THE PUBLIC SCHOOLBOYS’ IGNORANCE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3327, 20 September 1911, Page 7

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLBOYS’ IGNORANCE.

OUTSPOKEN CRITICISM BY A HEADMASTER. Mr. J. L. Paton, headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, severely criticised the public schoolboy in’ an address at the speech-day at Willaston School recently. ' . - " ; : . “There are brilliant exceptions,” he said, “but in the main tlie product of the public school is woefully disappoint-; ing. Boys brought up under the ideal conditions of our. public schools carry, into life a certain narrowness of 'out-, ok. ■- “I was amazed when taking the topform at Rugby, at the rudimentary ignorance I found. . , “Looking at the public schoolboy in after life, is it not the common experience to find that it- ps the local builder, the local grocer, and the local publican who is on the local council, while the public schoolboy Is found in his club grumbling about the corruption of his local government, or else sitting at home before his fire groYvling about the ,-ates.

“It is one of the great disappointments of English education that though our public schools are models to the world of what corporate life should be, yet that corporate feeling of the public schoolboy has ever translated itself,: as it should hare done, into effective civic action.

“He is narrow noti only in his knowledge and outlook of municipal things, but in his social- life, and content to look on and criticise when it ought to be the passion of his heart to he in the middle of the fight, helping .and serving his species. A system of education that‘has produced men capable of callous isolation stands condemned.”