should say No. I suppose that if we include teaching hours and
preparation, a boy spends some six hours a day on his intellectual
work, or if you prefer, he is supposed to spend that time. A game of
football two or three times a week, does not last more than an hour
and a quarter; if you add a liberal allowance for changing and baths,
two hours is the whole time occupied. A game of fives or a physical
drill class need not demand more than an hour. The game that really
wastes time--and I am sorry to admit it--is cricket. I am not thinking
so much of the long waits in the pavilion when two batsmen on a side
are well set, and the rest have nothing to do but to applaud. I see no
way out of that difficulty, so long as wickets are prepared as they
are now by artistic groundsmen. I am thinking rather of the excessive
practice at nets. An enthusiastic house captain is apt to believe that
by assiduous practice the most unlikely and awkward recruit can be
converted into a useful batsman, and the result is that he will drive
all his house day after day to the nets, until they begin to loathe
the sight of a cricket ball.
We should recognise that cricket is a game for the few; the majority
of boys can never make good cricketers. And happy are those schools
which are near a river and can provide an alternative exercise in the
summer, which does not require exceptional quickness of eye and wrist
and does provide a splendid discipline of body and spirit. In the
summer it is well to exempt all boys from cricket, who have really a
taste for natural history or photography. Summer half-holidays are
emphatically the time for hobbies, and it is a serious charge against
our games if they are organised to such a pitch that hobbies are
practically prohibited. The zealous captain will object that such
"slacking" is destroying the spirit of the house. We must endeavour to
point out to him that the unwilling player never makes a good player,
and that such a boy may be finding his proper development in the
pursuit of butterflies, a development which he would never gain by
unsuccessful and involuntary cricket. House masters too are apt to
complain that freedom for hobbies is subversive of discipline, and to
quote the old adage about Satan and idle hands. That there is risk, is
not to be denied. But you cannot run a school without taking risks.
Our whole system of leaving the government largely in the hands of
boys is full of risks. Sometimes it brings shipwreck; more often it
does not. For in the majority of cases the policy of confidence is
justified by results.
There is one way of wasting time that is heartily to be condemned, the
waste involved in looking on. I am inclined to think that if all
athletic contests took place without a ring of spectators, we should
get all the good of games and very little of the evil. Certainly
professional football would lose its blacker sides if there were no
gate money and no betting. Few men or boys are the worse for playing
games; it is the applause of the mob that turns their heads. But I am
afraid I am not logical enough to say that I would forbid boys to
watch matches against another school; the emotions that lead to the
"breathless hush in the Close" are so compounded of patriotism and
jealousy for the honour of the school, that they are far from ignoble.
But I would not have boys compelled to watch the games against clubs
and other non-school teams. Above all, if they watch, they must have a
run or a game to stir their own blood. The half-holiday must not be
spent in shivering on a touchline and then crowding round a fire.
That the athlete is a school hero and the scholar is not, is most
certainly true. The scholar may once in a way reflect glory on the
school by success in an examination, but generally he is regarded as a
self-regarding person, who is not likely to help to win the matches of
the year. But the hero-worship is not undiscriminating; conceit,
selfishness, surliness will go far to nullify the influence of
physical strength and skill. Boys' admiration for physical prowess is
natural and not unhealthy. The harm is done by the advertisement given
to such prowess by foolish elders. Foremost among such unwise
influences I should put the press. Even modest boys may begin to think
their achievements in the field are of public importance when they
find their names in print. Some papers publish portraits of prominent
players, or a series of articles on "Football at X--" or "The
prospects of the Cricket Season at Y--". The suggestion that there is
a public which is interested in the features of a schoolboy captain,
or wishes to know the methods of training and coaching which have led
to the success of a school fifteen, is likely to give boys an entirely
exaggerated notion of their own importance and to justify in their
minds the dedication of a great deal of time to the successes which
receive this kind of public recognition.
