TESTS AND TEACHING
S1R,—While I find myself in complete agreement with the Master of Balliol in his appeal for a physical as well as mental content for our educational syllabus, I am somewhat disturbed by his remedy— the county badge. Surely our academic system has suffered suffi- ciently in the past from the emplOyers' demand for the " magic," for anyone to wish to see a similar incubus hung round our " athletic " necks.
I would venture to suggest that any school equipped with playing fields and gymnasia can provide the stimulus under which the average boy will learn to delight in that state of well-being that comes to the trained athlete, whatever his game or sport. Perhaps, however, I should add that, the inspiration must come from masters whose sense of vocation has led them to realise that all the activities of their pupils are just different facets of a single stone, and who are anxious to lead their boys in the paths of right thinking, right movement and right living, a trinity to which the name Physical Education has been given. I have had the gratifying experience of seeing the reality of such a system in a State secondary school, of knowing a boy who at thirteen years of age suffered so badly from flat feet as to be unable to undertake any prolonged exercise, win the Fowler Dixon style prize for walking at the public school cham- pionships; and another who in his early teens walked and ran in a most ungainly way, yet won the mile race in the same champion- ship in 4 minutes 3o seconds.
I have no wish to detract from the work of Dr. Kurt Hahn, late of Salem, but when I hear people stating, in favour of the county badge system, the fact that Salem (a specialist school for the not too brilliant sons of the German rich) won the public schools cham- pionship three times a decade ago by sweeping the board in the throwing events, at a period when English boys knew nothing about the technique of throwing, I would have them know that an English school with only a hundred boys over 141 years of age, and with an average leaving-age of barely 17, drawing its boys from the local population only, won the same championship in the last two meetings before the war; further, that in the second of these two years the runner-up was Mill Hill School, in which a similar conception of physical education is held. Let us therefore devote our energies in the future to developing a system based on the traditional English games; to training masters to understand and develop the ideas of physical education m their schools; to providing all schools with the necessary facilities and seeing that every child has the privilege of remaining at the type of school suited to his mental equipment at least to the end of the school year in which he reaches his sixteenth birthday. Finally, it is to be hoped that the Scout and similar voluntary bodies may continue the valuable work which they have done in the past unhampered by an ex- ternally imposed examinational system.—Yours, &c.,
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