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σε placed" by the authorities of the public schools on these two subjects alone." Or to quote Mr. Gidley Robinson's able and temperately worded review of the situation, "the preparatory school curriculum in all its main features is the direct outcome of the entrance scholarship system at the public schools." In order to lessen the obstacles now impeding those changes in the curriculum, changes which are so inherently reasonable and so widely desired, it is doubtful whether anything will avail short of strong representations from the parents of the boys whose education is thus in some degree impaired. There is no reason in the nature of things why the public schools should not give marks in their examinations for a different and more extended range of subjects. And it is difficult to believe that Oxford and Cambridge would offer serious opposition to such a reform or fail to readjust in turn their entrance requirements in accordance with the altered curriculum of the public schools.

6. No one can visit an English preparatory school of the best modern type without feeling that no other country can show, among its schools for boys of the same age and sort, anything that can surpass in excellence and promise what we here are so fortunate as to possess. He would probably go further than this, and say that he had never seen, and never expected to see, in any other country, such a scene of happy school life or such thoughtful and affectionate care lavished on schoolboys, yet with due regard to order or discipline.

But while heartily admiring all that is now done to make these schools the centres of much that is best in educational influence, the present writer is far from thinking the course of studies ideal or well designed for the intellectual welfare of the boys. The last thing he would wish to do is to impute blame to the masters in charge of the preparatory schools. It is not their fault. In the last resort it is the fault of the parents, who ought to insist on a change, and who alone can bring a change about. The schools have picked material; they teach some of the brightest boys in England. Many of these boys are taught up to a very high point of proficiency in a rather narrow range of subjects. The quality of the work done in classics is specially remarkable; and it would be a grievous mistake to think that anything short of the very best teaching in other subjects could effectively take the place of what is now so well done in Latin or Greek. Many experienced and skilful schoolmasters are convinced that exact teaching in the classical languages is an unrivalled discipline for the mind-not in a directly utilitarian sense, but in its indirect effect on the logical powers. Many other people, while not prepared to concede the unique excellence of the older classical training, would cordially agree that, in skilful hands, the teaching is thorough, and that, in a certain limited sense, it severely disciplines the mind of the boys. But they feel that it often fails to induce a wide range of intellectual interests. It causes the boys to miss their one opportunity of learning many things far more appropriate than advanced classics to their natural tastes and years. With great respect to those eminent authorities who hold a contrary

90 Place of the Preparatory School in Secondary Education.

opinion, I would urge that the customary course of studies in our English preparatory schools is unduly neglectful of the mother tongue, of English composition and of English literature; that it is too heavily loaded with Latin; too soon encumbered with Greek; and that it fails to do what could and should be done in the teaching of French as a living language. It usually provides far too little drawing, brush work, and manual training generally. It might do more to interest boys in natural history and to train them in a scientific way of looking at things. Too often it fails to develop powers of expression or to stimulate and strengthen the imagination, or to widen the range of intellectual and social sympathies. It is prevented from doing all this, chiefly by the dead weight of habit and by the rules for the entrance examinations at the public schools. If in addition to all the noble work which the Preparatory and Public Schools do at present, they felt free to take the lead together in cautiously but extensively reforming their curriculum, the benefits conferred by them on the nation, already so great as to excite our admiration and gratitude, would be considerably increased.

M. E. SADLER.

ENTRANCE SCHOLARSHIPS

AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS

AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON PREPARATORY

SCHOOLS.

It is hardly to be disputed that the astonishing improvement which is to be noticed in the Preparatory Schools of to-day compared with those of thirty years ago has affected especially the two departments of physical supervision and teaching. As regards the first, there is little doubt that the influence of the mothers of the boys has been steadily and successfully exercised in the direction of general improvement. It is only natural that at the tender age when a child first leaves home, the mother's voice should be a powerful one in the settlement of many questions bearing on food, accommodation, and so forth. But when we come to consider the teaching, a new question presents itself. Granted that the mass of parents have secured important changes in some departments, are we to attribute to them also the manifestly greater efforts now made on all sides to keep the teaching up to a high level? The difficulty in this idea is that the anxiety shown by the English upper classes in the mental training of their children cannot even yet be described as very wide or deep, and thirty years ago it was even less so. But if this is not the cause of the phenomenon, what is?

The answer to this question introduces one of the most interesting but least satisfactory parts of the subject.

During the last thirty or forty years the system of entrance scholarships has been enormously extended among the Public Schools. It was found that the large endowments of Eton and Winchester were attracting the very pick of the cleverest boys in the country, and since at that time public attention began to be more and more given to the financial side of education, it was natural that other schools which had risen in importance since the middle of the century should do their best to draw some supplies from the same source; that is, to hold out prospects of gratuitous or nearly gratuitous education to the clever sons of impecunious parents. The idea once formed spread very rapidly, and soon (that is, about 1885) every school of any prominence at all, and many grammar schools that could ill afford it, were offering substantial reductions to boys whose promise in classics and mathematics could be tested by an examination at twelve or thirteen years of age. Thus a rivalry was established, and from the figures quoted in the Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education, 1895 (Secondary Education, vol. i., p. 173) it is clear that the desire to outbid each other in the pursuit of clever boys has induced the governing bodies of the Public Schools to abandon all idea of restricting the money grant

to the eleemosynary purposes for which it was originally given, and to press forward in eager haste and add to their scholarships, so as to keep up the standard of cleverness in the new entries to the school.

