PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION* 



107 



buys ! If public schools had yielded to the desire to raise their 

 fees to meet this figure in any great degree, it would now be 

 costing you about £500 a year to send your son to Eton, and over 

 £300 to send him to Westminster. Unanimously the schools 

 have refused to take that view of their duty in a time of national 

 strain. School fees have been raised only to a degree that would 

 enable schools to live. The average increase, as far as I have been 

 able to gauge it, is not more than from 30 to 40 per cent. School- 

 masters have not sought to shift the rest of the burden on to 

 other people's shoulders, but to bear it themselves. School- 

 mastering is essentially a pastoral office, the obligations of which 

 are understood and for the most part cheerfully accepted by 

 those who enter upon it. But the labourer is not unworthy of 

 his hire ; and in spite of the cynic's remark in Mr. Mallock's 

 New Republic that £60 a year is too much to give to your Curate 

 and too little to give to your cook, there is another point of view. 

 School fees as they stand are a large sum for parents to pay ; 

 they are a small sum for schools to receive. And what is the 

 result ? In mercantile terms the parents have been able to 

 purchase education, since the price has not been allowed extrava- 

 gantly to soar above their means, and in the educational labour 

 market there are no unemployed. 



But all these considerations are secondary. There is a pro- 

 founder and more permanent cause of the continued existence 

 and stability of the public schools. They would not be sought 

 after unless they met, I will not dare to say satisfied, a real 

 demand. There must be something in their educational and 

 social system — for under these two heads the criticisms of them 

 may most conveniently be discussed — which is worth having 

 and which a modern democracy desires to have. What is this 

 elusive something ? To take these two things in the reverse 



order, vajepo i> Trporepo v'Ojii >/ jiticd' v ; — ■ ^ 



Consider first the position of the public schools as a social 

 institution. Human beings associated in a State develop their 

 institutions to give efltect to their aspirations and ideas, some 

 good, some bad ; the institutions of any period are an index 

 and an expression of the national character which has given 

 them birth ; and in turn they react upon the national character. 

 Hence in the history of education one sees, for example, in 

 ancient Athens the establishment and the reaction of an 

 elaborate system of private day-schools aiming at a high degree 

 of culture, quick wits, wide knowledge and critical taste, with 



