has been gradually developed and the results of it are evidenced less by success in examinations, whether competitive or qualifying. than by the way in which boys thus equipped at the outset of their school career usually go through it creditably and with

satisfactory results, even where they possess no singular capacity. It is perhaps these average boys who owe most to their early preparation. Exceptional ability will assert itself, even though its start be unfavourable: ordinary powers cannot afford to be handicapped in the race of school any more than in the race of life.

Before leaving this part of my subject, I should like to say a word or two on the charges, frequently brought against preparatory schools, to which I have adverted above-of cramming and

overwork.

It is sometimes assumed that if a number of instances can be adduced where boys-more especially scholars have after joining a great school ceased to maintain the superiority to others which they showed in the scholarship or entrance examination, such boys must have been crammed with knowledge which they never properly digested, or else that nature, overwrought by long hours of study at a premature age, has asserted herself by a reaction in which the brain remains torpid and inactive.

In a certain proportion of cases -not a large one-one or other of the charges may be true. I know preparatory schools where boys are "crammed" for scholarships: there may be others where they are overworked, though I do not know them. The word "cramming," however, requires definition. Some crammers" are admirable teachers: and the term ought not to be applied without discrimination to tutors who avowedly prepare boys for special examinations. We are probably all in a measure" crammers" in this sense. But cramming in its proper and bad sense is marked by two characteristics: (1) excessive attention to one or two branches of a liberal education to the neglect of the rest; and (2) the imparting of mere information as distinguished from educational principles, the use of the "tip," the memoria technica, and the rest of the equipment of the false educator, including the art of studying and playing up to the idiosyncrasies of different public school examiners. In some measure these examiners have themselves to blame if they fall victims to such artifices. It may be hard, (e.g.) in a grammar paper, not to leave scope for the exercise of them, but in most examinations they can be largely eliminated.

But in the preparatory schools which I know most intimately "cramming" in its bad sense is not practised. No doubt the examinations which the boys have to pass are kept carefully in mind during their preparatory training, and certain points are emphasized and have special time given to them; but there is no neglect of important side-subjects; and the teaching is good and carried out on rational lines. The cases of arrested development to which I have adverted above are many of them to be accounted for by quite other causes than those to which they are commonly attributed; to new surroundings and methods of teaching, to the physical changes which occur at this time of life, to the withdrawal of the stimulus of the entrance or scholars hip examination and the like. Nor am I casting any slight upon public school masters when I add that there may be cases where the preparatory school-master is a better teacher, and that in the

highest sense, than the form-master with whom a new boy is placed. Hitherto the boy has had the advantage of more stimulating teaching, and has in consequence shot ahead of his equals in ability elsewhere: deprived of it, he sinks back to their level. Of course the reverse case is not unfrequently to be found and then the boy mounts rapidly in his new school.

I turn now to training of other kinds. Not long ago I was told of a complaint addressed by the mother of a boy sent much too young to a public school to the matron of the house in which he had passed his first term, to the effect that he had come home not knowing how properly to wash himself or brush his hair. The reply was obvious. But it is just such lessons as these-in the social alphabet-that are taught efficiently and well in preparatory schools. A training in cleanliness, in personal neatness, in carefulness about the elementary laws of health, in orderliness, and resourcefulness in little things, cannot be begun too early. It should be begun in the nursery, but it is often left to the preparatory school to instil its very rudiments. Postponed, at least in some of its details, to the time when the public school is entered, it can only be learnt by imitation of or rough reminders from school-fellows, and a hint now and then from a matron, who cannot from the nature of the case be fully informed about the operations of the dormitory. The age at which a boy should go to a preparatory school is a difficult question. In some homes it is doubtless difficult to arrange for proper teaching to be carried on. But, as a general rule, there should be time allowed for home influences to do their salutary work. It should not be forgotten that the tendency of all schools is to turn out boys of one stamp or mould. Conventions are masters of the situation, for good or evil. The levelling process should not begin too soon or by the time a boy gets to a public school everything may have been levelled down that is most worth having in a boy's character.

More important still is the question of moral training. Very young boys have not unfrequently, as all schoolmasters know, a very imperfect sense of honour, of truthfulness, of honesty and the distinction between meum and tuum. It is far easier to create and to foster such a sense in the simpler atmosphere of a preparatory school than in the more complex surroundings of a public one. Few boys now come to us on whom some impression has not been made in this direction.

The older and higher boys in preparatory schools are often entrusted within obvious limits with power and responsibilities which doubtless have in most instances and in the long run an effect on their character. But this practice has its drawbacks. It may be questioned whether boys at this stage are not too undeveloped to bear the strain of such responsibilities, to understand their nature or importance. There is a danger of a premature appeal to the half formed sense of honour searing the conscience, and rendering it callous when, later on, the appeal ought to make its impression. A boy may become morally blasé; further it should be remembered a boy so trusted finds himself a nobody

when he joins his greater school; and the revulsion-almost parallel to that which takes place when a sixth form boy goes to the University-is in some cases hurtful. Corruptio optimi pessima.

On morality in its narrow sense there is much to be said. Given the best tone in the world amongst elder boys, the knowledge of sexual facts cannot be long delayed, and knowledge means discussion of them. I need not point out the danger, arising from this cause, of the learning of bad habits by younger boys in such a community before they are fully conscious of their significance. It was great in the old days of mixed ages: it is very far from absent now. The preparatory school master who can keep his school pure, and who warns his boys when they leave him of the dangers to come, is discharging a duty the value and importance of which cannot be exaggerated. On the other hand, there is no greater peril known to the boarding house master of a big school than the presence in his house of boys who have been corrupted and familiarised with impure ideas before entering it. I have known schools from which housemasters have dreaded to receive boys. Happily they are few; in the majority of cases preparatory masters are fully alive to the risk and the responsibility. Even among quite young boys there is a danger of contamination from the presence of one or two who have somehow or other learnt all too soon what they should not; yet it is, I believe, in the large majority of instances guarded against and minimised. If boys thus protected in the early stages of their education fall later on, it is the fault either of special proclivities to vice or of untoward surroundings in their later school.

A few words may be added about the preparatory departments of great schools. There is often an objection raised and felt to them to the effect that the boys cannot but mix, and that not to their advantage, with their older neighbours. I do not think that this is the case in any well managed school: the two departments are habitually kept distinct, and little is known by the one of the other. On the other hand, something is gained by the fact that the system of the one is identical with, or leads naturally up to that of the other. For such special purposes as a Navy class, where boys are prepared for an examination to be taken at an early age, such an educational ladder is most valuable: and if we take a broader outlook, it is not easy to see that there is any serious flaw in the system.

I have said, I hope, enough to show what to my mind are the advantages of the preparatory school system as well as its drawbacks. There are few housemasters of public schools who will not agree with me that the gain is far greater than the loss, and that in the system we have much that tells for manliness and much that helps us to combat evil and to foster good.

H. A. JAMES.