Why Send Your Boy To School?

A Plea for Developing Individuality—Eccentricity Even—in Preparatory Schools

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

THE Headmaster of a large and successful boys' school not a thousand miles from New York is fond of telling his pet experience with parents. He had dropped a certain boy, who then endeavored to enter another school, and of course the master of the second school wrote to the master of the first for information. This the first master supplied, and forgot the incident. But a few days later he was suddenly confronted with the boy's parents, the mother well in the van. What did he mean, she demanded, telling Dr. B— things about Robert that caused him to reject her son? The master assured her that he had said nothing derogatory about Robert, merely stating that he didn't quite fit in so large a school and would do better in a smaller one. By way of proof he sent for a copy of the letter. When it came he proceeded to read it aloud, and found it as he remembered—until he reached the last sentence. Out of the tail of his eye he saw this sentence coming, but it was too late to retreat. He had to read on.

"IN SHORT," the letter concluded, "the it real trouble with Robert is that he has been spoiled by a foolish mother."

He blurted out the words, while the mother stood before him, speechless with indignation. There was a tense pause. Then the father, who so far hadn't said a word, stepped suddenly forward, grasped the Headmaster by the hand, and cried, "Thank God, I came!"

The number of preparatory school boys who arc unsatisfactory to their masters because they have been spoiled by foolish mothers is, however, a tiny one. Most of the trouble comes cither from boys who have been neglected by their parents, or from boys whose parents have endowed them with unusual qualities. The parents most apt to neglect their boys are, of course, the rich and busy ones, so the preparatory schoolmasters, who arc called upon to educate the scions of such families, generally have their hands full merely trying to do the work which the parents should have done before the boys were ten years old. When, on the contrary, the parents have done the work so well that John or Bob is a distinct individuality, with an independent character and some decided and original talent (other, of course, than athletic talent), he fits even less comfortably into the well regulated prep school than the 16-year-old hooch hound.

The average parent, especially the one who had a hard struggle in his own boyhood, wants his children brought up in comfort and "well educated." That is human and natural. Also, if he is a man of character, he wants his son to have character. But any master will tell you that, to bring a child up in comfort, too often means to bring it up in luxury, with no sense of responsibility, and that far too many fathers, themselves possessing strong character, forget entirely that this character was developed by overcoming obstacles, and expect their sons to show equal character without ever facing a real obstacle.

"Why should I work?" a boy said the other day, when reproached with flunking three exams. "What difference does it make? Dad's worth a million, and I'm going to inherit the business. I'm not going to break my neck boning algebra."

A boy whose parents have allowed him to grow up with that attitude of course hasn't one chance in ten thousand of ever amounting to the worth of a pet poodle, nor has the school, which doesn't get him till he is thirteen or fourteen, have one chance in ten thousand of doing him much good. The number of such boys, especially in the more expensive prep schools, is pathetically large. Some of them never get to college, but the schools, supplemented by tutors, manage to shoe-horn the majority into Harvard, Yale or Princeton, where the income of $10,000,000 endowments is spent upon their worthless persons. And it is chiefly the parents' fault that they are worthless. They never had a chance from the start.

One is always hearing talk of the over-emphasis on athletics in preparatory schools. Athletics are greatly emphasized, but there is a very good reason for it. Coming in so large a proportion from homes where there is no true intellectual life, or else from homes where they have been left to a nursemaid and tutors and their own wild devices, the schoolboys find in athletics almost their first and most natural contact with reality. The opposing rush line is oppressively real. The cooperation of team play is real. The chance for loyalty to something beyond the self is real. The adulation of other boys for the athlete is delightfully real.

THE athlete finds himself a leader with influence over his fellows. He feels a sense of power, a stirring of character. Hence it is that in the great majority of schools the athletic field, not the class-room, is the real basis of education, the means through which the school gets at the boys and contrives to make some of them, at least, reasonably dependable, loyal, and fit to stand up among men. The real trouble with the majority of our prep schools isn't too much emphasis on athletics, but no emphasis at all on anything else except the College Board exams.

Probably 90% of private preparatory school boys expect to go to college, and the entire scholastic curriculum is adjusted to the end of getting them there. To get there, they have to pass certain definite examinations, in certain definite subjects, whether or not they have any liking and aptitude for these subjects. Bear in mind that a very considerable number of them come from homes without any intellectual background, and most of them from homes where the ideal of worldly success is a fat income, a straight eight, and a house on the proper street. They are not going to college because of any intellectual curiosity, any desire to learn. They are going because it is the proper thing to do. And now consider the master's job. He has to take boys without mental ambition, without any respect for things of the mind, and get them past the College Board in a rigid, arbitrary set of subjects which gives him almost no scope to awaken and educate each separate boy through the channel of some special aptitude that might, conceivably, be discovered in him. Study, for the boy, becomes a bore, and his code too often demands that he scorn any chap who does more than the essential minimum of work. Coming to the school without intellectual interests, or having none roused in him after he gets there, his mind is ripe for the contemplation of mischief, and he exalts his one reality—athletics —into a sort of religion, an intolerant religion, too. Conform, he says, to every lad in school, or be the butt of ridicule.

