Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

It is at this period, also, of a boy's development that the moral question assumes a definite significance. There is no phase of school life that is more generally misunderstood...

The boy who thus exhausts in ragging the residue of energy that the football field allows him, has, it follows, to be careful not to burn the candle at both ends. He has to spar...

Prefectship is the coping-stone of a public school education. The boy who leaves without becoming a prefect has missed, we are continually assured, the most important part of hi...

The ardent idealists with their thousand pretty schemes for the regeneration of mankind, find no difficulty in allotting a few panaceas to the Public School. We hear of the 'new...

Alpha and Omega are the most widely known letters of the Greek alphabet. And the first and last weeks of a public school career have inspired more essays and sermons than the ot...

Twenty years ago a father said to his son, who had just come down from Oxford with a batting average of 35.7: 'For ten years, my boy, you have been playing cricket all through t...

We hear much of the embarrassed misery of a boy's first week at school. And, certainly, it is pretty wretched. Mr Vachell compared it to the first plunge into an ice-cold swimmi...

Were the moral question to be tackled sensibly, and were the reduction of the age limit to modify the 'blood' system, and insist upon the fact that school life is only a prelude...

The last year, and especially the last term, is popularly supposed to be the happiest of a public school career. And it is possible that this may be so in the case of an industr...

And it is splendid fun. Let us make no mistake about that. It is splendid fun. For the ordinary boy, for all those, that is to say, who have not been designed by nature for the...

Fears for the future and regrets for the past are alike forgotten during the last week. There are sad moments, but, as Arnold Lunn remarked, 'there is a world of difference betw...

By this time the new boy may be truly said to have reached the inner circle of a public school philosophy. He knows to what gods he must bow the knee. And he serves dutifully be...

Desmond Coke has described in _The Bending of a Twig_, the middle years of a public school career as being slow to pass, but swift in retrospect. He devoted two chapters to them...

But it is not only on account of the moral question that I would advocate the lowering of the age limit. Such a reform would, I believe, make its influence felt on every side of...