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wal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays should bring him into contact with some more of life than its superficial frivolities. The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as fascinating as the child of two, and the parents' time and energy devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent. And it will, we believe, bring a new happiness to many parents themselves. As school-masters, our widest experience of parents--not that we pretend it is very wide--is our experience of boys' talk about their homes. Boys speak of their parents with deep affection and respect, as a rule; but so very often they leave an impression that they do not really know them. It is the commonest thing in the world for fathers and sons, without any positive estrangement, to get entirely out of touch with one another during the latter part of a boy's school-time. The boy develops rapidly, and the greater part of his development is quite concealed from the father. He returns home to find his father "just the same," and apparently quite unable to divine the new developments which the son is too proud to reveal uninvited. Or maybe he does attempt to reveal them, and, bungling his task, finds himself misunderstood, and lays the blame on the father. So often, as it seems, the father might have helped matters by playing a rather more active part, and going half, or even three-quarters, of the way to meet his son's confidences. But there is a natural shyness of fathers towards their sons at this stage, and shyness on one side begets shyness and misunderstanding on the other. More than once a boy has said to one of us, "What am I to do to get into touch with my father? Last holidays we found we'd nothing sensible to talk to each other about at all." It is difficult to advise, but the most obvious thing to say is, presumably, to remind the boy that his father is but a human being like himself; that possibly the boy is himself rather unnecessarily enigmatic, and that instead of expecting the
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