Now it so happens that the really valuable people in this world, whether men or boys, have always been the non-conformists. They have also always been the most troublesome. But it is the duty, and the glory, of true education to help the non-conformists; not to cut men to a pattern, but to develop to the full their individual talents and capacities. Some nonconformists boys are always getting into even the most expensive and fashionable prep schools, where they are almost invariably regarded as nuisances by most of their masters, and as freaks by most of their mates. And that is the real and just reproach against our American schools. There is no place in them for the unusual boy.

THERE is no place for the unusual boy because the rigid demands of the college entrance examinations have made true education more or less impossible; and because the type of American home the average schoolboys come from, the type of bringing up (or lack of bringing up) they have had, make these boys, in advance, intolerant of intellectual achievement, ignorant of all the subtler things of civilization, blind to everything but the one easily grasped reality of athletic supremacy and leadership. If you don't believe this, ask any schoolmaster what percent of his boys ever read anything but text books and a few of the cheaper and more sensational magazines. Or give any senior class in any prep school a test on current events. Or ask any school editor how many of his fellows can be induced to write for the literary paper? Or how many can draw a picture for him? Or how many can play any instrument but a banjo or a saxaphone? Tell any senior class that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, at 19, published a book of poems, and William Winter, at 19, reviewed it, and Edward Everett, at 20, was installed as pastor of a Boston^church, and watch the sheepish incredulity on their faces. Or even ask them, as they were asked recently in two schools, how many legs a Hottentot has—and then gasp to find that over 60% answer, "Four."

You may ask, perhaps, why the average schoolmaster is annoyed by the unusual boy, even though you readily sec why this boy is picked upon by his mates. The average master is a slave to routine, to "marks," to the necessity of getting his pupils into college. If any considerable number of them fail, he is considered to have failed as a teacher. That teacher is prized most whose discipline is best, who gets the largest percentage of boys into college, and who can help with the athletics and similar extra-curriculum activities. Give him a pupil of original mind, who refuses meekly to assimilate the daily lessons but asks questions, debates; and routine is interrupted. Give him a boy, still further, who has some pronounced talent, and he finds a problem on his hands that not only interferes with routine but troubles his conscience. For if this boy's bent is science, the chances are he cannot or will not assimilate Latin or English, and if his bent is literary, or artistic, or dramatic, the chances are he cannot or will not assimilate algebra. The masters not only are vexed at the prospect of failure in the college exams.; they are pained at their own inability to supply this boy with what he plainly ought to have— a chance to drive forward along the line of his talent, stimulated by competition, rewarded by praise, and getting through the line of his dominant interest that maturity of mind and developed individual capacity which if is the business of education to give.

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Any master can tell you, if he will, of dozens of cases in his own experience of boys who plainly showed in school a flair for some form of creative activity, from radio-making to scene designing, but who had to be ironed out into conformity with the college requirements and the code of the clan. A few boys, of course, always have the talent to resist the curriculum, and follow their own star away from college into life, and the character to resist the code and be as individual and non-conformist as they choose. The majority, however, do not. They struggle with the curriculum dully and dutifully and vaguely wonder why this thing, education, is such a bore; and they either conquer their eccentricities and conform to the code standards of conduct or, after enduring a merciless ragging from their mates, suppress their secret stirrings of the mind and spirit, becoming lonely, unhappy, and sometimes even dangerously unbalanced boys.

It seems a great pity that in an age when the ignorantly fanatic masses in America are trying, not without success, to impose a horrid stamp of dull conformity upon the country, our private schools and colleges should aid and abet them. Yet they do, for dull conformity is dull conformity, whatever the code; and it is no less sad to see a schoolboy paddled or perpetually ragged by his mates for writing verse or reading a book than it is to see a man tarred and feathered by his night-shirted neighbors for denying the Virgin Birth or keeping a mistress. Arnold called his Rugby boys "young barbarians at play", which well enough describes most schoolboys at times. There is something in the air of England, however, which seems to encourage freedom and respect for the individual. The more eccentric his individuality, in fact, the more likely he is to be respected. And English schools are making constant experiment in finding ways to educate him through his peculiar talents. It does not seem so with us. "Get into the mould, or get out of the school," might justly be the motto over too many a scholastic door.

Some day, perhaps, we shall abolish all examinations, especially those for college admission. That will be the first step in a genuine educational reform. To get into college a boy will have to demonstrate to his teachers some genuine intellectual curiosity, and some genuine intellectual capacity either along general lines, or strikingly in one line. That will automatically reduce all college freshman classes by at least 50%, all college graduates will be relieved for a few years of the perpetual demands on their pocket books, and the new crop of graduates who presently come along will be a much more interesting, diversified and civilized lot of educated individuals than the present crop of smug conformists afraid alike of art and ideas. Then maybe when the children of the new crop go to school, they won't be 90% little undeveloped dumb-bells at 18.

But this is a long way in the future. Our colleges are still too dominated by the "success" ideal to want anything but a steady stream of curriculum fodder. Meantime, if you have a son who has a genuine talent, who is an unusual boy, for Heaven's sake keep him so. Educate him yourself!