Next there is the parent. Our ever active critics are apt to forget
that schools are to a large extent mirrors, reflecting the tone and
opinion of the homes from which boys come. The parent who says when
the boy joins the school, "I do not mind whether he gets in the sixth,
but I want to see him in the eleven," is by no means an uncommon
parent. I have no objection to his wanting to see his boy in the
eleven, the deplorable thing is that he is indifferent to intellectual
progress. I have heard an elder brother say, "Tom has not got into his
house eleven yet, but he brought home a prize last term. I have
written to tell him he must change all that, we can't have him
disgracing the family." When a candidate has failed to qualify for
admission to the school at the entrance examination, I have had
letters of surprised and pained protest, pointing out that Jack is an
exceptionally promising cricketer. It is assumed that we should be
only too glad to welcome the athlete without regard to his standard of
work. If we could get the majority of parents to recognise the
schoolmaster's point of view, that while games are an important
element of education, they are only one element, and that there are
others which must not be neglected, we should have made a real step
forward towards the elimination of the excessive reverence paid to
the athlete.
After the press and the parent comes millinery. Perhaps it is Utopian
to suggest that "caps" can be entirely abolished; but the enterprise
of haberdashers and the weakness of school authorities have led to a
multiplication of blazers, ribbons, caps, jerseys, stockings, badges,
scarves and the like, which certainly tend to mark off the successful
player from his fellows, and to make him a cynosure of the vulgar and
an object of complacent admiration to himself. Success in games should
be its own reward. In some cases it certainly is. And the paradox is
that very often it is those who are least bountifully endowed by
nature who profit most. Some there are who have such natural gifts of
strength and dexterity, that from the first they can excel at any
game. Triumphs come to them without hard struggle, and they breathe
the incense of applause. But others have a clumsier hand, a slower
foot, and yet they have a determination to excel, a resolution in
sticking to their task that brings them at the last to a fair measure
of skill. Such a boy is already rewarded by the toughening of the will
that perseverance brings: he does not need a ribbon on his sweater. To
give the other, the natural athlete, a coloured scarf, is to run the
risk of making him over-value the gifts he owes to nature.
There is no reason why a boy who excels in games should not excel in
work. The two are not competing sides of education, they are
complementary. The schoolmaster's ideal is that his boys should gain
the advantages of both. The athlete who neglects his work, grows up
with a poorly furnished mind and an untrained judgment. The student
who neglects his games, grows up without the nervous development that
fits his body to be the instrument of his will, and without the
knowledge of men and the habit of dealing with men which are
indispensable in many callings. It has been proved again and again
that it is possible to get the advantages of both these sides of
school life. There is no reason why the playing of school games should
be anything but a help to the intellectual development of a boy.
But the constant talking about games is by no means harmless, though
it is true boys might be talking of worse things. It is related that a
French educational critic was once descanting to an English head
master on the monotony of the conversation of English public school
boys: "they talk of nothing but football." But when he was asked, "And
of what do French school boys generally talk?" he was silent. But if
"cricket shop" saves us from worse topics, it certainly is destructive
of rational conversation on subjects of more general interest. In
great boarding schools we collect a population of boys under quite
abnormal conditions, cut off for the greater part of their social life
from intercourse with older people. It is, I think, a general
experience that boys who have been at day schools and are the sons of
intelligent parents, have their minds more awakened to the questions
of the day in politics, or art, or literature than boys of equal
ability who have been at a boarding school. They have had the
advantage of hearing their father and his friends discussing topics
which are outside the range of school life. Boarding schools are often
built in some country place away from the surging life of towns, where
the noise of political strife and the roar of the traffic of the world
are but dimly heard. In such seclusion the life of the school,
particularly the active life of the playing fields, occupies the focus
of a boy's consciousness. The geographical conditions tend to narrow
the range of his interests, and he remains a boy when others are
growing to be men. Those who have the wider tastes, are deterred from
talking about them by the ever present fear of "side." They will talk
freely to a master of architecture or music or Japanese prints, but
they are chary of betraying these enthusiasms to their fellows. And
masters are not free from blame: I suppose we all of us sometimes bow
down in the house of Rimmon, and when the conversation languishes at
the tea-table, fall back on a discussion of the last house match. It
is the line of least resistance, and after a strenuous day's work it
is not easy to maintain a monologue about Home Rule. Not the least of
the boons of the war is that it has ousted games from the foremost
place as a topic of conversation. I have not noticed that they are
less keenly played, although the increase of military work has
diminished the time given to them; but they have ceased to monopolise
the thoughts of boys. The problem then of reducing the absorption in
games is the problem of finding and providing other absorbing
interests. We cannot, fortunately, always have the counter-irritant
of war. Where we fail now, is that the intellectual training of a boy
does not interest him enough in most cases to give him subjects of
conversation out of school. We give some few new interests by means of
societies, literary, antiquarian or scientific. But the main problem
is to make every boy see that the work he does in school is connected
with his life, that it is meant to open to him the shut doors around
him through which he may go out into all the highways and byways of
the world.
