double their salary: there was an instance lately of a good mathematician being offered a resident mastership of £300 a year to start with. This paper is not concerned with the vexed question of the ultimate prospects of assistant masters, but the average income of a large body of resident masters, visiting teachers, drill sergeants, etc., can be easily seen to be a serious item in the preparatory schoolmaster's balance sheet. Besides, is the time, attention, personal supervision, and organising power demanded from the Head to be assessed at nil? An income of at least £500 is not an exorbitant sum to reward such constant attention, and if this is below the average income of Preparatory School Headmasters, which I fear is the case, there is in this sphere of Education a large amount of underpaid labour presented annually to the public. No schoolroom is now regarded as properly furnished unless equipped with modern types of desks and seats, well-drawn maps and diagrams, and shelves lined with the books of a good school library. This expenditure alone easily rises beyond £100 for a school of any size. Again, every schoolmaster is tempted to add to the comfort or convenience of his school by enlarging his buildings. In fact, building operations are a very maelstrom in their absorption of savings. Let the instance already recorded of £45,000 be recalled, while a leading school in the North of England is said to have cost nearer £50,000; and, to descend to a lower level, a school for thirty boys had quite a plain dormitory and schoolroom added to it at a cost of £1,500. Buildings both absorb money and demand brains for their arrangements, and both have been lavishly given to Preparatory Schools. The training of the boys' bodies is now rightly insisted on, and requires the provision of gymnasia, baths, and playingrooms. No one can hope to build a proper-sized gymnasium, even of wood, and fit it with apparatus, under an expenditure of at least £200, and for large numbers that sum may easily be trebled. The cost of a bath depends largely on the site and its power of adaptation: but £150 is a minimum estimate for one of adequate size, and if it is covered in and heated, more than double that sum will be needed. The cost of playing-rooms and cricket fields varies indefinitely according to position and locality, but there are several schools which have to pay as much as £50 for the use of a suitable field. Beyond all these there is the cost of museums, libraries, and workshops. In the face of these details all necessary to complete efficiency, who would deny that a Preparatory School is a venture that calls for the expenditure of considerable capital? And yet that capital furnishes but a moderate certainty of adequate financial return. The Preparatory Schoolmaster is embarked on the most capricious of all trades; though, as regards brain and character, his work may be of the noblest. The best efforts of the most capable headmaster may fail absolutely through no fault of his; for there are ever hovering round him, like bad dreams, a flock of phantom elements of failure. A health certificate is now rigorously exacted by every headmaster from boys on their return after holidays; but, while such a step may cultivate greater care on the part of those who have to sign the certificate it cannot guarantee immunity from illness, which may be introduced at any time latent in the system of some boy. A detached sanatorium-another costly building item-is generally the appendage of a Preparatory School, and though the isolation which it provides is a great safeguard against the rapid spread of any epidemic, its effective arrest of contagion is dependent on a good deal of luck in detecting the first signs of sickening before the patient becomes infectious. The long list of complaints enumerated on our certificates is ever present to warn us that, take whatever precautions we may, we are very near a danger that may imperil our welfare. Nor is the area of danger confined to our own school; for we have of late years seen disastrous effects resulting in certain towns on the South Coast from the outbreak of epidemics, which created a panic in the minds of parents. It would not be difficult to summon witnesses who would tell the story of their schools being virtually ruined by this very panic. A terrible phantom is the apathy of local sanitary authorities. Again, the connexion of a Preparatory School often depends so much on the personality of the headmaster that, if it is broken by his sudden death, before continuity is established with a successor, its value is sadly impaired as a realisable asset: for, though sickness or death may impair the value of any business, the effect is trebled where the dominant factor of success is personality. Further, there may be often letters that vex the heart of a Preparatory Head, but none are are so trying as those that bring to his notice some lâches or unjust conduct on the part of his assistant masters. He feels that nothing can divest him of responsibility for any wrong that has been inflicted or any irregularity that has caused dissatisfaction; but at the same time he knows that what has occurred has been done in direct contravention of his clear instructions, and that his experience of the offender has never led him to expect this disloyalty from him. Well ordered Preparatory Schools resemble happy households of young people so much more than corporate bodies, that the acts of individual members raise or lower the reputation of the school more rapidly than is the case with larger schools. Lastly, the popular breeze must fill the sails of the Preparatory School bark, if it is to make good weather; and what a fickle wind it may often prove! Surely it must be something more than a desire of profit that makes level-headed men sink their money in buildings founded on such quicksands. Preparatory Schools, save for a very few, are no Eldorado or Klondyke, but a very hardly worked soil which needs constant cultivation, and the crops of which are often snatched away by influences as fickle as British weather. The need, which has been already emphasised, of keeping abreast of the times, entails such a constant drain of resource and money, that the percentage realised can never be high. Many successful 2 D men have calculated that 4 per cent. is the outside