of the compass, and from four different counties. The statistics as to absence are as under: Problems of the Secondary Day School The Railway-Train Scholar By J. L. Paton, M.A. THE development of facilities for intercourse brings with it new problems, and one of the most difficult is the child that travels to and fro from school daily on the railway trains. With the increase of secondary education the number of such railway-train pupils is much larger now than it was, and it is likely to be even larger in the future. What the number of such pupils actually is in England there are no figures to show, and, what is more serious, there has been no attempt made as yet to ascertain what effect this daily railway travelling has upon the development, physical and intellectual, of the growing boy and girl. I may be wrong, I hope I am wrong, but for many years I have been making inquiry of all sorts of medical authorities, including the medical officers of both railways and schools, as to whether any inquiry has been made or anything written on this subject, and I have been unable to discover anything except a popularly written article on the general subject, "The Influence of Travelling on Health," by Dr. J. Book of Russell Reynolds, in Malcolm Morris's Book of Health (Cassell, 1884). I have therefore taken in hand certain observations on my own account, and have secured the co-operation of a few other schools. I have no special qualification of any kind, and both method and results will doubtless appear to experts both crude and unscientific. But my object is rather to call attention to a neglected question than to profess to answer it. Perhaps I had better deal with the statistics of Manchester Grammar School first, because about them I can answer any questions that arise. I have taken as the period of observation the whole school year from the middle of September 1906 to the last day of July 1907. I took the school year as a whole so as to exclude any seasonal variation, and I take this year only because there has been no epidemic visitation of sufficient virulence to affect the statistics at all seriously. I have left out of account (1) those boys who left or entered the school in the course of the year, (2) those who were absent for a whole term, (3) those boys who used the train only on occasion. Absences have been counted by halfdays, morning and afternoon-i.e., if a boy is away for a whole week, he counts ten absences, because there are ten half-days. There are 767 boys who have been in attendance at the school throughout the school year. Of these 452 (practically 59 per cent.) are boys holding season tickets for the railway and going to and fro regularly by train. The remaining 315 boys come by tram, or cycle, or walk. The railway boys travel daily distances varying from five to over seventy miles. They come from all points When one considers that a boy who comes from a distance is more likely to be detained for a slight ailment, these figures show that in point of regularity of attendance the railway-train boy is superior to the nontrain boy. I am afraid the same could not be said of his punctuality. The next inquiry was as to intellectual progress. This may be gauged by the terminal reports. Reports are classified on certain definite principles, for purposes of the school record, into four classes: A Excellent, B=Fair, C=Not satisfactory, D=Bad. Each boy has three reports in the course of the year. A report which is on the border line between two classes is marked AB, BC, CD, as the case may be. Such cases are counted as A B, BC, and so on; this accounts for the fractions. Here the train boy does not show up so well. These figures seem to indicate, what one would expect on other grounds, that the urbanised boy develops more rapidly than his rural confrère. The period of rapid growth which follows puberty sets in sooner with him, but his ultimate development is not so good. An analysis of the results at the athletic sports points to the same physical superiority on the part of the train boy over the urbanised boy. There were twenty-eight events; I exclude tugs-of-war, and no merely comic events are included in the reckoning. 452 train boys. 21 First places. Second places. 17.. 315 non-train boys. II .. Third places. Total. An analysis of our cricket, lacrosse, and football teams shows an equally striking result in favour of the train boy. I am aware that it would be misleading to draw any hard and fast deductions from these figures. There are too many variants. As it is impossible to eliminate these variable factors, the only alternative seemed to be to extend the field of observation as widely as possible, and thus trust to one variant cancelling out against another. Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas. I asked, accordingly, seventy-two other schools to supply me with their statistics on the same lines, hoping thereby to arrive at definite results. I am sorry to say that only six schools have been able to send in detailed replies. These schools are: Brighton Grammar School, Whitgift School (Croydon), Birmingham Central Secondary School, Widnes Secondary School, Manchester Secondary School, Salford Secondary School. Schoolmasters have so many forms to fill in nowadays, and so many returns to make, that my colleagues must be forgiven if they strike at any extra imposition. I am all the more grateful to the non-strikers. Combining the results for these six schools, we have: Average per boy. II.2 14.65 D. 6.7% 6.1,, Only one school sent in a report, viz., Birmingham Central Secondary School. Increase in The figures confirm our statistics so far as attendance goes the train boy is more regular. In regard to intellectual progress they suggest a contrary inference -viz., that the train boy reaches better progress at school. It is worth noticing that, so far as objective figures are concerned, there is no discrepancy; it is only with the subjective classification of reports that inconsistency appears. It may be interesting to place alongside these English statistics the figures of a Hungarian school, given by Dr. Adolf Jura of Budapest. These are in slightly different form. boys. 71 The conditions of these boys differ in certain respects from those of the English boys we have been considering. School begins at 7 A.M., and many of the train boys have to be up at five; the midday interval is long, and trains are infrequent, so that many are on the go from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. When home-work is started after a twelvehour day like this, it is not surprising that intellectual progress is unsatisfactory. The general outcome of these statistics seems to be that physically the train boys are rather superior than inferior to the non-train boys. The detrimental effect of the railway travelling is more than counterbalanced by the advantages of country or suburban air, and the better feeding (I daren't say fare) and housing at home. It is obvious that the home of the railway boy must have economic advantages. Either he is a farmer's son, or else he belongs to a family which has been well enough off to move out to the suburbs; in any case, the fact that the family can bear the expense of the season ticket indicates better economic position. On the other hand, the train boy is intellectually inferior. He has been educated usually in a country school, where perhaps the three upper standards were taken together; he has not had his wits sharpened by the city life; he has not, as a rule, the same incentive to work, he is tired with the wear and tear of travelling. And all this holds in spite of the fact that the train boy is frequently a picked boy who holds a scholarship. Several masters also notice that the train boy is apt to flag towards end of term. Such, then, being the statistics I have been able to collect, I propose to review shortly the disadvantages of habitual railway travelling for school children, and then to indicate shortly what measures it seems desirable to take in view of the circumstances which make habitual railway travelling a necessity for so many. The disadvantages of habitual railway travelling are: (1) The dulness of monotony, going over the same ground day after day. Dulness is a bad thing for all of us; it is specially unwholesome for the young. Schoolmasters know only too well the temptations that beset the dull hour; railway officials know them too. Small Train boys are leathered with the window straps; they are slung up with other light articles on the rack, or stowed in under the seat with the foot-warmers. They unscrew the advertisements; they get out at each station and change compartments, in order to have the pleasure of getting in again while the train is moving; they practise ju-jitsu; they essay the furtive cigarette. Not long since in the skating season a railway detective came to complain to me that a boy had bored gimlet through the partition, and had used a water I 2614 .. 36.5 It should be noted that for one term all boarders were excluded because of infection. hole with his pistol with disastrous effect upon an inoffensive old gentleman in the next compartment. These are some of the forms of rowdiness which go on in trains and "places where they sing," but they are not so serious as those other things which are done in tunnels when young folks of a certain type find themselves together in the dark-things which make railway trains so dangerous for girls. It must be remembered that when adolescents get together into small cliques of half a dozen or so, especially when free from supervision, they are apt to do things which they would never do if either they were alone or if there were twenty of them together. Of a similar nature is the danger of railway literature. The bookstalls at railway stations are not now what they were when Mr. W. H. Smith was alive. There are at least five different cheap periodicals regularly displayed and sold on those bookstalls which are absolute poison to the boyhood and girlhood of our country. Such are the dangers of dulness. I have always felt that it is by offering escape from dulness that vices get most of their attraction, at any rate for the young. (2) Railway travelling levies a heavy toll on time. This is in some cases very considerable. I have boys who spend at the least two and a half hours daily in the train, without making any allowance for unpunctuality or the time spent in waiting-rooms, &c. All this time, amounting to more than one whole day in a fortnight, is so much time taken from either recreation or rest or education. It is idle to suppose that a school child can do its home-lessons in the train; very few adults that I know are able to do anything involving intellectual strain, and, if it were attempted, the additional strain on both eye and brain would more than counterbalance the saving in time. rail. I know of an exceptionally intelligent boy, at. eleven years, of neurotic temperament, who is always sick and usually prostrate for the rest of the day after travelling any considerable distance by rail, and I have heard of many other persons similarly affected. Again, rhythmical spasm of eye muscles has been described as resulting from the effect of a rapidly moving panorama on the eyes of railway travellers. The effort of reading, too, while the body and all about it is actively vibrating, as in railway travelling, is well known to damage sensitive eye-sight. . . . Osler of Cambridge, one of the best of our writers on general medicine, in describing 'traumatic neurosis' gives 'railway brain' and railway spine' as synonyms, and describes a condition of neurasthenia or hysteria, or both,' which follows an accident,' or shock, often in a railway train,' from which the patient may apparently not have suffered in the body. Now, although this has special reference to railway accidents, yet by the very admission that there is something special which cannot be explained in terms of physical force about nerve shock sustained under conditions which obtain in rapid railway transit, the liability of such rapid vibratory movement, as such, to disturb the harmonious working of that extremely complex machine known as the nervous system is plainly implied. And, if this be true of the adult, it is true in a higher degree of the more impressionable, and less stable, growing boy." (3) This brings me to my third point-the nervous strain. There is the jarring and the jolting and the noise, the swaying from side to side, the abrupt arrest on the application of the brake, the vitiated air, and all the concomitant discomforts, which no amount of upholstery is able to eliminate. Every one has noticed that stupor which these things produce both in himself and in other people. There is, too, the feeling at breakfast of "having to catch the train," a feeling which in the case of a neurotic child not infrequently spoils the meal which ought to be the foundation of the day's work. These things are not of much account once in a way, but they are a very serious handicap to a weakly child when repeated day after day. Being a layman, I should like to quote in confirmation from a letter which Dr. Boobyer, Medical Officer of Health to the City of Nottingham, was good enough to write me. "Many neurologists, viewing the conditions of railway travelling, as these differ from mere normal motion, from an à priori standpoint, have definitely expressed the opinion that they are very likely to do damage, and that they probably account for many of the signs of nerve disturbance and nerve failure and breakdown so often seen nowadays in persons of unstable and sensitive nervous temperament who travel much by I shall doubtless be told that the human frame gets habituated to this jar and jostle, just as it grows acclimatised to smuts, high linen collars, pointed shoes, and other excrescences of modern civilisation. I admit that the robuster natures do get so acclimatised, but it is at the loss of certain higher sensibilities which belong to the finer part of our human nature; and even in the case of the robust, athletic boy the loss is distinctly perceptible, for every schoolmaster knows that, if his cricket team or shooting team have to travel any distance for a match, the effect of the railway journey is distinctly unfavourable to the performance of his team. This is capable of abundant verification. (4) There is the obvious danger of train boys bringing infection into the school. This danger does not attach in the same degree to the tram or bus, because they are not upholstered with germ-incubators in the shape of cushions. (5) The bringing in of the country children to town. schools is all the while accentuating that centripetal tendency of our population which it is the object of legislators and garden cities to counteract. In view of these difficulties, what practical recommendations suggest themselves? (1) As regards the school. The school hours of a town school should be compressed within as short a period as possible, so that the pupil gets away early in the afternoon. The dinner interval should be as short as is practicable without ill-effects to health or work. An hour is probably long enough. No book-work of any kind should be allowed either to masters or boys during the dinner interval. The school should provide to which you belong. No masters, no monitors can have you perpetually under supervision. Show yourselves as freemen, worthy of your freedom, because the inward discipline of your conscience is more compelling than the discipline of the cane." a good plain meal at cost price or under, and, as far as (2) As regards the railways, I think doctors will agree with me when I say that the present upholstery is hygienically wrong. It is a regular nursing-bed for dust and germs. Again, the worst moral danger of railway travelling would disappear if all carriages were like the dining-cars or the club-trains-open throughout at the top, with a gangway down the centre, and no separate compartments. Failing this, or, I should prefer to say, pending the general adoption of this type of carriage there ought to be more special compartments than there are for girls. Wherever a headmistress has a sufficient number of girls to justify the application for such reserved compartments, the application should be made and granted by the company as a matter of course. (3) Most schools and their regulations claim that their pupils shall be under school discipline and wear the school badge while going to and fro between school and home. Here comes the crux of the whole problem. There is nothing so wearing as to have responsibility without having control. How is one to police such a diocese as my own, with 500 boys coming in from all directions by train? Who is to undertake the supervision of the train routes? Masters cannot be expected to do it; they find it distasteful, and what is distasteful is badly done. If one employs paid men for the purpose-what we should call at Cambridge "bulldogs "one is, I fear, only provoking to trespass. My own conclusion is that one must throw oneself frankly on the boys themselves. It is my own practice to select the two or three senior or leading boys on each train route, and give them monitorial powers over the boys travelling by that route. They have to keep a sharp look-out on smoking compartments and other contraptions of juvenile mischief; it is their duty to report serious misconduct at once, in case of lesser mischief to warn first and then report if their warning is disregarded. But in the main one cannot rely too much on any mere organisation of this kind. The virtue that always needs a guardian is not worth guarding. One has to appeal frankly to the inward sense of honour in the boys themselves. You wear the uniform of your school. The good name and honour of the school are in your hands. People judge in silence of your school by the sort of conduct which they observe in you. Bullying, smoking, rowdiness, any sort of indecency in speech or conduct-all these things injure that school Some Foreign Notes A NEW Gymnasium is to be opened at Dahlem (Prussia) in October 1908 which will have many of the features of an English public school. On a site of sixty acres boarding-houses will be built and playing-fields laid out. The Grünewald See will offer opportunities for swimming, and rowing and manual training and gardening will be included in the curriculum. The Berliner Tageblatt, passing an opinion on this school, in an article headed "Caste-Schools," says that no one will doubt that the systematic attention to physical culture will be prejudicial to the systematic training of the intellect, that the pupils of this "highclass boarding-school" will not be able to reach as high a standard in the Leaving Certificate Examination as those trained in the ordinary Gymnasien. A curtailment of the Gymnasien syllabus it regards as an advantage, and repeats that it has advocated for years greater attention to gymnastics and games. But it is inclined to regard the experiment as an addition to the Berechti gungswesen which strangles the aspiration of many a humble German. Attempts to reform the humanistic Gymnasium and higher education in general have not been wanting in recent years. Many of the reforms are due to the initiative of the Kaiser, who found, as a schoolboy, the Gymnasium in Cassel not altogether to his liking; and he is credited with the desire to secure in Germany more harmonious relation between education and instruction than the existing Gymnasien afford. a Models for the new school are not wanting, even in Germany. The old Fürstenschulen attempted a similar aim and some private schools have with moderate success copied the English prototype. For the new school is undoubtedly an imitation of the latter in its attempt to cultivate all sides of a liberal education. The pedagogic infant will not be exempt from the difficulties of teething. When von Studt was minister of Education an attempt was made to open a Freier Kindergarten in Charlottenburg and the official fist descended on the babe and ended its thin-spun life. In the treatment of those communal boards which have wished to improve primary education the same official brutality has been shown. It will be hard to prevent these Jacks-in-office from availing themselves of a splendid opportunity to "Keep their hand in." The projected Gymnasium in Dahlem is not a private undertaking: it is to be erected at the cost of the State. The consent of the Prussian Landtag will therefore be III. Organisation in the Transvaal necessary for the outlay. This consent will be obtained, but a motion of approval will meet with opposition from the advanced Liberals, who are agitating for the removal of all privileges and the abolition of the Standesschulen. However necessary it may be to encourage physical training and the development of character, the Liberals will have considerable support in their opposition to the grant of public money in the interests of an exclusive class. II. A Notable German Exhibition A RECENT number of the Frankfurter Zeitung makes an appeal, presumably to South German towns, on behalf of an international educational exhibition. The principal departments of industry and commerce have, the writer asserts, had their share of attention while the international interests of education has remained neglected. Partly to meet financial difficulties and partly to get promoters to revert to the original objects of these exhibitions, a plea is inserted for disarmament and concentration. Disarmament implies the rejection of the side issues of entertainment and pageantry; concentration means a limitation of the main issues to methods of interchanging opinions and increasing the productive power of the people. With the latter object in view the writer asks first for the consideration of those who live in abnormal conditions or are subject to abnormalities of physique or mind. Further, he wishes to see an effort made on behalf of those who have left school and are struggling, often without efficient guidance, towards manhood. THE Transvaal Education Department was established The educational exhibition, thus foreshadowed, would be arranged in four sections: one, dealing with the care of children not of school age, which would treat of the protection of mothers and infants, crèches, day-homes, play-schools and kindergarten; the second, dealing with children of school age, their scientific and professional education, curricula, time-tables, buildings, furniture and accessories; a third, which should consider the care of young people between the age of leaving school and the attainment of citizenship; and a fourth dealing with benevolent and charitable work of a social-pedagogical character. At this exhibition, the writer suggests, congresses and courses on special subjects might be held. International congresses appear to be as plentiful as blackberries in autumn and need some change of character. The change advocated is to refer a limited number of questions to international committees who would sift the material and give the audience a statement of their conclusion. No locus is suggested for the exhibition, but with the wonderful progress in industry and education in South Germany, it is hardly likely that the appeal will be allowed to escape notice. of Education, and the remainder elected. The school committees constituted under the Ordinance of 1903 and similar to the committees of managers in this country will continue to fulfil their functions. Extensive powers are given to the central authority to make regulations, and a certain latitude is allowed in varying the provisions of the Act. NEW regulations have been issued in connection with the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. From January I next it will be open free on Mondays, Thursdays (instead of Tuesdays, as at present), and Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M.: on the other days admission will only be by ticket, as is the case with the libraries on all occasions. |