Do school games produce the man who regards games as the main business
of life? We must emphasise "main." It is certain that they do
encourage Englishmen to devote some part of their working life to
healthy exercise--and few, I suppose, would wish them to do otherwise.
The Indian civilian does not make a worse judge for playing polo, nor
is Benin worse administered since golf-links were laid out there. But
there are men who never outgrow the boyish narrowness of view that
games are the things that matter most. These remain the ruling
passion, because no stronger passion comes to drive it out. For this
the schools must bear part of the blame, for they have not taught
clearly enough that athletics are a means but not an end. Not all the
blame, for surely some must rest on a society which tolerates the
idler, and has no reproach for the man who says "I live only for
hunting and golf." And here as elsewhere, I believe we are judged more
by a few failures than by many successes. We can all of us in our
experience recall many an honest athlete who is now doing splendid
service to Church or State, doughty curates, self-sacrificing doctors,
soldiers who are real leaders of men. When they became men they put
away childish things, but they have not forgotten what they owe to the
discipline of their boyish games. Games are not the first thing in
life for them now, but they have no doubt that they can do their work
better from an occasional afternoon's play. They see things in their
right proportion, because they know that the first thing is to have a
job and do it well. If we can teach boys to begin to understand that
truth while they are at school, we shall have exorcised the bogey of
athleticism. I should expect to find (though I do not know) that the
authorities at Osborne and Dartmouth do not need to bother their minds
about that bogey. Their boys play games with all a sailor's
heartiness, but their ambition is not to be a first-class athlete, but
to be a first-class sailor, and the games take their proper place. It
may be desirable to reduce the time devoted to games, though as I have
said I doubt if there is any need to do so, except for cricket. It may
be that we should give more time to handicraft, or military drill. But
these things will not change the spirit. What we need to do is to make
clearer the object of education in which athletics form a part, that
there may be more sense of reality in the boy's school time, more
understanding that he is at school to fit himself manfully and capably
to play his part on the wider stage of life.
[Footnote 1: C.W. Saleeby, _Parenthood and Race Culture_, pp. 62, 63.]
IX
THE USE OF LEISURE
By J. H. BADLEY
Head Master of Bedales School
To teach a sensible use of leisure, healthy both for mind and body, is
by no means the least important part of education. Nor is it by any
means the least pressing, or the least difficult, of school problems.
"Loafing" at times that have no recognised duties assigned them, is
generally a sign of slackness in work and play as well; and if we do
not find occupation for thoughts and hands, the rhyme tells us who
will. The devils of cruelty and uncleanness will be ready to enter the
empty house, and fill it at least with unwholesome talk, and
thoughtless if not ill-natured "ragging." Yet work and games, whatever
keenness we arouse and encourage in these, cannot fill a boy's whole
time and thoughts--or, if they do, his life, whether he is student or
athlete, or even the occasional combination of both, is still a narrow
one and likely to get narrower as years go by. If life to the
uneducated means a soulless round of labour varied by the public-house
and the "pictures," so to the half-educated it is apt, except in war
time, to mean the office and the club, with interests that do not go
beyond golf and motoring and bridge. If our lives are emptier and our
interests narrower than they need be, it is partly the result of a
narrow and unsatisfying education, which leaves half our powers
undeveloped and interests untouched, and too often only succeeds in
giving us a distaste for those which it touches. Both for the sake of
the present, therefore, to avoid the dangers of unfilled leisure, and
still more for the sake of the future, the wise schoolmaster does all
he can to foster, in addition to keenness in the regular work and
games, interests, both individual and social, of other kinds as well.
