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THE PLACE OF THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR BOYS IN SECONDARY EDUCATION IN ENGLAND.

1. Of the foreign and American visitors who come in increasing numbers to study English education, it is probable that comparatively few have even heard of the existence of what we call Preparatory Schools. And yet the latter occupy an important place in the line of higher education in England. But so unsymmetrical are our educational arrangements, and so lacking in formal unity, that there are doubtless many Englishmen, not to speak of strangers from other countries, who would find it a little difficult to construct a diagram showing the various elements in our national education and the connection (if any) between the different parts which make up that varied whole. The aim of this volume in general is to furnish a description of the educational service rendered by the Preparatory Schools to the nation, and to explain the conditions under which their work is carried on; while the special object of the present paper is briefly to indicate the place now occupied by these schools in English Secondary Education, and to compare some features of their work with those of the corresponding parts of German education. As part of this task, therefore, I may be permitted to enter upon a short preliminary explanation of the circumstances which determine the special position of this type of English schools.

2. An English boy, whose parents can afford to give him a Public School education (to use those words in the English, not in the American, sense), usually begins what may be called regular lessons when he is about six years old. If his parents live in the country he generally has a governess; but, if they live in a town, it is a not uncommon arrangement for them to send him, when he has reached the age of six or thereabouts, to the Kindergarten attached to a girls' Secondary School, or to a class for little children taught by some lady with a special gift for that kind of instruction. In recent years there has been a great increase of interest in the education of young children, and some of the classes, referred to in the preceding sentence, are doing very interesting and original work. When he is nine and a-half, or ten, years old (or perhaps a little later), the boy is generally sent away from home to a Preparatory Boarding School, usually in the country, often at the seaside or in other bracing air.* He stays at the Preparatory School until he is between 13. and 14, when he goes on to the Public School which has been

* On this point it is impossible to generalise, but there are some signs of a tendency to defer sending boys to a Boarding School away from home as long as possible,

chosen for him by his parents, or where he may have been elected to an entrance scholarship.* At the Public School he will remain (in the great majority of cases as a boarder) until he is 18 or nearly 19, when, if he is intended for university life, he will go on to Oxford or Cambridge. But he will leave the Public School at a rather earlier age if he enters the Army, and the same will be true generally (though by no means always) if he is destined for commercial life.

It is a little difficult to say exactly at what point in such a course of education, secondary, as distinct from primary, education begins. Much will depend on the circumstances of each individual case. But, ordinarily, as soon at any rate as he enters the Preparatory School (and in many cases earlier) the boy will have begun to learn certain classical subjects which are still the staples of English secondary, as distinguished from public elementary, education. And, what matters a good deal more than the subject matter of his school lessons, he will then, as a rule, have entered a certain scholastic atmosphere, and a rather clearly distinguished sphere of educational influences, which are characteristic of the tradition of our older type of secondary schools. It is on entering the preparatory school, therefore, that a boy usually begins his secondary education, and enters upon a course of training which, being planned to extend over the eight or nine following years, may fairly may fairly claim to be judged by nothing short of the outcome of the whole period for which it has been designed. A prolonged course of secondary education, though made up of a number of school years, each more or less separate in the matter of instruction, cannot be compared to one of those bookcases which are composed of separate shelves, each an independent unit and separately useful, though forming in the aggregate a single piece of furniture. The course of education is intended as a whole, and should be judged as a whole. Of such a prolonged course of educational treatment, that furnished by the preparatory school is only the opening stage. It is not a course of education complete in itself, though it is usually under different direction from that which follows it. It is only a fraction, rather more than a third and less than a half, of a lengthy course of training. Of a flight of nine or ten educational steps, the preparatory school represents the first three or four. No one ascends them who does not mean to go up further still.

The preparatory school course is thus an integral part of one of the main lines of English secondary education. There are, of course, in England other lines of secondary education for boys, not to speak of what is done for girls. But this particular line of preparatory school and public school has a distinct character of its own and has rendered, and is rendering, specially valued service to the national life. That being the case, it is singular that no attempt has previously been made to describe the work of the preparatory schools and to show in detail the course of

*Most preparatory schoolmasters are in favour of boys going on to the Public School at 13 or thereabouts.

training through which an English boy generally passes during the first three or four years of his secondary education. A glance at the time-tables issued by the authority of Government for higher schools in Prussia,* or at the corresponding documents relating to similar schools in other continental States, will show that those years of work, which in England are passed in the preparatory school, are included elsewhere in the general curriculum of the secondary school. It is as if the plan of studies and time-table for Eton or Winchester were so printed as to comprise the outline of work and time-table for the preparatory schools as well. Thus, if we wish to compare the work done in an English and a German classical secondary school, we have ordinarily to strike off from the latter the work of at least the three lowest classes-each of those classes representing one year of school life. The contents of the present volume will enable educational students to compare for the first time this complete course of English secondary education with its continental counterpart.

