6 AUGUST 1937, Page 21

- - [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,=-All your

contributors on this subject appear to assume without argument that it is desirable to save boarding schools at the expense of day schools, or at least, side by side with them. ' Is it not time to consider the very grave disadvantages a boarding school brings to its members : (t) by the dislocation of their experience of home life. (2) By the segregation of members of one sex together and the exclusion of the other sex ? Sir Frank Fletcher, in his very able book, points out that all boys do not necessarily have good homes—none the less, the home and the family is the normal unit of civilised life, and boys do not, as a rule, profit from an absence of education in the subject which, in the end, will be of the greatest impor- tance for them.

Personally, I believe that the future position of many public schools will, and should be, that of regional secondary day* schools for the areas in which they are. I never meet a modern secondary school boy without feeling that he is a great deal better educated than I, with a public, school education, ever was. But that, of course, is no doubt my own fault—not the