ENTRANCE SCHOLARSHIPS AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON PREPARATORY

SCHOOLS.

It is hardly to be disputed that the astonishing improvement which is to be noticed in the Preparatory Schools of to-day compared with those of thirty years ago has affected especially the two departments of physical supervision and teaching. As regards the first, there is little doubt that the influence of the mothers of the boys has been steadily and successfully exercised in the direction of general improvement. It is only natural that at the tender age when a child first leaves home, the mother's voice should be a powerful one in the settlement of many questions bearing on food, accommodation, and so forth. But when we come to consider the teaching, a new questión presents itself. Granted that the mass of parents have secured important changes in some departments, are we to attribute to them also the manifestly greater efforts now made on all sides to keep the teaching up to a high level? The difficulty in this idea is that the anxiety shown by the English upper classes in the mental training of their children cannot even yet be described as very wide or deep, and thirty years ago it was even less so. this is not the cause of the phenomenon, what is?

But if

The answer to this question introduces one of the most interesting but least satisfactory parts of the subject.

During the last thirty or forty years the system of entrance scholarships has been enormously extended among the Public Schools. It was found that the large endowments of Eton and Winchester were attracting the very pick of the cleverest boys in the country, and since at that time public attention began to be more and more given to the financial side of education, it was natural that other schools which had risen in importance since the middle of the century should do their best to draw some supplies from the same source; that is, to hold out prospects of gratuitous or nearly gratuitous education to the clever sons of impecunious parents. The idea once formed spread very rapidly, and soon (that is, about 1885) every school of any prominence at all, and many grammar schools that could ill afford it, were offering substantial reductions to boys whose promise in classics and mathematics could be tested by an examination at twelve or thirteen years of age. Thus a rivalry was established, and from the figures quoted in the Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education, 1895 (Secondary Education, vol. i., p. 173) it is clear that the desire to outbid each other in the pursuit of clever boys has induced the governing bodies of the Public Schools to abandon all idea of restricting the money grant

to the eleemosynary purposes for which it was originally given, and to press forward in eager haste and add to their scholarships, so as to keep up the standard of cleverness in the new entries to the school.

The precise effect of this change on the Preparatory Schools it is very important to estimate. But before doing so it will be as well to point out the full meaning of the action of the governing bodies and of enterprising head masters who have urged them on. It is interesting to determine how this rise of scholarships has come about now, while in the middle of the century the peculiar pressure and difficulties connected with it were not felt. Two great influences have been at work: railways and the public Press. The time was, from 1850 to 1860, for example, when a school like Shrewsbury, owing to the fame of two or three great head masters, became a nursery of classical scholarship of a most remarkably advanced order. Critics might say that the scholarship was narrow in character, suited to the old classical Tripos at Cambridge, and alien from the wider curriculum of the Oxford Greats, and so forth. But no one could possibly deny the extraordinary enthusiasm for a certain kind of learning which existed there, and the ripe, sound scholarship which the school produced. In other words, the prestige of the Eton or Winchester scholarships was not so great as to absorb all the clever boys in the country. The insufficient railway accommodation no doubt prevented many parents in the north from sending their boys southwards, and tended to feed the local schools with scholars in their own county, or, anyhow, from not very remote districts. But when this insufficieney of railways gave way to rapid and easy communication from all parts of the kingdom, it was plain that the old local schools would have a hard fight with the big boarding schools; for the smaller grammar schools the fight has been, and still is, one for dear life, And even the large foundations, such as Marlborough, Repton, Haileybury, Clifton, Rossall, and others, though they continued to thrive in numbers, thought it necessary to institute or augment scholarships in order to prevent the absorption of all the rising talent by the other foundations. It is possible, however, that if left to themselves these schools would have shortly discovered that the large expenditure involved was likely to prove useless. But at this juncture the second great influence made itself felt-that of the public Press, or rather, to put it more accurately, the increased publicity which social changes have given to school life and doings.

At this point the Preparatory Schools have been drawn into the vortex. The rapid increase of the pressure of competition among all Private and Preparatory Schools, has made it seem advisable to the large majority to advertise their successes in the newspapers. Hence the scholarships gained in the Public School entrance examinations are duly recorded not only in the prospectuses of many Preparatory Schools, but in the newspapers at the time the result is made known. It is felt, whether rightly or wrongly it is hard to say, that the one thing fatal to a school

is obscurity and so the authorities do everything in their power to bring before the public the names and numbers of small boys who have passed a stiff but narrow examination, and have gained the reward of paying less for their education at the Public School.

There is something open and above board in the action of the Preparatory Schools, which is less noticeable in the orthodox behaviour of the authorities of the Public Schools. Their method of making similar successes known to the public is to publish them by the mouth of the head master on Speech Day, the proceedings of which are duly reported in the leading newspapers. In defence of this practice it may be urged that the friends of the school wish to know the honours that have been obtained, and further that the strong current of athletic interest, which sometimes threatens to bear all before it, needs to be counteracted by prominence being given to intellectual success, and that if the teaching in a school is good there is no reason why its fruits should not be pointed to on fitting occasions with legitimate pride. The worst of it is, however, that there is a serious unreality belonging to the whole matter, which is transparent enough to the few who know the truth, but very deceptive to those who do not. It consists simply in the fact that the examination successes of any particular school depend almost entirely on the quality of the boys sent thither. There are slight differences no doubt between the teaching and the traditions of scholarship belonging to one school rather than to another. But various influences are slowly but surely abolishing these differences and reducing the effective training of one school to the same level as that of another. Formerly there was a great difference in the comparative efforts of the leading schools in the matter of intellectual training. One school was famed for its great traditions and long history and its "yield" of notabilities in the past. Another was full of intellectual activity; and various methods of teaching Greek and Latin were practised here, but unknown there. Nowadays all this is changed. Everybody is urged forward to do their best; the same kind of men get the teaching of the best scholars in their hands, and what is done in one foundation is quickly known of and adopted at another. And yet the difference between different schools in the matter of scholastic “honours" is enormous, and if anything is increasing. What is the reason of this?

