Sin,—May I congratulate Messrs. Peele and Whitehorn on their articles
on the Centenary of Arnold's death? I must, however, challenge Mr. Whitehorn's assertion that such activities as music, dramatic, debating and literary societies, magazines and school orchestras are not feasible in day schools. I can assure him that in my old day school in Scotland these activities flourished forty years ago, some of them much earlier, and they also existed at other schools like it. They are, I think, to be found in these days in most Scottish secondary schools, and I think also in most English Grammar and State-aided secondary schools.
As a Scotsman long resident in England and interested as a parent in Rugby School and post-war education, I have often wondered, when reading correspondence on this subject, if there is not too much dis- cussion about public schools. The efficient schools will survive and deserve to survive as most valuable national assets. They are, however, very expensive and can only cater for a small minority of the best children of all classes. In Scotland public (boarding) schools are small and few. Practically all working- and middle-class Scottish boys receive their higher education at one of the great day schools. Education at these schools is relatively cheap and they are thoroughly democratic. For generations they have produced the vast majority of leading Scotsmen in every walk of life, some now governing this country and the empire, while many of these had nothing in youth but ability, ambition, a thirst for knowledge and the will to work.
Apart from reform of the public schools which, after all, can under any system only educate a small number of boys, should not the aim of post-war education in England be, where necessary, to develop, for the children of all classes capable of benefiting from a higher education, the existing Grammar and secondary schools to the traditions and level of the great Scottish day schools? Thus, side by side and on an equality with the public schools, such schools may come to be regarded, as in Scotland, by the community generally as the national educational nurseries
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