THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO ATHLETICS
But it is not only on account of the moral question that I would
advocate the lowering of the age limit. Such a reform would, I believe,
make its influence felt on every side of school life. It would not
alter, but it would modify certain conditions. The blood system would
still exist, but less acutely. The gap between the junior and senior
would be small. At present a man of nineteen who has been tried for his
county eleven appears to the junior as a gorgeous giant. He and his
friends live in a world apart, and they know it. A good three years
separates him from the anxieties and indignities of the day room. No
one, save his actual contemporaries, remember him as being anything but
a blood. He is, and has been, a prince among mankind. He idles through
his last two years, a very splendid, a very attractive figure; but, as
we have already seen, his is hardly the ideal apprenticeship for life.
If the leaving age were fixed at seventeen instead of nineteen, so proud
a position would be unattainable. There would still be bloods, still
elegant creatures to saunter across the courts, languidly arm in arm.
But a certain refinement would be missing. The languor would be less
certain of itself, it would seem to fear a sudden assault and a fierce
shout of 'Jones, you young swine, what right have you to shove on side?'
There is a difference between the blood of eighteen and the blood of
sixteen. It is only four terms since the blood of sixteen was suffering
the last exaction of the law. He remembers vividly being beaten for
ragging in the dormitories; it is not so long since he was a fag. If we
were suddenly transplanted on a magic carpet into the luxury of an
Eastern court we should stand for some time in dazed bewilderment,
marvelling at what had happened to us, wondering who were these comely
Ethiopians that prostrated themselves before us. For quite five minutes
we should lack the courage to give an order. The blood of sixteen feels
like this; can he have achieved so swiftly his ambition? It is only
yesterday that he was trembling in the presence of the great. By the
time he has recovered from his bewilderment and is preparing to exert
his authority his year of office is at an end.
Not only, moreover, is the sixteen year old blood unable to hold so
exalted an opinion of his own importance, but his immediate juniors
refuse to recognise him as the gilded figure of romance. The men on the
Fifth Form table remember when the head of the house helped them to
wreck Bennett's study. They cannot feel him to be so vastly superior to
themselves. It is different for the blood of eighteen. He has passed
slowly through many circles to the dignity of an Olympian. He has
served his period of probation. He was not a colt's cap one season and
the next a colour. He took a year to pass from house cap to seconds, and
another year from seconds to firsts. He discovered himself gradually. He
rose slowly to his greatness. By the time he has reached his last year
the days of conflict are infinitely remote. He can hardly believe it
possible that he was ever caned. He is, in fact, a great deal too old
for a Public School. And as things are now it is impossible for any,
save the exceptional boy, to reach a position of authority till he is
eighteen, or at least seventeen.
A great many boys do undoubtedly leave between the ages of sixteen and
eighteen, but by doing so they lose the most valuable lessons they
should learn at school. A boy who leaves before he has been a house
prefect fails to put the coping stone to his education. The
responsibilities of prefectship are an invaluable experience. And when
the house master begs the parent to let 'Arthur stop on another year,'
the parent naturally gives way. And it is, of course, always the wrong
type of person who stays on that extra year. It is the clever, the
brilliant, the athletic boy, the boy who already stands out above his
contemporaries and in the course of the next year will be even more
prominent, that is encouraged to remain. It would not matter if the dull
boy stayed on another year. His natural talents would not be sufficient
to lift him to the rarefied atmosphere of Olympus. It is the second
eleven colour who is urged to stay on to get his firsts. The fast bowler
who is asked to captain the side next year, the exhibitioner who hopes
that another year's work will win him a scholarship at Balliol. The
great become more great, and, as their undistinguished contemporaries
fall out of the race, the gap between the prefect and the fag grows more
pronounced. The intermediate steps are few and dimly seen. It is not
surprising that the blood system should gloriously flourish. It would
not so flourish were the leaving age to be fixed at seventeen. We have
the proof of this in the knowledge of what happened during the war, when
the big men left suddenly in August, 1914, when boys of sixteen sat at
the Sixth Form table, and when no one stayed on at school after his
eighteenth birthday.
