The
meetings for the purposes just mentioned, as well as those for
entertainment, have, like games, a real educational value, and do
much to cement the comradeship of common interests and common aims
that is one of the best things school has to give. And not only among
those of the same age. These are things in which the example and
influence of the older are particularly helpful to the younger. They
can become, like the games, and perhaps to an even greater extent, one
of the interests that help to bind together past and present members
of a school. And they afford an opportunity for masters to meet boys
on a more personal and friendly footing, and to get the mutual
knowledge and respect which are all-important if education is to be,
in Thring's definition, a transmission of life through the living to
the living. That the organisation of leisure-time pursuits is of the
utmost help to the school as well as to the boy, is the unanimous
verdict of the schools in which it has long been a tradition. The
master who has had charge, for the past five-and-twenty years, of this
organisation in one such school writes that there they consider such
pursuits as the very life-blood of the school, and the only rational
method of maintaining discipline.
If what has here been said is admitted, it is plain that to teach, by
every means in our power, the use of leisure, is one of the most
important things a school has to do.
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