A DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.• THOSE who remember
Mr. Pellatt's brilliant and suggestive little book on Public Schools and Public Opinion will know what to expect in his latest contribution to the educational controversy, and will not be disappointed. You may agree with him or you may not, but you cannot refuse to acknowledge his courage, his humour, his capacity for hard hitting. He always gives as good as he gets. And he is entitled to a hearing by his record. He has been a Public and Preparatory School master for twenty-five years. Ho holds no special brief for the classics, his own subjects being history and modern languages. He is the uncompromising foe of cramming for scholarships, and sacrificing the needs of the average boy to his clover brethren. Again, though a distinguished athlete at Oxford in his youth, he is under no illusion as to the cult of athletics. Pro. fessionalism he detests. Tho value of games is recreative, and depends on the spirit in which they are played. At the same limo he is a determined and formidable opponent of the utilitarian and materialistic view of education, and in particular of the blind and wholesale adoption of scientific and German methods. In dealing with theorists, who have no practical experience at their back. he is a veritable milieus stultorum. He does not take the assaults on the Public School system " lying down," but carries the war into the enemy's country at all points.
Mr. Pellatt is not an Etonian, but he has sent many boys to Eton, and in associating it with his defence of the Public School system lie has no doubt been prompted by the fact that Eton has been of late a good deal under the microscope of public cpinion. Moreover, a Report has recently been issued by a number of loading men, with Lord Dmborough at their head, fortified by the replier of parents, and directed against the typo of education existing at Eton. This little book is a slashing counter-attack on this Report, which is specially addressed to the parents of Public School boys, but, as Mr. Pellatt points out, it is far more necessary that Public School masters should read and digest it. The replies of the parents are in many instances grossly insulting to the entire profession of schoolmasters, to whom they attribute the lowest motives in maintaining the present system, and they are more or leas unanimous in demanding the " scrapping " of the classics, and the devotion of more time to useful subjects. Here Mr. Pellatt at once comes to grips with the critics. What are useful subjects? Ho has no difficulty in showing that a chaotic divergence of opinion prevails on this noint. Some want more higher mathematics ; others hold up for emulation the linguistic proficiency of the washerwomen of the Southern Hemisphere, who converse in five modern languages; others clamour for political economy, or a knowledge of the founda- tions of estate management, or solar physics. Those demands are not only irreconcilable, but they are open to serious criticism.
• Public School Education and the Wan an Answer to the Attack on Eton Education. By T. Pellatt. London: Duckworth and Co. In. 6d.1 A knowledge of modern languages may be highly useful, but it depends on circumstances. It is not by uny measns an invariably lucrative accomplishment. Many of the charges are boomerangs. Thum one of the most violent opponents of the classics admits that without them he might have been a brutal materialist. His attack on the brains of the Army is sufficiently rebutted by the work of our Staff, and his onslaught on the incompetent teaching of history and geography shows a complete ignorance of the methods actually in use. In fine, it would be a sheer impossibility to devise a curriculum to satisfy those mutually destructive demands, which culminate in Lord Desborough's strange admission that the classics afford the highest mental training you can get ! Mr. Follett is very sarcastic at the expense of this unholy alliance of parents and eminent professors, and attributes the movement to our notional genius for self-depreciation and the zest with which eve delight to join in series of freebooting expeditions against those who labour in the various departments of our national life. As for the demand for " scrapping " the classics, Je.c., ho stoutly maintains that school. masters would loyally fall in wills it if it were pressed by Government or the authorities who carry weight wills the country. The arbitrament does not rest with dons or obscu- rantist professors. The men whose views really count are such men as the late Lord Cromer, Lord Bryce, and Lord liedesdale, whose opinions on the study of the humanities are here set forth. Powerful as those opinions are, Mr. Pellatt might have further fortified them by the testimony of Mr. Paul Elmer More, the dis- tinguished American essayist, in the remarkable plea for the humani- ties contained in his recent work on Aristocracy and Justice. School- masters, he declares, are now blamed for doing what schoolmasters all the world over have done and must do. Thoroughness is the great essential in education, and that inevitably involves continuity, concentration, and a certain amount of rigidity. The specialist is the last person in the world to be given