THE MODERN BOY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 133, 2 December 1937, Page 25

THE MODERN BOY

PRAISE BY DR. NORWOOD

The modern boy was .praised by Dr. Cyril Norwood, President of St. John's College, Oxford, and a former head of Harrow, at a boys' club conference at Oxford, says the "DaiJy Telegraph and Morning Post." Dr. Norwood said: "If you look at the picture of a form in a London County Council higher elementary school or secondary school as it was in 1890, and again as it is today, the difference in quality of the human material leaps to the eye. "The result of our educational work is incomparably better than it was forty years ago. At the age of fourj teen, both for girls and boys, we are producing a different article. "But at the age of fourteen, having spent all that public money on provide ing remarkable results, we throw the children straight into the employment market. "It is there that boys' clubs and similar work can come in to help, but unfortunately only a small percentage come within the sphere of that influence. "I do not think we can go on very much longer with the privileged classes keeping their children at school up to the age of eighteen while the children of the unprivileged are thrown on to the labour market to take their chance at the age of fourteen." Mr. Basil Henriques, a London Magistrate and warden of the Bernhard Baron St. George's Settlement, declared that club work was a vocation, not a profession. "The boys' club is not a place for keeping the boys off the street." he added. "For the average boy it is a makeshift public school. It is a club like the Athenaeum, only rather more noisy."