Letters to the Editor
DAY VERSUS BOARDING SCHOOLS
1To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sia,—At the present time there is no doubt that the boarding schools enjoy, whether deservedly or not, a greater prestige than the day schools. It is interesting, for example, to notice how few day-school men, having attained high rank in their professions, send their sons to their old schools. In the sCholarship lists, the day schools are not ahead of the great bearding schools, although they might well be expected to be, since the operation of the poverty clause tends to exclude many clever boarding-school boys from the university scholarship lists.
The prestige of the boarding schools, it cannot, of course, be denied, is to a considerable extent a social one. They do, as already indicated, tend to draw the bulk of their pupils from a " higher " and on the whole more moneyed class. A big London day school offers cheap and exceptional advantages to the lower middle classes of the nearer suburbs. This means that the tone is different from (not necessarily inferior to) that of an ordinary public school. To watch, say, the boys of Winchester and St. Paul's mingling, or failing to Mingle, after some athletic contest illustrates what is meant.
At the University the London day-school boy frequently does well—often along original lines—and he is not seldom an amusing person of ingenuity and versatility. But only a minority of the boys of these schools come up to Oxford and Cambridge ; many leave school at sixteen or seventeen to take up city clerkships and the like.
The three limitations, social, financial, and geographical, which in the nature of things are laid upon the London day schools are in some instances increased by the fourth fact that the governing body in these cases is frequently one of the City Companies. Munificent to the cause of education as such bodies are well known to be, there is not usually in any one Company, among its active members, such diversity of talent as exists in almost any boarding-school set of governors. In the nature of things this is inevitably so.
If,. on the whole, the advantage goes to the boarding schools as schools—what of the individual boy ? Is he better educated (in the widest sense) at a large London day school, or as a day boy at a school like Clifton or Cheltenham where the non-boarders are no negligible proportion of the entire school ? On the whole it would appear that few parents, unfettered by financial considerations, deliberately choose to send their sons as day boys. This speaks for itself ! The English public school system, in spite of novels like The Loom of Youth and plays lice Young Woodley, has a tremendous vogue, and it is essentially a boarding-school system.
The most serious defect in the day school, from the point of view of the educationist, is, that the whole training of the boy is not in the hands of the expert. Some may say that this is well : but the educative process ought surely to be a unity, and this it can hardly be if day by day it is under the triple control of parents, street attractions, and schoolmaster. I write, Sir, as one who, owing to an accident followed by a serious illness, went to no public school, and who, while having nir official connexion with any, is keenly interested in them am, Sir, &c., CLEMENT WRITE. Clifton Road, Rugby.
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