ENGLISH SCHOOL SYSTEM

Evening Star, Issue 21006, 21 January 1932, Page 11

ENGLISH SCHOOL SYSTEM

♦ —• AMERICAN MOTHER IMPRESSED If is not easy for an American woman to adapt herself to English life, however adaptable she may be, for England is a queer, subtle, aristocratic country, governed by illogical ideas, quite content to be inconsistent and very averse to any form of explanation or apology (writes Mary Borden, the novelist, in the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ’). One must take it or leave it, accept its assumption and bow to its unwritten laws or go away. Rebellion is useless. , Even asking questions,is useless. One is given no answer. lake the question of education. 1 arrived in England filled, as most Americans are, with enthusiasm for education; filled, too, as again American women often are, with a sense of ray own importance as a woman. I believed that schooling was a good thing, and that this good thing was desirable for girls as well as boys. But I also believed that it was the rightful prerogative and privilege of parents to look after their children while they were small. ’

I put thirteen or fourteen as the proper age for a boy or a, girl to go away to school. I found out that in all these assumptions I was wrong. I found, first that it was not considered the parents’ duty or privilege to bring up children; secondly, that it was the habit to send boys away to school when they were babies; and, thirdly, that it wasn’t deemed worth while to send girls to school at all. I was very, surprised by all this, and very rebellious. Now I aiu surprised, after ten years of English life, to find how much I myself have changed. I have almost been brought round to agree that education is quite unnecessary for girls, and that it is, on the contrary, a good thing for small boys to leave homo at the age of nine. Many ( of the most interesting women in England to-day will tell you that they had no education, and were brought up in the schoolroom. But what did they learn in it? That is the puzzling question. For they will answer, if you ask them, “Nothing,” and the answer is not true; their lives give it the lie. And yet I can think of no other unless it be that they learned how to be happy and to think things out for themselves. I am talking of the girls who have been brought up in the country. It is the landed gentry of England that has imposed its aristocratic notions upon the nation’s educational institutions. The boys must be fitted to manage estates, command men, and defend the right of property. The girls must he fitted for marriage. Book learning wasn’t attractive in a girl. Why waste money on it p , Xjje first' thing was health. Fine young animals was what the old country squire wanted his children to be, all of them, boys and girls. He included them in the survey of his property with the lambs, the calves, the pigs, and the ponies. He gave them these for their own, and expected them to be happy and grateful. He was ,right, the old country squire. English children, born and bred in the country, are the youngsters in the world, and such a boy’s life, up to the age of nine, the happiest j know anywhere. NEW YORK’S CONTRAST. Contrast it with the life of a child brought up on the 10th, 15th, or 20th floor of a New Yark apartment house. There’s not a green thing to be seen from those dizzy nursery windows. Ho has a sense of suffocation, of being cramped, imprisoned and breathless but he does not know why. He does not understand what is the i matter with him, or what he is missing. And yet, when I came to grips in England with the tyrannical educational system for boys that our careless old country squires of another century had brought into existence, I rebelled.

A public school? Yes. I agreed that my boy should go to one; so ho was put down for it the week ho was born. That seemed a little odd. but not frightening, since, after all, he wouldn’t be going for thirteen years. They sounded deliciously long. Sudi denly seven of them had passed, and my friends, one and all, began to ask mo what preparatory school he was going to. “ You’ll have to send him when he’s nine, you know, and most heads of good schools want them at eight,” “ Well no head of any school can have mine,” I blustered, and then, when those people kept on at me, I began to argue, and that was ray undoing. For there was only one answer to every argument. •“ We all do it. All the other hoys will be going. You can’t make him a freak’ my dear, just because you’re fond of him.”.

‘ But lie’s still a baby,” I cried, “ with quite round cheeks and a curly mouth. How can I send such a little chap out into the world?” “If you don’t,” they said, “ he’ll blame you, and you’ll be sorry.” And so, reluctantly, oh, so very reluctantly, we went, just another couple of niodern parents who didn’t want to be rid of their boy, and looked at prep, schools and chose one, and put him down to go there when he was nine “ But not one 'day sooner,” I cried again, driven- to my last ditch, and I stuck to that.

Never will I forget the day at Victoria Station, ■when wo went to see him off, and found there a long platform .filled with parents, just like ourselves, and very small boys in grey flannels, every one of us, parents and boys, pretending hard not to mind. The strain was awful. It was a little like seeing men off on those other trains that used to _ leave in 1914-18, and in some ways it was worse, for it was more formal, _ There was ho coming back, in the real sense from this adventure. They wfere going into a pew world that would change them into men, and the chahge would gradually take place without our being able to watch, interfere, or help. All we could do now was to count up the days till the holidays and put our trust in the school. It would have been a dreadful disgrace to a boy did he or his mother break down. One’s life depended on a dry eyelid and a stiff upper lip, I think I am glad now that I did it. I think for him that it is much better. When I remember his teas, for instance, with me or his Nanny in London, and contrast them with the dining hall at school, I can see that tea at school is a great lark compared with tea at home. NO LONGER A REBEL. All those boys, bursting with life, bubbling with laughter, swapping with great enjoyment infantile jokes of extreme _ pointlessness and devouring mbnntains of bread and butter, make me feel that I am a very dull, clumsy creature, too heavy on my feet, too heavy and too stiff in the joints of mind and body to bo a fit companion .for a youngster nine years old. And he was getting, too much for me. too big for me, too cunning. I had become wax in his hands, and that was bad.

Often, oh, very often, I > think of th'ose small boys out there' in Hampshire, all going to bed in their striped flannel pyjamas. Surely a boy in pyjamas and jaeger dressing gown, strutting about with his hands in his pockets, is the most attractive sight in the world'. , Ninety of them, all together, ragging, throwing pillows, totally unaware of their charm. All that charm wasted and ninety women deprived of it! The Head of the school says: “ Good night ” to them. He goes the rounds every night and-stops at the foot of each bed and speaks to each drowsy face. I am grateful to him. I envy him bitterly. He is a good man. It is his vocation to look after small boys. He is better at bringing up children than I am. It is a pity, but it’s true. I’ve come round. I think if you are very fond of someone very young, you are probably not the right person to look after him. _ I think you hesitate when quick decisions are required, and make mistakes out of fear, and I think that too much affection is suffocating anyhow ta a little boy. And so I no longer rebel. I’ve been brought to adijiit that the English idea is good for the children, and only bad for the parents. But for them it is bad both ways. For the parents who don’t care much it is bad to be relieved of all bother, and _for the parents who care too much it is not good to be deprived for so long of what they love most on earth. But I believe that the youngsters who escape from either kind are, on the whole, fortunate, v