ter two
little vignettes of parentage. Which would you have?

The holidays occupy rather more than a quarter, and rather less than a
third of the year. If you asked what the boys do in the holidays, you
would ask a question that puzzles many boys themselves to answer. The
waste of school holidays is even more striking than the waste of school
terms. For education should not be, indeed, cannot be, limited to term
time. The proportion of boys who require "rest" in the holidays, even
for the first week or two, is small. A slack time, prolonged beyond a
week or so, bores most boys consumedly and ought to bore them all. We
are not thinking here of the favoured few who get their fill of fishing
and field sports. Such things have their limitations, perhaps, but
they offer at least a time of activity, resourcefulness, and keen
enjoyment. Most boys, however, live in quiet homes in towns, far from
the opportunity for such things, and how these pass the time is a
mystery even to themselves, as many have confessed to us. In plain
words, they _kill_ the time, and thereby acquire a most dangerous
accomplishment. Some few, it is true, make themselves endlessly useful
to their parents, and nothing could be better. But only a few homes
provide scope for an "odd-jobs man" of this type. For the bulk,
holidays are simply times of unemployment.

Now, when a schoolmaster ventures to offer advice about the holidays,
he might seem to be stepping presumptuously outside his own province;
but that plea for reticence is one we cannot admit. Term and holidays
alike are an education, and they interact upon one another so closely
that the schoolmaster not only may, but must, form his judgment upon
both. It is not for us to compile a detailed "Parent's Assistant."
Heaven forbid! Every home has its own problems and its own
opportunities, but surely there is no home in which the parents have
not a range of activities, professional, commercial, political, or
literary. So often, as it seems, from various motives, good and bad,
the boy remains more or less excluded from these long after he has
become capable of a certain partnership in his parents' interests. The
drawback of life at a public school is that it is highly artificial.
Call it as you please a barrack or a monastery, a boarding-school is
something cut off from the main streams of ordinary life. In the
holidays the boy renews contact with ordinary life, and that periodic
rene