The head masters of the Public Schools are still of opinion that the amount of money offered in scholarships is the determining factor in the situation. They do not proclaim this on Speech Days, but they show it either by their continuing the scholarship grants or by increasing them. And prima facie it would seem that they are right. The schools with the longest annual record of successes are those which offer the largest and most numerous scholarships; it is clear that even if the peculiar advantages belonging to Day Schools in London, Birmingham, and Manchester be allowed due weight, the financial differences have a great deal to do with the result. And yet the efforts made by

the Governing Bodies of scores of schools are quite impotent to bring about the desired result. During the last ten years the congestion of clever boys in a few schools has been more noticeable than ever. This is one of those assertions the truth of which may be known to some, but yet is very difficult to set out in any formal way. There is strong reason, however, to believe that, in nearly all the schools outside of a select few a decline in classical scholarship has been going on during the last twenty years. If this be doubted, a good test would be to examine into the standard of the best boys in one or two schools which were fertile in classical scholars at that time. The result would be that an individual boy or two would be found up to the mark, but whereas there used to be ten or a dozen strong scholars there are now one or two, and the sixth form would be found to contain a large majority of mediocrities. And this has gone on in spite of a greatly improved system of teaching in the middle and lower parts of the school. The late Master of Balliol remarked that in his time a manifest improvement in the average knowledge of Greek possessed by Public School boys had taken place. And yet a school which thirty years ago constantly sent up boys to the University quite fit to take a first-class in the Cambridge Tripos at nineteen years old, now falls in numbers of scholars far short of the few eminent foundations which have been referred to. This result is not because money is not spent in scholarships, nor because the teaching is one whit inferior to what it was-as already stated, it is, if anything, better-but because some other influence has been at work and has caused the supply of clever boys to be unevenly distributed, and to form a conglonieration in three or four of the best known schools.

This influence is twofold. It is the rise of day schools, and the action of the head-masters of preparatory schools. The first is foreign to the subject of this paper and may be briefly dismissed. Great energy and good teaching have doubtless been expended on the pupils of the four great day schools of London, Birmingham, and Manchester; and it has been pointed out by an experienced master that, as compared with the members of boarding schools, day school boys possess an enormous advantage in the constant stimulus of ambitious parents at home. Added to these facts, the amount of the pecuniary attraction is, in one well-known case, enormous. Hence the inevitable result. Parents of sharp boys really eager for academical success find it worth their while to forego the advantages-which are generally recognised of a boarding-school training, and secure the strong concentrated teaching and scholastic atmosphere of the prosperous day school; and as long as this is the case there will be nothing whatever surprising in the number of prize-winners turned out by St. Paul's, Merchant Taylor's, and Manchester Grammar School.

But what has now to be considered is the influence of the Preparatory School on this particular phenomenon, the absorption of the scholars into a few schools. One of the most obvious of the effects of the strenuous competition between

Preparatory Schools is the struggle to train boys of thirteen up to the standard required by the public school entrance scholarships. It is very generally felt, perhaps more strongly than facts warrant, that a preparatory school thrives to some extent in proportion to its intellectual successes as measured by these examinations; and so no stone is left unturned by the head masters to secure the reputation of being successful in the entrance scholarships. As to the effect of this on the general training of young boys much might be said; but its bearing on the present question is not hard to trace. Owing partly to financial outlay, partly to general prestige and ancient tradition, certain scholarships, such as those at Eton, Winchester, Rugby, and some day schools, are of higher repute than others. If a preparatory school can secure one of these it gains, so it is thought, in reputation. Hence, as soon as a boy of eleven years shows precocity in classics or mathematics, the master naturally does all he can to induce the parents to select for him one of these schools, and in many cases he is of course successful. He is the first "expert" perhaps who has given a decided opinion of the selection of a school, and as very frequently the parent has no very strong feeling, the arrangement is generally made as suggested. So it comes about that the cleverer a young boy is the more certain he is to go to a school which is already more than fully stocked.

What are the effects of this concentration of the intellectual promise of the country into a very few schools? There is something to be said in its favour. It is generally admitted that one sharp boy quickens the wits of another, and in an atmosphere of studiousness and nimble-tongued talk all the members of the community are benefited. It is possible to be quite convinced of this, and to be perfectly satisfied that when once it is conceded the whole question is set at rest. There are, however, other considerations which are only too easily forgotten. If the aftercareers of the picked clever boys of the public schools are noticed, it is found that worldly success is meted out to them in a measure apparently quite independent of the classical or mathematical ability which they showed in their teens. The numerous failures are those boys who grow up into men unable to work with others, wanting in broad understanding of their fellow-men, and in practical tact. Yet the system under which they have grown up has encouraged in them a belief that they are better equipped for the battle of life than their schoolfellows. This is an almost inevitable result of the system of prize-giving, order of merit, and perpetual comparison of different boys, and is crowned at the University in many cases by the honour of a good first-class. But the facts seem to show that these selected men are no more likely to succeed than anyone else. Success seems to be still due either to accidents of birth or position, or to a certain freshness and vivacity of mind and temper which are not likely to be encouraged by any system involving strenuous work for a chain of examinations. And it is always important that a young man beginning life should be under no delusion as