PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION. 



105 



Further, in a staff numbering anything from 20 to 50 masters, 

 by whom the actual work is carried on, he has with him a pro- 

 portion and often a majority of senior men. Men who have 

 worked on certain Hues for 20, 30 and even 40 years — capital 

 teachers as many of them are, wise counsellors, devoted to the 

 interests of their boys — nevertheless have neither inclination 

 nor ability to change their method or their outlook. These 

 form the senate of the scholastic State. And in educational 

 politics as in other spheres it is the habit if not the function of a 

 senate to modify the enthusiasms of a fresher blood. A third 

 explanation of the staidness of our educational gait lies in this : 

 a public school deals with pupils for some four or five years only 

 at a critical age, thirteen to eighteen, when the great majority 

 of parents are unwilling to submit their children to the hazard 

 of experiment. With young children novel methods are freely 

 tried ; young men of eighteen and upwards have freedom of 

 choice largely in their own hands. It is at these two periods 

 that new movements can more readily be attempted, as the history 

 of education in the last two decades shows ; the public school 

 must deal more gently and more cautiously with the more 

 awkward age. A parent is at least as potent as a headmaster 

 in determining the nature of a boy's education. And a parent's 

 choice, in which the mother's influence is rightly predominant, is 

 guided by a caution which may perhaps be not far removed from 

 the virtue of prudence. 



From what has been said let us recognise and admit the truth. 

 The public schools are not the growth of to-day or yesterday. 

 Like States and individuals they have their history ; their 

 present and their future are conditioned by their past. You 

 cannot exhibit the full-blown blossom of modernised ideas unless 

 you start and man a completely new school. There was once 

 a parable of new wine and old bottles ; it is only if you pour 

 slowly and pour wine from which the youthful exuberance is 

 refined away, and do not try to fill too full, that the skins will 

 hold. A public school may be progressive, it may grow in 

 grace, it cannot be as though it had never been. Thus also it 

 comes about that we are blamed by one set of people on the ground 

 that we perpetuate class distinctions which are no longer desired, 

 and there are others by whom this same characteristic, perhaps 

 more fancied than real, is accounted one of our scanty merits, 

 and for whom it provides a sufficient motive, whether implicit or 

 avowed, for submitting their sons to the mercy of an institution 



