SCHOOLMASTERS AND THE SMALL BOY.
THE neighbourhood of Christmas is a season set apart, among other urgent matters, for the consideration of the small boy; and he, for his part, will refuse to be troubled by that fact. It is not much more than a week since he re- turned to the indulgent bosom of his family from the blandly disciplinary atmosphere of whatever Rodwell Regis "prepares" him for his future public school; and naturally, as yet, since Christmas Day occupies the whole of the week that goes before it and at least one or two days afterwards, he has not really had time to turn round. Not only have all the new things in the house and the garden to be inspected several times and tested in convenient ways, especially the new dog, but Boxing Day finds him with a considerably enlarged exchequer, on which immediate drafts will be necessary, one of the chief plagues about a Bank Holiday being that all the shops are shut. Why, in a paradise so completely and satisfactorily furnished with bicycles, ponies, paint-boxes, puppies, cameras, rabbits, cannons, canaries, and gunpowder, should he trouble his head with the school he has left behind him ?
Meanwhile grave and reverend bodies of schoolmasters consider him sagely. One of the gravest and most reverend of all, the Head-Masters' Conference, concluded its sittings on Saturday last. It was surely a rather strange conclusion. Most of the time was taken up with discussion of a resolution moved by the Head-Master of Winchester and seconded by the Head- Master of Eton. It was a long resolution, but perhaps is worth giving in full. Here it is: " That this Conference is of opinion that undue pressure is put upon boys at preparatory schools by the requirements of scholarship examinations at the public schools, and that in the interests of education the best remedy lies in lowering materially the standard of knowledge required in the Greek language." That practically gives voice to the opinion of the overwhelming majority of. preparatory-school masters. They know what it means, they profoundly believe it to be true, and they have, endeavoured, for years to get the public-school masters to help them to right what is wrong. As Canon Lyttelton pointed out, the competition among preparatory-school masters is extremely severe, especially in the matter of attempting to gain scholar- ships, but upon this one point they are unanimous. The public schools are asking them to teach too much. Both Canon Lyttelton and Dr. Burge strongly urged that scholarship Greek was taking too large a place in the teaching of small boys. As Dr. Burge remarked, "little boys who had been learning Greek for two or three years were expected to trans- late quite difficult Greek unseen. But that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was that they could translate it. They learned to do so by learning the tricks of unseen translation, and they concentrated, for some months before the examina- tion, on the tricks of so-called education, on learning those tricks at the expense of subjects on which they would be far better occupied." Every schoolmaster knows those tricks. Every preparatory-school master hates having to teach them, but you cannot get public-school scholarships with- out them. The great difficulty, however, which has always stood in the way of those who have tried to get the scholarship examinations changed to a fair test of a clever boy's abilities, which would yet involve no kind of cramming or teaching of tricks, has been the conservatism of the great public schools. When, therefore, the two most conservative of all (or if they are not the two most conserva- tive, the British parent at all events supposes them to be), Eton and Winchester, openly offer to lower the examina- tion standard so as to get rid of the trick teaching, it might have been thought that the rest of the public schools would follow them. Did they ? Not a bit of it. They rejected the resolution by sixteen votes to ten. The Greek is to be kept at as high a standard as ever. The deliberate and unanimous opinion of the whole body of pre- paratory-school masters, pronounced on a question which they believe vitally affects the proper training of a child's mind, is set aside by a number of teachers who do not, first and fore- most, train children. It is surely a strange situation.
The worst of it is that when the public-school masters claim that the standard is not too high, the small boy does not help the preparatory-school master at all. He is capable of attaining it, and he does attain it. But it is at a price. The small boy in the schoolroom is, in truth, an extremely inter- esting person. One of the most interesting points to notice in him—perhaps on the whole it is the most interesting—is a quality of his mind which, for want of a better term, may be called elasticity. There are some boys whose minds stretch very slowly. They cannot be hurried into suddenly grasping a great deal, and they may carry that incapacity with them to the end of their lives, developing very likely into sound men of business and admirable parents. There are other boys whose minds begin by stretching slowly, and will not be pulled open easily, but who at the age appointed by their constitution suddenly expand their minds themselves. Up to quite a late stage in their education, possibly after they have left school, possibly even after they have left the University, they may have shown hardly any signs of a broad intelligence, and then in a year, almost in a day and a night, something within them moves. They cannot take in too much or too quickly ; what they take in remains with them, and they develop into ordained and unsuspected captains of industry and leaders of men. There is a third class of boys, and it is a small one. Their minds are so elastic that they can be pulled open as fast as their teachers please. They will expand to almost any achievement. At the age of thirteen they will translate Thucydides with the erudition expected from an under- graduate in Honour Mods., and will render English verse into Latin elegiacs with an ease and nicety which would do credit to the weekly competitors of the Westminster Gazette, from some of whom perhaps they may have learnt the trick of the thing. The numbers of this class are small, but they include pretty nearly all the scholarship boys; and in later life they are represented by many brilliant thinkers and workers, no doubt, and by more who are fairly, though not exceptionally, successful. But the number of partial and absolute failures mnst.be studied to be believed. The elastic was stretched too quickly at the beginning ; either . it would expand no more later, or not enough to help a grown man; perhaps it even began to contract again ; possibly it snapped.
Will any schoolmaster contend that on any basis, either of selecting the best boys, or the boys who are likely to develop into the best men, the high-pressure, high-standard examina- tion for young boys is justified by its results ?
Do not the schoolmasters, then, understand their pupils ?
Many of them do. of course; very likely most. Indeed. there never was a time, probably, when schoolmasters and boys were on better terms, understanding and understood, than to-day. There are certainly fewer Kings and Prouts in the profession than there were in the days when Beetle wrote odes to those immortal beings ; and there are more men of the type of " Ham," in that lesser but excellent study of modern schoolboys and masters, Mr. Ian Hay's "Pip."
reviewed not long ago in another column,—men who realise that " Jinks minor and Muggins tertius, who sit in the back row with lowering brows and grinding teeth, chafing under his tyranny and preaching sedition at intervals, will one day come and sit in his armchairs, with their feet on his mantel- piece, bearded or sun-burned or distinguished, and will convey to him, if not in words, at any rate by their demeanour, their heart-felt thanks for the benefits which he lavished upon them with so unsparing a hand in the grand old days in the Shell or the Remove or the Lower Fifth.
That is his reward. Men have died for less." But if they understand so much, why not more Of all questions
in which the small boy is concerned, this question of im- posing a high standard in Greek for scholarship examinations is the one which has been most thoroughly debated ; yet. when
at last a numerous body of distinguished teachers, who might reasonably be supposed to know more about the capabilities of small boys than other people, give, it as their opinion that the standard set up is too high—well, they are merely told that they are wrong, and that is the end of it. The hero, of all the discussion, it must be owned, will not, for his part, be greatly moved one way or the other. He will proceed on his
way. He can bear it all. To travesty Matthew Arnold— Yes, we arraign him ; but he, The twelve-year Titan, with deaf Ears, and untroubled eyes Regarding neither to right Nor left, goes passively by Staggering on to his goal, Bearing on shoulders unbowed, Atlanteiin, the load
Well-nigh not to be borne Of the too vast orb of his Greek.
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