d supply, what they
want they will get. It has been said that every nation has the
government it deserves. So it is with the press, and so it is with the
schools: we get what we want, and what we want is what we deserve.
What do we want?

There are some parents who take the public schools quite seriously as
places of professional training, places where their sons will be taught
to earn their livings, and they are encouraged in this notion by the
fact that several professional bodies insist on successful candidature
in some pass examination in school subjects as a first step towards
entrance into the profession, and thereby rivet these examinations upon
the schools. The result is not altogether bad. The examinations make
for a deplorable ossification of the curriculum; but they also set a
certain low standard, and drive a certain type of boy and master to
work, and, though the type of work is not very exalted, it is better
than nothing at all. On the individual boy the effect will be various.
"Look here," says the house master, "there's London Matric. at the end
of next term. Hadn't you better give up all this foolery with politics
and do a little real work?" The advice was taken, and perhaps we are
not sufficiently impartial to offer a valuable opinion on the result.
However, the boy was no fool, and the first part of the advice need
never have been given. Except in the case of boys, far too numerous,
who are taking examinations that ought never to have been imposed on
them, "modern aiders" and the like who are mugging up "prepared books"
of Virgil and Euripides, work for a pass examination ought not to mean
the cessation of all other intellectual activity.

There is another much more old-fashioned type of parent who stands for
everything that is traditional, who is seriously disturbed if his boy
wanders far afield from the old classical curriculum, who regards all
new subjects as foolish fads. It is this parent, helped by an
old-fashioned type of house master, who retains in a mild torture of
boredom the boys who linger wasting their time in the lower reaches of
the classical side.

But anything is better than nothing, and the attitude of many more
parents is purely cynical. They just leave it to the schoolmaster.
"Cynical" might seem a hard word with which to repay this compliment of
trust; but it is not, for there is really no compliment and no trust.
The parent does not really believe in the school-mast