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crib." This principle places the Public Schools Entrance Scholarship Examinations on a far higher and more satisfactory level than Local and similar examinations where papers on prepared books are set.

The general or English papers call for some comment.

(i.) Roman and Greek History are taught at the Public Schools so much more than English History that those papers are best which encourage a thorough and thoughtful teaching of English history. Roman and Greek history may well be left to the Public School period.

(ii.) Geography is rarely taught on the classical side of Public Schools, and therefore this subject should be encouraged at Preparatories, especially physical geography and kindred subjects, as a means of cultivating the observing powers. Hence, the paper that makes it necessary to have learned geography is better than one that makes it merely optional.

Now, of the papers printed above only one is, in the opinion of the present writer, satisfactory in these respects, i.e., the Winchester history and geography paper; the next best is the Marlborough paper; but the Winchester questions are much better chosen.

The second part of the Eton paper may test general knowledge, but is not of a character to encourage a candidate to spend any fair proportion of his time for preparation either on English history or geography.

II.

Let us

Are entrance Scholarships useful and beneficial? consider their effect (1) on the individual boy, (2) on the general working of the Preparatory Schools.

There is no doubt that many boys are enabled to go to the great Public Schools through winning Scholarships who would otherwise have to be content with another sort of school altogether. In many cases it is a choice between a local day school or a cheap public school, and a school with all the advantages of Eton, Winchester, or Rugby. Again, the winning of a scholarship will obtain what no payment of fees can securenamely, a place in the college at Eton or Winchester. Here the whole intellectual standard is of the highest. There are 70' picked boys all in intimate contact, and the effect is undoubtedly most stimulating. The days when scholars were looked down upon have now gone by--they are now the objects of envy and admiration to their less gifted schoolfellows.

A scholar feels that he is saving his parents' income, doing something for them in return for what they have done for him. He knows, too, that more is expected of him, that he is in honour bound to do credit to the school that has given him the advantages of lower fees in return for what he may do for his school. These two feelings must and do help to spur him on to do his best.

It cannot be upheld that, as a rule, the minds of scholars have been developed at the expense of their bodies. They prove

themselves by no means inferior as regards athletic prowessthe 70 scholars at Winchester have often put into the field teams which have beaten the teams picked from 200 "commoners" and from 200 boys in houses. To be one of the 70 at either Eton or Winchester must be considered the proudest achievement of any boy up to the age of 14. Brain power alone will not get a boy a scholarship at these great schools; neither will good teaching alone. He must have a combination of intellectual, moral, and physical strength, besides being well taught.

The same must be said, too, in a less degree for a boy who gets a scholarship at any one of the Public Schools where the competition is not so strong as at Winchester and Eton. It is no small advantage for a boy to fail once or twice and to succeed in the end. He probably learns his weaknesses; he at first trusted too much to his ability and lacked perseverance, or he had worked at congenial subjects and neglected others; he benefits by failure followed by success; valuable moral lessons are taught him by experience.

It has sometimes been said that boys are overpressed at their Preparatory Schools in order that they may gain Scholarships, and that the result of this overpressure is that the boy falls off afterwards and does not fulfil the promise that he has shown. There is no apparent proof of this assertion. As a rule the entrance scholar is found much higher in the Public School than non-scholars of the same age. The head boys are generally scholars, and scholarships at the Universities are almost monopolised by those who have won entrance scholarships at the Public Schools. This is not invariably true, but if a nonscholar gets a scholarship at the University it is generally the case that he was not well taught at his Preparatory School, or that he was lazy there, or that he was kept back by illness or other accidental cause.

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The picture that is sometimes drawn of the poor boy taken from games to do extra work for scholarships, crammed with tips up to the last moment, forced to spend his holidays in work with a tutor, overpressed, overanxious, is a picture which has no real presentment in an ordinary Preparatory School. Such treatment would doubly defeat its own object-such a boy would not be at his best in an examination room. No schoolmaster would risk the unenviable reputation of neglecting the health of his boys, his doctor would not allow it, it would do the school much more harm than a possible scholastic success could do it good.

No, the boys who go in for the scholarships have the same hours of work as the other boys, they go through the same course of teaching, they play the same games and often excel in them. Again it has been said that the rest of the school is sometimes neglected for the sake of getting on the scholars. The conditions of Preparatory Schools do not allow of this. Boys are arranged into classes and move from one to another according to their ability and industry just as they do at a public school; the better boys of course get into the top form, and the work of the top

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at the Public Schools.

form will depend on the ability of the boys who get into it, but there will be no extra hours for it. Its success will depend on the teaching in the lower part of the school quite as much as in that of the top form itself. The assertion that some Preparatory Schools keep a special scholarship class is ridiculous. Some of the boys in the top form may get scholarships, but it is absurd to imagine that clever boys are picked out right through the school and taught with the idea of their becoming scholars and the rest of the school neglected.

There can be no doubt that the standard of teaching in schools. which are uniformly successful in getting scholarships is higher than at those schools where the standard is set by the require-. ments of pass examinations.