a free hand in devising educational schemes, bemuse he disregards the average pupil and wishes to give preferential treatment to the prodigy. Moreover, the claims of one specialist are deadly to those of another, and thus we find in this Report a general demand for diffusion coupled with specific demands which arc quite irreconcilable. The new system of naval education is generally acknowledged to have made for remark- able efficiency; but if it is admitted to be good., it knocks the bottom out of the case of the " diffusionists," the "useful subjects" reformers. As for our Army training, the results of the Public School system are to be found in the achievements of the British officers from Mons onward. (The testimony of so unbiassed a critic as Sir William Robertson to the value of the O.T.C. is on record, and might well have been invoked to strengthen this part of the ease.) The charge of inefficiency in Lord Deshorough's Report is brought against all Public Schools, yet of two schemes of education admittedly efficient one is closely bound up with the Public Schools, and the other owes its success to a staff largely composed of Public School men. Again, Mr. Pollatt does well to point out that there is an open and strenuous competition between our Public Schools, and, what is more, that the newer ones, relieved in some instances from financial worries by liberal endowments, show an increasing tendency to compete with the older ones on their own ground. Turning to a comparison of British and Continental methods and standards,Mr. Pollatt notes that the course of study in subjects is much the same in Germany, but that the German boy of the same social stand- ing as the boy who in England goes to the Public Schools does more classics than the English Public School boy—a statement, we may add, confirmed by a letter of Dr. Rice Holmes to the Times last year. Mr. Pellatt has some good remarks on " The Fallacy of Progress' in Education "; on the mistaken belief in short cuts, patent schemes, royal roads to learning. You cannot evade drudgery and concentration. The cognate fallacy that you can simplify everything in education is effectively dealt with in a homely illustration. " This [fallacy] leads people who are teaching small children to try to teach them by means of pictures. Thus, in order to help a little boy in the nursery to understand the sentence the hen lays the egg,' you show him a beautiful picture of a he'll and also one of an egg ; unfortunately, however, you cannot draw a picture of the word lays.' " Returning to his comparisons with Germany, Mr. Pellatt emphasizes the dangers of German ideals— excessive unification which destroys individuality and the conver- sion of schoolmasters into Government officials. Character train- ing, he unflinchingly asserts, is impossible without religion, and none of the would-be reformers mentions it ; it is evidently in their view a " useless " subject :— " This is really the basis of the charge brought in the report against the Public Schools—viz. their crime, according to the report, is that they will persist in fiddling about with these worn- out things, religion, honour, and so on, and as a boy's time is limited, and you cannot possibly do everything, they conse- quently neglect the more important things. The gibes in the report against the clergyman head master' all come from this feeling. All I say to the profession to which I am so intensely proudto belong, the profession which I believe to be the very est and noblest a man can work in next to that of the soldier an the sailor, the men who fight for their country and so make my own profession possible—all I say to the Public Schoolmasters is, Stick to your guns ; if necessary go down with the ship,- but still continue to turn out amiable and excellent gentlemen like Lord Desborough, whose only fault, after all, is that he has been rash enough to meddle with an extremely intricate subject about which he knows nothing whatever. Do not try to turn ant Lord Haldanes, but let thorn go, as he did, to Germany for their education. For I think I have plainly shown that you will never satisfy all the gentlemen of the report at the same time. If you succeed in pacify- ing Mr. Samuel you will still have the knight of the washerwomen to cope with.' When I say my own profession is the' very highest' a man can work in I do not, of course, pretend to compare it with that of the clergyman. For the man who has the care of the religion of a country is necessarily the most important man of all. And if this war has not proved that statement to be true, then, as Shake• spears says, You may spit upon me and call me horse.' "
We should have liked to note Mr. Pellatt's very candid remarks on the dangers of cramming for scholarships, and the drawbacks of the present system under which examinations for appointments in the Civil Service are held. But we have said enough to indicate the contents and spirit of the book. We cannot go'so far as Mr. Pellatt in his advocacy of the maintenance of the status quo, but none the less we welcome his gallant and effective defence of our Public Schools against the attacks of those who hold that the main aim of education should be utilitarian.
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