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is too precious to be wasted upon any but the most solid foundations ; and that the object of school education is , after all , only to teach men to educate themselves . There we are among the Crichtons again . Do the nineteen out of the twenty aforesaid ever dream of educating themselves ? Are they addicted to beginning new studies of any sort ( except professional ones ) in their four-and-twentieth year ? Do they not rather cease from pursuing even their old ones ? Does more than one man out of one hundred consider mental
cultivation to be a duty at all ? In short , may we not , perhaps , this long time , have taken such very high ground in this matter as to have overlooked the vast majority of those with whom we proposed to deal ? Of those of our own class that we come most frequently in contact with—of those we meet in railway-carriages and steam-boats , for instance — are the best-informed generally from our great public schools ? How much of that hauteur ( neither philanthropic nor
Masonic ) , affected by us grown-up Etonians and Harrovians , is more than a convenient method of hiding consummate ignorance ? Are officers in the army , and country squires—who are almost unexceptionally public schoolmen- —great triumphs of our educational system , or are they not ? But it seems , according to the latest advocates of public schools , that " a gentlemanly tone " is the great
thing to be desiderated , and an article to be procured at those places only . It may be so ; but why mask that advantage under the name of education : advertise rather at once , cc Deportment is here acquired , " or " Insouciance carefully cultivated after the sublimest models . "
Some people , indeed , with more honesty than independence , avow their predilection for such places , as getting their boys into a good connection . This is , we believe , at all times , a foolish error , and not seldom fraught with fatal results . A rich trader sends his son amongst the nobs , with injunction to get into a good set . English boys are human , just as English men are , in the matter of lords , and , to please the Viscount Plantagenet , Jack Allspice eats dirt with relish : he is
admitted without much difficulty , but not unaided by the paternal purse-strings , into the highest school-society ; gives champagne breakfasts to dukes' sons at the Phoenix , and presents velvet and gold " leaving-books " to the left-handed descendants of kings ; but these advantages are only for a season ; the " hat fellow-commoner" at Trinity may , indeed , foregather with the spangled tassel ; but in the great world ( to which college is but the ante-room ) , wherein the
" good set" was looked forward to from the first , Jack is never suffered by his noble friend to forget how Allspice , senior , was " respectable " and a grocer . A much more serious matter is it where a poor young gentleman enters into such society at school ; the scholarshi p he was to obtain , he loses through idle habits , or dissipates its slender proceeds in a few hours ; at college he is unable to divorce himself from the same set , and , falling from bad to worse , " shuts up " at the conclusion of his college course , if he even "lives" so long ; is unable to meet his tailor ' s bills goes
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
Untitled Article
is too precious to be wasted upon any but the most solid foundations ; and that the object of school education is , after all , only to teach men to educate themselves . There we are among the Crichtons again . Do the nineteen out of the twenty aforesaid ever dream of educating themselves ? Are they addicted to beginning new studies of any sort ( except professional ones ) in their four-and-twentieth year ? Do they not rather cease from pursuing even their old ones ? Does more than one man out of one hundred consider mental
cultivation to be a duty at all ? In short , may we not , perhaps , this long time , have taken such very high ground in this matter as to have overlooked the vast majority of those with whom we proposed to deal ? Of those of our own class that we come most frequently in contact with—of those we meet in railway-carriages and steam-boats , for instance — are the best-informed generally from our great public schools ? How much of that hauteur ( neither philanthropic nor
Masonic ) , affected by us grown-up Etonians and Harrovians , is more than a convenient method of hiding consummate ignorance ? Are officers in the army , and country squires—who are almost unexceptionally public schoolmen- —great triumphs of our educational system , or are they not ? But it seems , according to the latest advocates of public schools , that " a gentlemanly tone " is the great
thing to be desiderated , and an article to be procured at those places only . It may be so ; but why mask that advantage under the name of education : advertise rather at once , cc Deportment is here acquired , " or " Insouciance carefully cultivated after the sublimest models . "
Some people , indeed , with more honesty than independence , avow their predilection for such places , as getting their boys into a good connection . This is , we believe , at all times , a foolish error , and not seldom fraught with fatal results . A rich trader sends his son amongst the nobs , with injunction to get into a good set . English boys are human , just as English men are , in the matter of lords , and , to please the Viscount Plantagenet , Jack Allspice eats dirt with relish : he is
admitted without much difficulty , but not unaided by the paternal purse-strings , into the highest school-society ; gives champagne breakfasts to dukes' sons at the Phoenix , and presents velvet and gold " leaving-books " to the left-handed descendants of kings ; but these advantages are only for a season ; the " hat fellow-commoner" at Trinity may , indeed , foregather with the spangled tassel ; but in the great world ( to which college is but the ante-room ) , wherein the
" good set" was looked forward to from the first , Jack is never suffered by his noble friend to forget how Allspice , senior , was " respectable " and a grocer . A much more serious matter is it where a poor young gentleman enters into such society at school ; the scholarshi p he was to obtain , he loses through idle habits , or dissipates its slender proceeds in a few hours ; at college he is unable to divorce himself from the same set , and , falling from bad to worse , " shuts up " at the conclusion of his college course , if he even "lives" so long ; is unable to meet his tailor ' s bills goes