War conditions were, of course, abnormal. It was inevitable that at such
a time the rewards of school life should lose their value. It was
impossible to feel the old excitement about the result of a house match
when the morning paper had brought with it the story of Neuve Chapelle.
The winning of cups and the gaining of colours ceased to be an end in
themselves. For the boy who was prevented by lack of years from joining
the army in 1914 school life became a period of probation, of marking
time. Life in its fullest sense was waiting for him on the other side;
no prefect ever looked forward to Oxford more eagerly than those of us
who were still at school in 1915 looked forward to the day when we
should join the army. Our imagination was quickened by the stories told
us by old boys returning from depôts and from the front. Was it possible
that Smith, who had played with us only eight months earlier in the Two
Cock, should be in charge of a company in the front line trenches? We
fretted at our tether; our eyes were fixed on the future. We scorned the
prizes that lay to our hand. We began to reconstruct our scale of
values: it was not only the giants of the football field who were
winning honours for themselves and for the school in France. Queer,
insignificant fellows who had never risen above the Upper Fourth, and
had never been in the running for a house cap, came home on leave with
the blue and white riband of the military cross. We began to realise
that it was not only the blood that was entitled to our respect. The
blood system received a rude shock in August, 1914. It will never,
unless we become involved in social revolution, receive such another. I
believe, however, that it would be considerably modified were the
leaving age to be altered.
There would be also less hooliganism and less bullying. The third yearer
would no longer be in a position of reckless freedom. Studies would
still be stripped, scholars would still be ragged, but the process would
be compressed. The swash-buckling element would find itself sooner in
authority. The scholar would reach sooner the immunity of the Sixth. And
the prefect would be no less capable of keeping order. For, after all,
the prefect owes his power as much to the system that is behind him as
to himself.
But perhaps the greatest difference that the change would effect would
be in the boy's attitude to his own life. Six years is a very long time
to be in one place. I remember at the end of my first year overhearing a
conversation between the barber and a boy who was leaving the next day.
'Well, Mr. Meredith,' the barber was saying, 'I suppose this is the last
time I shall cut your hair. I have cut it a good many times.'
'I have been in this town,' said Meredith, 'for ten years: five years at
the prep, and five years at the school. I'm jolly well sick of it.'
It is certainly a mistake to send a boy to the prep. of the school to
which he will one day go. Ten years is too long. But six is too long,
too--at that age.
It is not easy for any one under thirty to picture himself in six years'
time. We look back and remember ourselves six years ago in the
discomfort and disquiet of khaki. What a lot has happened since then.
Who can tell what the next six years may hold? Very few men under thirty
can look far ahead, and the new boy at a Public School who can see his
life mapped out for six years naturally does not look beyond them. He
hardly realises that there is a world outside. He will have to travel so
far before he reaches it. He comes to consider his Public School not as
a prelude, but as the whole sphere in which his personality has to move.
Certain prizes and certain honours await him. He does not pause to
think whether those prizes and those honours will be of much or little
service to him after he has put the cloistered world behind him. Not
only is he incapable of viewing his life under the hard light of
eternity, he is incapable of viewing it under the light of the fifty odd
years of traffic that wait for him among phenomena. He accepts
unquestioningly the standards and values of his school. He does not feel
that he is preparing for a contest. That phase of endeavour belonged to
his 'prep.' He has started the race.
There is a big difference between four years and six. It is a wall over
which even the fag can peer on tiptoe. The passage of ambitions and
loyalties and jealousies is much more swift. It is possible to consider
four years as a prelude; and as soon as public school life is regarded
as a prelude the scale of values becomes changed. The boy begins to
wonder whether he is doing his best to fit himself for after life. He
will cease to be contented with the honours that come to him on the way.
Because his school is a fixed institution, because the scope of his
masters is fixed within its walls, there is a tendency to regard him as
an inhabitant and not a sojourner there. That is what the schoolboy
should never be allowed to forget--that he is passing through one phase
of his life into another; it is because he has forgotten that that he so
often pauses bewildered and irresolute on the threshold of life.