Shorter Notices
-Barbarians and Philistines. By T. C. Worsley. (Hale. los. 6d.) SLINGING brickbats at the English Public School system is an old diversion in which Mr. Worsley has had many predecessors, not all of them inferior to himself in achievement. His slap-dash methods will gratify iconoclasts generally, but the book seems more designed to relieve emotion than to persuade. _ Its thesis, based, inter /die, on Tom Brown's School-Days, Stalky & Co. and Mr. Alec Waugh's Loom of Youth, is that the public school system as it stands is utterly incapable of providing leadership for a democracy.
" The Public Schools," Mr. Worsley writes, " may be producing leaders: but are they—this is the point—producing leaders adapted to a democracy? That question has only to be framed to be answered."
Well, the Public School system has produced, among others, the Leader of the Labour Party, Professor Haldane of the Daily Worker, the Editor of the New Statesman, Mr. John Strachey, Mr. Victor Gollancz, Sir Stafford Cripps, and apparently Mr. Worsley himself. What more does Mr. Worsley want? Misprints are not always of much consequence, but in this case they seem typical of the spirit in which Mr. Worsley has dashed at his subject. He gets Mr. Ensor's initials wrong, he gets Professor Carr's initials wrong, he consistently mis-spells Mr. A. S. Neill's name, he mis-spells Mr. Harold Nicolson's name, he spells Stalky sometimes right and sometimes wrong . . . and so on.
His proposals, the main feature of which is the conversion of the public schools (largely for the sake of their buildings) into Junior Universities, fitting into a system of popular secondary education, deserve consideration, but the polemics of the earlier chapters are not calculated to provide a particularly sympathetic reception for the constructive proposals in the later.
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