And yet there is nothing that we need more than an honest facing of the facts of public school life. Facts are a solid neutral ground on which parents and boys and masters may meet to discuss their ideals and their difficulties. And, in the course of that discussion, they may discover, as likely as not, a way out of their troubles. The hope of this book is to provide that statement of facts. It does not set out as an educational treatise. It accepts the Public Schools as the system best suited to the material with which it deals. It suggests no new system of teaching. It does not advocate co-education. It does not advance any plea for Montessor methods. It will contain no discussion of the advantages of Greek over German. There will be no appendix with time-tables and suggested curriculum. For, as things are now, it does not matter whether Sanscrit is substituted for mathematics: the boy will learn equally little of either. It is intended as a human study of public school life, as an attempt to break down that conspiracy of silence, that relationship of evasion and deceit that exists officially between parents, boys, and masters; and from time to time it will suggest solutions. It is, of course, only an attempt. For no one person can see more than a side of the truth. However impartial we try to be, we can see in a situation only what the limitations of our personality allow us. We are all at tether. During the last three years many public men have visited Russia; they have been honest men, and we know quite well that they went there with the firm intention of telling nothing but the truth. But, before they went, we could have told them exactly what they would say on their return. Yet the analogy does not quite hold good. For we, too, have gone, each of us, to a Public School with a preconceived idea of what school life would be, and each of us in turn has had that conception destroyed by actuality, and each in turn has had to create for himself his own picture. It follows then that there must in each picture be a certain measure of truth. CHAPTER II THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL