But during the school
years--and they are the most impressionable of all--it is the school
life that is for most the chief formative influence; and now more
necessarily so than ever. When, a few generations back, life was
still, in the main, life in the country, and most things were still
made at home or in the village, the most important part of education
lay, except for a few, outside the school. Now it is the other way.
Town life, the replacing of home-made by factory-made goods, the
disappearance of the best part of home life before the demands of
industry on the one side and the growth of luxury on the other--these
things are signs of a tendency that has swept away most of the
practical home-education, and thrown it all upon the school. And the
schools have even yet hardly realised the full meaning of this change.
Instead of having to provide only a part of education--the specially
intellectual and, in the public schools at least, the physical
side--we have now to think of the whole nature of the growing boy or
girl, and, by the environment and the occupations we provide, to
appeal to interests and motives, and give occasion for the right use
of powers, that may otherwise be undeveloped or misused. A school
cannot now consist merely of class-rooms and playing fields. This is
recognised by the addition of laboratories and workshops, gymnasium,
swimming-bath, lecture-hall, museum, art-school, music-rooms--all now
essentials of a day school as much as of a boarding school.
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