Public School Life: Boys, Parents, MastersWaugh, Alec
History
Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters
Waugh, Alec
Education, Secondary; Endowed public schools (Great Britain)
What does he gain to compensate for that loss?
He is protected to a large extent from the moral lapses peculiar to a
Public School. He will develop through normal channels. Though, as he
will in chapel and in his school listen to addresses that are based on
the accepted official attitude, it is a little doubtful whether he will
find himself in this respect much more satisfactorily educated than the
boarder. At any rate he should be saved the disquieting experiences of a
romantic friendship, and he will be less of a slave to the partisanship
and house feeling. But does he gain anything else?
We hear a great deal about the value of home influence, but what does
home mean for the day boy? He rushes home at the end of the day, has
his tea, and then settles down to prepare his lessons. By the time he
has finished them it is time for him to go to bed. He has had little
opportunity for talking either to his father or his mother. In the
morning he has only time to rush his breakfast and hurry off to school.
It must be remembered also that the parents who send their sons to day
schools are usually not particularly well off. It is one thing to come
home at the end of a hard day to the quiet seclusion of a warm and cosy
study where everything will be quiet and undisturbed. It is another
thing to come back to a house that is making strenuous efforts to get
things straight before the master of the house returns. Middle-aged
business men expect to find things made snug for them; they do not want
schoolboys kicking about the place at the end of the day.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than breakfast in the average suburban
family. There is the flutter over the post, the opening and shutting of
the paper, the constant glances at the clock. There is a banging of
doors, and running up of stairs, and the shouting over banisters. A sigh
of relief is heard when the front door closes behind the wage-earner.
In a large, well-run house the domestic machinery moves so smoothly that
it is unnoticed. In a small suburban villa these moments of arrival and
departure provide constant friction, and it is from the small suburban
villa that the majority of day boarders are recruited.
In consequence the day boy starts his day's work at a disadvantage. It
is like playing a cricket match on an opponent's ground. One arrives a
little jaded. The boarder is on the spot. He has twenty-five minutes'
leisure between chapel and breakfast. It is possible, of course, that he
will pass these twenty-five minutes in a feverish attempt to prepare the
'con' for which he had been allotted an hour on the time-table of the
previous night. But that is his own fault. He has every chance of
starting the day fresh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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