LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE UNIVERSITIES CONJOINT SCHEME.
[TO THIII sarros OF THI " 811110TATOR.1
you kindly allow me a little of your space to object, as an old public-school man and a schoolmaster, to your remark that University honours are no guide to the worth of a school's teaching. Where such honours are gained merely as spasmodic efforts and are rare, no doubt your criticism is true, but when they are gained regularly year after year, and by boys who have, as is the case in all the best schools, spent several years in the place, surely they are no small testimony to careful and conscien- tious training all through. Such boys do not receive all, or even their most important teaching in the sixth form ; it is the ground- ing of the lower forms which makes them sound scholars, and that grounding is not applied to them in any special way, apart from the rest of their class. You cannot make a purse out of a sow's CAT, nor will any thoroughness of education train stupidity into scholarship.
I do not share your correspondent's antipathy to inspection, but I protest against the number of certificates gained being of itself any gauge of a school's merit, knowing, as I do, what dif- ferent circumstances affect the number of boys which a school can send up. If this new system is to be followed out in every detail, and to be looked on as a trial of our work, it will doubt- less have much the same effect as an Act of Uniformity on the English Church. Whether that will be a blessing or a curse, I will leave to your judgment. The classical elegance of Eton and Shrewsbury, the broad teaching of Rugby and Marlborough, will have to be brought to the same level, to meet the exigencies of compulsory competition.—I am, Sir, &c., ANOTHER SCHOOLMASTER.
[What we said and say is, not that University honours are no guide to the worth of a school's teaching, but that they are no guide to the amount of intellectual discipline bestowed on the average boy,—which is what most parents wish to know,-,-since the highest success is often gained by schools which cultivate the clever boys at the expense of average boys. And that is a habit which is apt to begin at the beginning.—ED. Spectator.]
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