interest they are reaping on all the capital that has been sunk; and the man would be sanguine who could ever hope to realise at par the capital invested. Yet England surely may take it as a good sign for the future training of her young citizens that she can find so many men of high character who are so fired with educational zeal as to be willing to risk their money on a thoroughly insecure financial basis, C. BLACK, PREPARATION FOR THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL It is not proposed in the limits of a short article to cover the wide field of the moral, mental, and physical education of young children, but rather, with a view to the much-desired continuity of education, to show how the mental training of the child destined to go to a Preparatory School may be best harmonised with the existing conditions of those schools. It is not intended, however, and it is necessary to say this at the outset, to set up the mental training of the Preparatory Schools as an ideal education for the young boy. In the opinion of many competent judges it is too exclusively linguistic and mathematical, and takes little account of other important sides of education. Into the reasons for this it is unnecessary to enter here; it is enough to say that any wise system of home education will aim at supplying these deficiencies to some extent. It will be best to fix the limit of home training at nine years, and this for many reasons. On the one hand, few boys are sufficiently independent in their habits to leave home before this age, nor is it desirable that they should be removed earlier from the immediate influence of the mother; on the other, it is highly important that a boy's education should be broken by as few changes as possible, and that the second stage, from nine to fourteen, should be at one school and under one system of teaching. Now the forms of a Preparatory School are invariably graduated on a Latin standard, and the course of teaching is made continuous from beginning to end. In many schools it is found advisable to have a beginners' class for boys who have been insufficiently prepared in elementary subjects; but the well-prepared boy of nine can take his place in the lowest Latin form to begin the language then, and with five years before him can, if he be of average ability, secure sufficient time in the highest form to ensure a good position in any Public School Entrance Examination, or, if he be a clever boy, to win an Entrance Scholarship. It rarely happens that an older boy is able to qualify for a higher form, and if he does, he labours under the disadvantages of a change of teachers and probably a change of text-book and system. It has been shown by recent statistics that the actual age of entry is on an average rather over nine and a half. Boys enter from eight to eleven, roughly speaking; that is, some exceptionally independent or less amenable to petticoat-government come earlier, others come later, either because they have been kept at home for reasons of health, or because parents prefer a preliminary 4333. 2D2 breaking in at a day school or at one of the pretty numerous boarding schools for little boys which are conducted by ladies. There are not a few excellent Preparatory Schools which receive day boys, and where such a school is available nothing can be better than this combination of home training with the wholesome influence of corporate school life-a system, moreover, by which continuous education may be secured from a very early age till the boy goes to his Public School; but these advantages are not to be had in country districts, while in great towns such schools are often hampered by the difficulty of securing open spaces for playgrounds and providing for the organised school games which are so important a factor in a boy's education. The question then for our consideration is this, "How may a young boy be best educated up to the age of nine for his school career?" The first and last essential is that he should be interested in what he learns, and should be put in the way of acquiring good mental habits and good methods of work. What he has learnt is of no importance whatever, compared with how he has learnt it. The interest that a boy takes in his work is very little affected by the nature of the task before him, but is always in exact proportion to the power of achievement which is awakened within him by clear, judicious and stimulating teaching. He must be taught from the first to aim at a high standard of thoroughness and accuracy and a habit of concentrating his attention on the work in hand. Nothing is more useful to a boy, when he goes to school and takes his place in a class of eight or ten boys, than the power of thoroughly mastering a given piece of work in a given time. Every lesson should therefore be short and should be required to be known perfectly within a reasonable time. If the child cannot do it, shorten the lesson rather than extend the time. It must be confessed that these general principles, sufficiently obvious to an experienced teacher, are too often neglected in home training. The position of a governess in a private family is one of much difficulty and claims our fullest sympathy. Unless the heads of the family are persons of exceptional knowledge and discrimination in educational matters, the temptation may be overpowering to push on as fast as possible and show by 'results' that the pupil is getting on, that is, is doing more advanced work. From this springs a whole crop of evils, especially in the case of the less quick-witted children, difficulties are skimmed over, the teacher following the line of least resistance; to save friction injudicious help is given, the boy learns no standard of thoroughness or accuracy, and loses interest, because he loses (or has never gained) that sense of power which enlivens the dullest subject and is the mainspring of mental progress. To the Preparatory School is left the heaviest of all heavy tasks-the unteaching of bad methods and bad mental habits. I am putting an extreme case to illustrate a tendency and a danger. I am far from suggesting that this is confined to home teaching or to lady teachers. The same tendency may be observed in University men who are learning their work in Preparatory Schools, but it is more quickly corrected in the organised system of |