School holidays are a vexed question, and I have no
desire to vex it further. With the complaint of some secondary schoolmasters that their holidays are being shortened as part of a "levelling-down" process resulting from the 1944 Act I have much sympathy—though I only wish I ever got anything like half as long a holiday in the year as they do. But what stirs me at the moment is not the shortening but the lengthening of holidays. There are some schools—mainly private ones—which seem to be breaking-up earlier and earlier in July and going back later and later in September. The record is held by one (there may for all I know be plenty more) which reassembles on September 30th. Since these are boarding-schools, which charge for board and lodging (as well as tuition) by the term, -not the week, the advantage in abbreviating the term as much as possible is obvious. It is an unattractive form of short measure.
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