But there is another point to be considered-the case of a boy who has worked well and tried for a scholarship (perhaps several times) and has not eventually succeeded. Is the result bad for him individually? We do not think that it is-surely boys must learn to bear disappointments, to find out that success does not always crown effort. He has probably often been beaten in class and in games, and part of his education has been to bear these defeats and still to go on doing his best.

C. C. LYNAM.

THE TEACHING OF LATIN AND GREEK IN
PREPARATORY SCHOOLS.

It is not the primary object of this paper to discuss the arguments as to the superiority of the education given by the Classical side, as it is called, to that of the Modern side, nor to enquire how far Greek is necessary to the proper training of a boy's intelligence before a certain age; what I have in front of me is to describe to the best of my power the methods employed by English preparatory schools for teaching both Latin and Greek to boys somewhere between the ages of eight and fourteen. Yet it is advisable, for the purpose of clearing the ground, to see what the differences of opinion roughly are, and to take a brief survey of the points at issue.

Each system has its advocates and each has much in its favour. With those who maintain that a boy's education should be strictly utilitarian, who consider that French, German, Mathematics andScience, with a certain amount of English, best prepare his mind. for his life's work, and who look upon even a minimum of Latin as a waste of time, we need not here concern ourselves; nor must we, even if we agree with them, waste time over those who think Greek the best possible agent for training thought and producing accuracy in the young, and who would insist upon all boys, whether intended for Classical or Modern sides, taking it as a subject until their fourteenth or fifteenth birthday, so that they may have a foundation on which to build the more securely afterwards. The number of preparatory schools teaching on either of these lines must be so limited that they would fall outside our serious consideration. The main point of contention between classical teachers is whether a boy has time for beginning Greek at all with any profit while at a preparatory school. Had he not better make the rest of his knowledge doubly sound, and will he not indeed know just as much Greek at eighteen, if he begins at fourteen, as he will if he begins at eleven or twelve? The curriculum, they say, is overloaded. Supposing that the limited time at his disposal every week is to be curtailed by six or seven hours, now to be devoted to Greek, the average boy will not properly digest enough to satisfy the public schools in English, French, Latin, etc., at his entrance examination. It may, too, appear somewhat unreasonable (as was almost unanimously decided last year by a strong committee of preparatory school headmasters) that a child of twelve should be learning concurrently four languages-English, French, Latin, and Greek,besides the other subjects universally recognised as a necessary part of his mental baggage. The curriculum of the German Reform Schulen, as exemplified by what is called the Frankfurter Lehrplan, seems to them the sensible way out of the difficulty. and it has much to recommend it. In Germany there is nothing to correspond exactly with our preparatory school. There they have large secondary day schools which undertake a boy's educa

tion from nine to eighteen years of age, or thereabouts. Of these schools that called the "Gymnasium" teaches Latin and Greek when its pupils are old enough, the "Realgymnasium" Latin but no Greek, the "Oberrealschule" neither; for some years now, however, the authorities have permitted in certain places the experiment of teaching the same elementary subjects, French, Arithmetic, etc., in all three types of school until a boy is twelve years old. This gives him the chance of obtaining a thorough grasp of the elements, and allows his parents time to decide whether his abilities or his future prospects mark him out for the Gymnasium, the Realgymnasium, or else for the Realschule or Oberrealschule; if for the former two, he now adds Latin to his subjects, dropping some of his French hours, until he is fifteen; he then begins Greek at the Gymnasium if he is destined for any studies at the University other than Modern Mathematics, Languages or Science, spending rather less time than before at Latin. It is a reasonable scheme and is said to be answering beyond the expectations of most observers. In many cases those taught in this way have in two or three years overtaken those who began Latin at nine. Possibly Greek may show the same results, though as yet the system has not been on its trial long enough to demonstrate this conclusively. However this may be, Germany is Germany is not England. not England. The effect of German education upon the formation of the national character is not wholly such as we should care to see in Englishmen, and our system, whatever its demerits may be, is attracting attention and even admiration abroad. The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. Representatives from France (where there are loud complaints that their secondary schools tend to produce too many functionaries who work well in an official groove* and too little self-reliance of character), from Germany and from America are constantly visiting us and examining with interest our schemes of teaching and our system of private and public school education. Soon they will be establishing schools on our lines. The case so far then is not proven. That the ordinary intelligence can, under fixed conditions, assimilate in four years. what is usually looked upon as the work of six is by no means universally accepted as true. In any case, we preparatory school headmasters are at present not fee agents; we cannot each one of us carry out our ideal curriculum. We have no governing body to thwart or control us, it is true; but for all that the guiding comes from above; and, just as the public schools are compelled to bow to the wishes of the Universities and Woolwich, so are we obliged to adapt our teaching to the requirements of the public schools. To them we are in reality responsible; we cannot dictate to them or force upon them our ideas; we can only hope that when we represent to them the difficulties which beset us, they will arrange their system of work so as gradually to lessen them as they occur. As our opportunities of intercommunication increase we find the head

À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons " Par E. Demolins,

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