Compulsory Games in Schools.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 933, 17 January 1890, Page 4

Compulsory Games in Schools.

The parents of boysatour public ancTpriyate schools have been pouring forth their grievances on the hardness of compulsory games. The fact is schoolmasters are at their wits' ends to know how best to occupy their pupils in the intervals of class. One set of parents —and in this they are supported by the medical profossion—claim as a right that their sons should not be subjected to more than seven or eight hours' class work in the day. The rest of the time not occupied in eating or sleeping has to bo provided for, and there appears to ba but one way of doing it, and that is by some kind of compulsory athletic exercise. No one can have visited any of the public schools on a half holiday without being struck by tbe sight of several hundred boys playing cricket in summer or football in winter. Here, it appears to us, may be witnessed instances of the maximum of good and the minimum of evil in our public school system, which is the admiration of every foreign country. It is only when these compulsory games are carried to extremes that parents have any right to complain. Games are essential to the discipline of every school, for. boys of (Ordinary go and vigour, with a view of increasing their vigour by the physical exercise to which any boy of constitutional powers has a natural propensity. There are pubiic schoolmasters of high repute who hold that a certain standard of physical vigour is essential in a bjy if he is to reap the full advantage of a public school training, and in those instances where this standard is, and cannot be attained, it would be far better, for parents to realise the fact, and not subject a boy to a career for which he is not fitted, and which can only end in their disappointment and probably their boy's ruin. A large number of our public school boys are quite unfitted intellectually and physically to benefit by a public school course of training, and the system is discredited by the inadaptability of such boys to the requirements of a public sohool. There are * loafers 'in class as well as in the playground, and such boys should be r amoved from among large numbers to private schools where individual attention in work and recreation can be given to them. Such boys are to be pitied rather than blamed, for they cannot bear the jostling of the playground, nor have they the aptitude for the hurry and smartness of the public school class and would be better away from both.—Lancet.