LONG HOLIDAYS.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—Yoar dictum that school holidays " have increased, are- increasing, and ought to be diminished " will be heartily welcomed by a very large class of parents, who wish to bring up their- children with the least possible amount of trouble to themselves.. No one, however, would suspect you of writing in the interest of persons thus minded. You show, as usual, that you desire to look. at the question on every side ; and I therefore venture to suggest that however reasonable may be your dissatisfaction with the pre- sent state of things, there is one important consideration to which. you have hardly done justice.
You speak chiefly of the effect of school-work on the boys, but we must also, in the interest of the boys, think of its effect upon, the masters. It is, for the boys' sake, of the very greatest import- ance that the masters should teach with freshness of mind and in good spirits ; and yet these are constantly endangered by the monotony of school life. There are other callings, no doubt, which. involve much more monotonous employment than that of the- teacher, but those who follow them have not so delicate a task as working on the mind and character of the young. School-. teaching is a thing quite by itself. In its mechanical regularity it is like many humble occupations, and yet it differs from them, all in this, that the quality of the work turned out depends almost. entirely on the personality of the worker. If a master could be• made into a machine for putting knowledge into boys as a printer becomes a machine for putting words into type, you might apply the moststrictly economical rules and get as much work out of him as possible ; but this cannot be, and as soon as you have extracted more- than a very moderate amount, you will find that the work suffers in• quality as much as it gains in quantity. You, Sir, have accused us teachers of being " half-timers." I fear statistics would not bear you out, and I am inclined to think that boys in England are injured rather by their masters working too much than too. little. I agree with you that a great distinction should be drawn between day-schools and boarding-schools, but in the latter, at all events, we ought to have a liberal allowance of holidays. Many large boarding-schools are in the country, where the masters are- almost cut off from social intercourse. The consequence is that their occupation has a very narrowing and often a very depressing effect. upon them. In some schools there is no regular break between the
beginning of February and the end of July, and during the last half of this period the masters find their work much more trying than during the first half. The boys seem to them less easy to teach, and they seem to the boys far more irritable.
" By all means, then, let the schoolmaster every now and then go abroad, or wherever he may get a thorough change, and renew his rapport with the outer world. Perhaps the best plan would be to have three holidays,—three weeks at Christmas, three weeks from the middle of April, and six weeks from the beginning of August ; but the third holiday has two drawbacks : first, the parents who send boys from a distance do not like to pay the expenses of three journeys ; and, secondly, both before and after a holiday there is always a good deal of time wasted. However, I did not take up the pen to discuss any particular scheme, but to testify, however feebly, that a liberal allowance of holidays is absolutely essential to enable us to keep our humanity in the monotonous occupation
of school-teaching.—I am, Sir, &c., R. H. Q.
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