The precise effect of this change on the Preparatory Schools it is very important to estimate. But before doing so it will be as well to point out the full meaning of the action of the governing bodies and of enterprising head masters who have urged them on. It is interesting to determine how this rise of scholarships has come about now, while in the middle of the century the peculiar pressure and difficulties connected with it were not felt. Two great influences have been at work: railways and the public Press. The time was, from 1850 to 1860, for example, when a school like Shrewsbury, owing to the fame of two or three great head masters, became a nursery of classical scholarship of a most remarkably advanced order. Critics might say that the scholarship was narrow in character, suited to the old classical Tripos at Cambridge, and alien from the wider curriculum of the Oxford Greats, and so forth. But no one could possibly deny the extraordinary enthusiasm for a certain kind of learning which existed there, and the ripe, sound scholarship which the school produced. In other words, the prestige of the Eton or Winchester scholarships was not so great as to absorb all the clever boys in the country. The insufficient railway accommodation no doubt prevented many parents in the north from sending their boys southwards, and tended to feed the local schools with scholars in their own county, or, anyhow, from not very remote districts. But when this insufficieney of railways gave way to rapid and easycommunication from all parts of the kingdom, it was plain that the old local schools would have a hard fight with the big boarding schools; for the smaller grammar schools the fight has been, and still is, one for dear life, And even the large foundations, such as Marlborough, Repton, Haileybury, Clifton, Rossall, and others, though they continued to thrive in numbers, thought it necessary to institute or augment scholarships in order to prevent the absorption of all the rising talent by the other foundations. It is possible, however, that if left to themselves these schools would have shortly discovered that the large expenditure involved was likely to prove useless. But at this juncture the second great influence made itself felt-that of the public Press, or rather, to put it more accurately, the increased publicity which social changes have given to school life and doings.

At this point, the Preparatory Schools have been drawn into, the vortex. The rapid increase of the pressure of competition. among all Private and Preparatory Schools, has made it seem advisable to the large majority to advertise their successes in the newspapers. Hence the scholarships gained in the Public School entrance examinations are duly recorded not only in the prospectuses of many Preparatory Schools, but in the newspapers at the time the result is made known. It is felt, whether rightly or wrongly it is hard to say, that the one thing fatal to a school

is obscurity and so the authorities do everything in their power to bring before the public the names and numbers of small boys who have passed a stiff but narrow examination, and have gained the reward of paying less for their education at the Public School.

There is something open and above board in the action of the Preparatory Schools, which is less noticeable in the orthodox behaviour of the authorities of the Public Schools. Their method of making similar successes known to the public is to publish them by the mouth of the head master on Speech Day, the proceedings of which are duly reported in the leading newspapers. In defence of this practice it may be urged that the friends of the school wish to know the honours that have been obtained, and further that the strong current of athletic interest, which sometimes threatens to bear all before it, needs to be counteracted by prominence being given to intellectual success, and that if the teaching in a school is good there is no reason why its fruits should not be pointed to on fitting occasions with legitimate pride. The worst of it is, however, that there is a serious unreality belonging to the whole matter, which is transparent enough to the few who know the truth, but very deceptive to those who do not. It consists simply in the fact that the examination successes of any particular school depend almost entirely on the quality of the boys sent thither. There are slight differences no doubt between the teaching and the traditions of scholarship belonging to one school rather than to another. But various influences are slowly but surely abolishing these differences and reducing the effective training of one school to the same level as that of another. Formerly there was a great difference in the comparative efforts of the leading schools in the matter of intellectual training. One school was famed for its great traditions and long history and its "yield" of notabilities in the past. Another was full of intellectual activity; and various methods of teaching Greek and Latin were practised here, but unknown there. Nowadays all this is changed. Everybody is urged forward to do their best; the same kind of men get the teaching of the best scholars in their hands, and what is done in one foundation is quickly known of and adopted at another. And yet the difference between different schools in the matter of scholastic "honours" is enormous, and if anything is increasing. What is the reason of this?

The head masters of the Public Schools are still of opinion that the amount of money offered in scholarships is the determining factor in the situation. They do not proclaim this on Speech Days, but they show it either by their continuing the scholarship grants or by increasing them. And prima facie it would seem that they are right. The schools with the longest annual record of successes are those which offer the largest and most numerous scholarships; it is clear that even if the peculiar advantages belonging to Day Schools in London, Birmingham, and Manchester be allowed due weight, the financial differences have a great deal to do with the result. And yet the efforts made by

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