What Way for Youth ?
Sirt,—None of your articles on the abo‘e whject -has mentioned the short-term school. Yet this is a most imporkant adjunct to the existing youth services, and an equally, important llridge between the youth services and the public schools on the one hand, and the public schools and the day schools on the other.
At the two Outward -Bound schools—the Sea School at Aberdovey, North Wales, and the Mountain School in the Lake District of Cumber- land—courses last one month, and they are thus boarding schools. There boys, who have hitherto only attended day schools, have the opportunity of experiencing life at a boarding school, and there public- school boys have the opportunity of meeting, and making friends with, their industrial contemporaries, who have perhaps already -been helping to maintain a family for a year or two. Some foreign boys, mostly from Central Europe, will also be met on many of the courses.
• The three essential features if these two schools are team-work, adventurous. pursuits, and thirdly, but by no means least, the Christian religion. To promote the first, the boys on arrival at the school are divided into teams, at the Sea School called " watches " 4nd at the Mountain School called " patrols." Henceforth each boy's activities are focused upon his watch or patrol, and the competition to prove his to be the best becomes really intense by the end of the course. The adventurous pursuit at the Sea School is sailing,' and whether in the swift currents and squalls of the estuary of the Dovey in small boats, ar out in Cardigan Bay in the school ketch, this can certainly be an adven- ture. At the Mountain School it is mountaineering, and anyone who has done his first climbing on or around Scafell, the Gable or Bowfell will know what a thrill that can be, an how it may well dispel for ever the "couldn't care less" attitude to life.
sity be undenominational, but there boys of every Christian denomination and of no denomination at all take part together in a short and simple
The practice of the Christian religion at the two schools must of neces-
act of worship every morning, discuss the living message of the Gospel, and earn marks for their watches or patrols by their proficiency in the Samaritan services of the two schools—life-boat drill and beach- rescue at the Sea School and mountain-rescue at the Mountain School.
Both schools are used extensively by the youth services for training, and there seems to be no doubt that boys do return very much better members of their clubs, scout troops, or cadet or ambulance units. The schools for their part desire nothing more than to see every boy attend- ing their courses, who does not already belong to a youth organisation, return home and join one. They do their utmost to persuade such boys to do so.—Yours truly,
J. N. W. GWYNNE.
Executive Director, Outward Bound Trust.
40 Broadway, S.W.1.
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