has had experience of school-life knows that the average
boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to
the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or
disreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to have
this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe
large numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation of
exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained.

Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption
that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone.
Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potent
cause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system of
education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's
individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations
that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This is
the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation
one must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature is
inherently bad.

Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and
amusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace
will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failing
to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to
develop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it is
no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with
mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. The
average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in
these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the
average Hottentot.

Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of the
schoolmaster--if such a being ought to have any existence at all--to see
that this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind do
not, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws of
nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed.
If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it
will expend itself through another. If the schoolmaster were to take
the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to
proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be
used in this useful and congenial work. But this can never b