3. But any such comparison, fruitful and interesting as it is, needs to be guarded by several qualifications, both as regards the outward form of the programme of studies, and still more as regards the inner life of the two sets of schools. We are perhaps inclined in England to exaggerate the uniformity of German schools of the same grade, but at any rate, however much one Gymnasium may really differ in actual working influence from another Gymnasium or one Realschule from another school conforming to the same type, there does exist the specific body of regulations with which each school, according to its type, has to comply. A Realgymnasium may not at its own will and pleasure borrow a fragment of the curriculum of an Oberrealschule, or indulge in whatever experiments of curriculum parents may demand or its director may please. In England there are no such limitations on the freedom of the headmaster or the governing body of an individual school. If the outcome of the multitudinous experiments, permitted by this state of freedom, had been carefully watched and recorded, many valuable lessons would have been set on record for our guidance; but as things are, we can say little more than that in descriptions of English secondary education generalisations are perilous, and that exceptions may often be more frequent than what is reputed to be the rule. Especially difficult is it to fix on any curriculum as being sufficiently normal and representative of a given type school to serve as a standard for comparison with the curriculum authorised for the corresponding type of school abroad.

of

But the difficulty is far from ending here. In a German higher school, a boy is in one class for all subjects. In an English school of the corresponding grade, he is re-classified according to his attainments in different parts of the curriculum, and may be learning English and Latin with one set of boys, French with a second, and Mathematics with a third. Again, in a German higher school, a boy almost invariably spends one complete year in each successive class. In England, few schools

*See Special Reports on Educational Subjects, vol. iii., pp. 253 ff.

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of the corresponding grade agree in their form of internal organisation. Mr. Frampton Stallard, in his interesting paper on the Time-table in this volume, states that he cannot show in detail the average number of hours given to each subject in the classes (or "forms," to forms," to use the English word) intervening between the top and bottom of the preparatory schools whose returns he has examined, and the reason for his inability is that "no two schools have similar form organisations. In one case there are as many as twelve separate forms for boys between the ages of 9 and 123; on the other hand, there are often not more than two.' It should be borne in mind that the number of boys in the school affects the complexity of the internal classification, and it is not the case that one individual boy would pass through twelve successive classes in three or four years. But the fact remains that there is very great variety in the internal organisation of our English secondary schools-a variety which makes it extremely difficult to institute exact comparisons between the standard reached in them and in the more or less corresponding part of the far more uniformly organised German schools.

Yet these discrepancies, serious as they are, lend themselves more easily to adjustment than do other and more deep-seated differences between English and German higher schools. The German boy, like the English, begins his regular lessons when he is six years old. At that age he often goes for three or four years to the public elementary school, or not unfrequently, in lieu of this, to a private school (usually said to be ineffective), or to the preparatory department (where one exists) attached to the public secondary school which it is intended that he should enter when he is old enough to do so. That time comes when he is nine or ten. This age therefore marks an epoch in the life of the German schoolboy as it does in that of his English contemporary.* But the German boy attends as a day scholar, whether he lives at home or (as necessarily happens when his parents reside in some place where there is no higher school) lodges with relations or friends. The English boy, as a rule, goes away from home and enters a boarding school. There are exceptions both ways, but the general practice in the two countries may be fairly contrasted as above. It does not fall within the scope of this paper to discuss the competing merits of day and boarding schools, or the age at which it is generally desirable that a boy should be set to work with boys alone, and cut off from the constant associations of family life. But the fact remains that, for the English boy who goes to a Preparatory School as a boarder, there is much less home life than there is for his German contemporary, who, at the same age, enters the class called "Sexta in a Gymnasium. It should be

A special difference between the life of an English and a German secondary school boy is that the latter works on (under ordinary circumstances) in one school through the whole period of his secondary education. The English boy, who goes first to a preparatory school and then to a public school, changes his surroundings, intimacies, teachers, way of life, and (often) place of residence at the age of 13 or 14, this great educational change coinciding (often most beneficially) with a physical one.

remembered, however, in this connexion, that a small boarding school can reproduce some of the more intimate relationships of home life.

In a boarding school it is natural that what is actually taught and learnt in the schoolroom should seem relatively much less important than is the case in a day school. In a day school the boys meet for lessons, with a fringe of games; in a boarding school they live together, and lessons are an episode-an important episode, of course, but not the cynosure. That is to say, the formula of "education" varies in different countries according to whether in the particular grade of school under discussion -the prevailing type is the day or the boarding school. If the former, the intellectual ingredients gain in importance, sometimes to the detriment of physical well-being; if the latter, the physical and social ingredients are emphasised, sometimes to the serious lowering of the intellectual average. In English secondary schools, lessons seem to matter a great deal less than they do in Germany for the ruck of the parents and for the ruck of the boys. There are numerous exceptions of course, and it is quite likely that economic and other forces now in operation in the two countries will lessen the present contrast. But physical condition, vigour, and cheerfulness of character, a pleasant temperament, and skill in games, probably count a great deal more in an English schoolboy's scale of virtues than they do in a German's, while as a rule the latter pays much more serious attention to what he is set to learn. Nor is the relation between boy and master the same. The German secondary schoolmaster tends to become professorial in his interests and way of life, learned in his subject, and extraordinarily skilful in giving instruction in it. The English secondary schoolmaster, teaching in a school of the corresponding grade, is much more the personal friend of his pupils, much more in sympathy with their out-of-school interests, and, however keen a teacher, almost necessarily much less of a specialist in it because of the other claims on his energies, thought, and time.*

4. There are other distinctive marks of our English system of higher education in its present dominant form-a form which is hardly likely long to remain unchallenged, though it is evidently congenial to the temperament of those at present most closely concerned with it.

Opinions differ as to the degree in which social distinctions might be lessened or removed by requiring, at least for the first stage of their education, the children of all classes in society to attend the public elementary schools It is unlikely that such a requirement could be enforced unless public sentiment were overwhelmingly in favour of it. But few will doubt that our boarding school system tends, far more than any day school

It has been pointed out to me that one of the most salient differences between the work of an assistant master in a German secondary school and that of an assistant master in an English preparatory school is that the latter is, by the nature of his calling, cut off from the opportunity of teaching elder boys, while the former, though he may take at one time a low form, will generally, in the course of his educational career, get experience in a higher one also.

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