PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION. 



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is held and is expressed that the public schools are not schools 

 for the public, but are an aristocratic preserve ? I doubt if 

 it was ever so. Certainly in the records of Westminster I 

 find Ben Jonson, the son of a bricklayer, in the sixteenth century, 

 and in the seventeenth, Henry Stubb, an impecunious mother's 

 son, sitting side by side with their fellows without question asked. 

 And I suspect that the annals of other old foundations reveal the 

 same tale. But in the present day, strictly interpreted, the argu- 

 ment must invite us to assume that the 700 members of the 

 Upper House have been so lavishly endowed by Providence as to 

 have 60 sons apiece, all of an age to be at school together in a single 

 year ! It were hardly possible even in a eugenic paradise. But 

 divesting the matter of any element of absurdity, let us interpret 

 the term aristocracy in a far wider sense ; let us take a smaller 

 selection of the public schools ; subtract from our 125 schools the 

 50 which in some form or another are in receipt of public monetary 

 grants from the Board of Education ; or take a narrower limit 

 still, and consider the argument in respect only of those 55 

 schools which are entitled to membership of the Public Schools 

 Club — even at that you are required in a single year to produce 

 a supply of nearly 19,000 boys between the ages of 13 and 18, 

 who are supposed to be drawn from the high-born families of 

 the country, from stocks of ancient hneage. Even this sup- 

 position is "a thing imagination boggles at." The argument 

 cannot, I think, be maintained either by fancy or by fact. It 

 is not a small and exclusive section of the people that is served 

 by the public schools ; it is not one class but several. Directly, 

 the education of the schools is shared in by the various grades 

 of the upper and middle classes from whom the 43,000 pupils 

 come ; indirectly and in progressive stages by the whole com- 

 munity. For what is the process ? Is it not this ? The 

 traditional and characteristic inheritance which the public schools 

 preserve is a certain social culture, a refinement of manners, 

 speech, mind, character and taste— qualities which form the 

 distinctive equipment of the educated man. Such qualities 

 are acquired in part by hereditary transmission combined with early 

 home influences ; in part, but to a lesser degree, by teaching ; 

 in part, and to the greatest degree, by constant and intimate 

 contact with those who already possess them. It is this flower 

 of social culture that for one short stage in its development 

 is nourished by the public schools. It is a thing recognised 

 as in itself desirable. It is for this reason that public school 



