We hear much of the embarrassed misery of a boy's first week at school. And, certainly, it is pretty wretched. Mr Vachell compared it to the first plunge into an ice-cold swimming bath: the sudden shock, and, afterwards, the glory of a swim. But it is the inaction, the loneliness of the first week that is so difficult. It is more like standing on the edge of the swimming bath on a cold day waiting for the signal that will start the race. And yet the change must have been a great deal more difficult for our parents than it was for us. The preparatory school system is of more or less recent growth, and, when one considers how much one learnt at a Preparatory School, in _esprit de corps_, in patience, in sportsmanship, in the give and take of a communal life, one wonders how an earlier generation managed to survive the first term. School life by all accounts was a fairly barbarous business in the eighties, and by what strange roads our parents came to those rough waters. Some came straight from home, some from private tutors: the majority from the old-fashioned dame school. It is not surprising that the Preparatory Schools should have so increased in number and improved in quality. For the Preparatory School fulfils a most important function, and it fulfils it extremely efficiently. It is what it sets out to be, a school that will take a small boy almost from the nursery, and train him in the course of four or five years to take his place in a large Public School. The task that the head master of a Preparatory School has to tackle is not, however, anything like so hard as that which confronts the head master of a Public School. For a Public School has to equip a boy for life; and life is vast, indeterminate, a swiftly moving river that is never the same from one moment to another. The Preparatory School, on the other hand, has only to equip a boy for a Public School, and the Public School is a fixed quantity. As regards curriculum, the task is simple. The required standard of education is known. A certain percentage in the common entrance examination has to be obtained. The school has not to discover the career for which its individual members are best suited. It has merely to decide which of them are good enough to be trained specially for scholarships. The main object of the Preparatory School, however, is to produce presentable specimens of society, boys who will do the right thing in the right circumstances. And this the Preparatory School does admirably well.