His parents' interest in his school life must appear to him superficial. When his father comes down at half term, he has to answer innumerable questions as to his prowess on the cricket field; and very often indeed the chief pleasure that his athletic successes brings him is the thought of the delight that his father will experience. But the intimate side of his school life, his thoughts, his friendships, his troubles, his ambitions, do not enter into his relationship with his parents. In the same way his house-master's interest in his home life seems to him superficial. On his return to school he is asked a few questions about the theatres he has visited; whether he is in training for the football; has he done any private work? not a word of his intimate life. The boy ceases to regard his school life as a continuation of his home life. The two are entirely separate, and it depends on the temperament of the individual as to which of the two he will consider the more important. We hear a great deal of talk about the influence of the home; it is, indeed, the stock argument of the pedagogue who would shelve his own responsibility on to other shoulders, but I believe that its influence is greatly overrated. Home and school present to the average boy two watertight compartments. They are different lives, a different technique is required. And human nature has at least one property of the chameleon. A schoolboy sets out, therefore, to discover school life for himself. He knows what his parents expect him to make of it; he has a fairly shrewd idea of what his schoolmaster expects him to make of it. It remains for him to investigate school life as his companions have made it. Naturally he does not announce his investigations. He lets his parents think what they like and his schoolmasters think what they like. He goes his own way. And it is thus that school life as it is, differs so enormously from the traditional concept of it. There must be always a gulf between the reality and the imagined idea. But in public school life the gulf is between, not the schoolboy reality and his idea of it, but between the schoolboy reality, and the confused idea of it that is held by parents and masters. It is two degrees from the truth. In consequence, when any one does attempt to tell the truth there is an outburst of indignant protest. And the worst of it is that it is an honest outburst. When head masters write to the Press and say 'these accusations are entirely false,' they honestly believe what they say. That is what makes everything so difficult. They have forgotten their own schooldays, and for so long they have been persuading parents of the value of a public school education that they have come to believe in their own advertisements. And yet what they have come to believe is far more remarkable than the truth. In sermons and addresses they assure the boy and his parents that school life is a miniature of the larger world;