He will make opportunities for various handicrafts: he will try to
stimulate lines of investigation not arranged for in the
class-routine; he will encourage the formation of societies both for
discussion and active pursuits, for instruction and entertainment. It
is the purpose of this essay to suggest what, along these lines, is
possible in the school.
But the reasons so far given for the encouragement of leisure-time
interests are mainly negative. In order to realise to the full the
importance of this side of education, we must look rather at their
positive value. From whichever point of view one looks at it,
physical, intellectual, or social, this value is not small. Some of
these interests contribute directly to health in being outdoor
pursuits; and these, in not letting games furnish the only motive and
means of exercise, can help to establish habits and motives of no
little help in later life, when games are no longer easy to keep up.
And even in the years when the call of games is strongest, some
rivalry of other outdoor pursuits is useful as a preventive of
absorption in athleticism, easily carried to excess at school so as to
shut out finer interests and influences. It was a consciousness of
this that led Captain Scott, in the letter written in those last hours
among the Antarctic snows, thinking of his boy at home, and the
education that he wished for him, to write: "Make the boy interested
in natural history, if you can; it is better than games: they
encourage it in some schools."
Besides health--and health, we must remember, is not only a bodily
matter, but depends on mental as well as bodily activity, and on the
enjoyment of the activity that comes from its being mainly
voluntary--the pursuits that we are considering can do much to train
skill of various kinds. The class-work represents the minimum that we
expect a boy to know; but there is much that necessarily lies outside
it of hardly less value. Many a boy learns as much from the hobby on
which he spends his free time as from the work he does in class.
Sometimes, indeed, such a free-time hobby reveals the bent that might
otherwise have gone undiscovered, and determines the choice of a
special line of work for the future career.
But the chief value of such interests lies rather in their influence
on other work, and on the general development of character. In giving
scope for many kinds of skill, they are helping the intellectual
training; and however ready we may be to pay lip-service to the
principle of learning by doing, and to admit the educational
importance of the hand in brain-development, in most of our school
work we still ignore these things, so far as any practical
application of them is concerned. One is sometimes tempted to wonder
if in the future there may not be so complete a reaction from our
present ideas and methods as to make what are now regarded as mere
hobbies the main matter of education, and to relegate much of the
present school course, as the writing of verses has already been
relegated, to the category of optional side-shows. At any rate these
free-time interests can supply a very useful stimulus to much of the
routine work. In these a boy may find himself for the first time, and
discover, despite his experience in class, that he is no fool. Or at
least he may find there a centre of interest, otherwise lacking, round
which other interests can group, and to which knowledge obtained in
various class-subjects can attach itself, and so get for him a meaning
and a use. And further, if we do not make the mistake of narrowing the
range of choice, and allow, at any rate at first, a succession of
interests, the very range and variety of these pursuits is an antidote
against the tendency to early specialisation, encouraged by
scholarship and entrance examinations, which is one of the dangers
against which we need to be on our guard. If, therefore, without mere
dissipation of interest, we can widen the range of mental activities
and encourage, by discussions, essays, lectures and so forth, reading
round and outside the subjects dealt with in class, this is all to the
good.
And all this has a social as well as an individual aspect. The
meetings for the purposes just mentioned, as well as those for
entertainment, have, like games, a real educational value, and do
much to cement the comradeship of common interests and common aims
that is one of the best things school has to give. And not only among
those of the same age. These are things in which the example and
influence of the older are particularly helpful to the younger. They
can become, like the games, and perhaps to an even greater extent, one
of the interests that help to bind together past and present members
of a school. And they afford an opportunity for masters to meet boys
on a more personal and friendly footing, and to get the mutual
knowledge and respect which are all-important if education is to be,
in Thring's definition, a transmission of life through the living to
the living. That the organisation of leisure-time pursuits is of the
utmost help to the school as well as to the boy, is the unanimous
verdict of the schools in which it has long been a tradition. The
master who has had charge, for the past five-and-twenty years, of this
organisation in one such school writes that there they consider such
pursuits as the very life-blood of the school, and the only rational
method of maintaining discipline.