A HISTORY OF RUTLAND and readiness of wit were the qualities which he esteemed most highly. The practical question which he set himself to solve was, how to realize these aims in a boarding school of the Public School type. He certainly did not look upon the boarding school as a necessary evil ; he rather regarded it as offering better advantages for training character firmly and surely than the ordinary home. But only in so for as it offered ordinary home life, or ' something better, intelligently better ' of the same kind, something truer, as being more care- fully devised and selected for its purpose. ' To train life truly implies a thorough atmosphere of truth.' There must be the fullest recognition of responsibility and the most thoughtful adjust- ment of means for fulfilling them completely. Achievement must not fall behind profession, expressed or implicit. A ' barrack-system', such as prevailed in college at Eton in his day, would not do. Family life was impossible in a mob ; limitations must be set upon numbers. A modification of the Eton house system might serve. Thirty was the maximum that could be properly cared for by a single master in a house specially planned to fulfil its object. With a small number of boarders in each house and the school of appro- priate size, it would be possible to have several houses, each providing a suiBcient income (about j^ 1,000 a year) to attract and keep a good man. In this way the largest possible proportion of permanent masters, masters with wives and families, an absolute necessity, could be secured. Each master being rewarded by the profits of his house, he would have the very best motive for keeping it in a state of efficiency. The individuality of the houses should be encouraged in all legitimate ways, but not to such an extent as to convert them into so many separate schools. The house was never to be regarded as an unit for the purposes of instruction ; the class was to be the unit, and the master attached to it was to be responsible for the more formal teaching in school and for the less formal tuition during hours of preparation. In this way truth was to be attained in the domestic life of the school. Truth in instruc- tion involved an effective acknowledgement that in intellectual matters every boy has a soul to be saved. Each case must be treated as unique. Individual attention in teaching is necessary be- cause each pupil has special characteristics ; it is the existence of such peculiarities which marks off teaching from such operations as hammering in nails or filling trucks with ballast (' truck- work '). Teaching is the awakening or the transference of vital power, a begetting of the mind and spirit complementary to the begetting of the body ; hence the uselessness of cramming, rule-mongering, and lecturing. Such work makes heavy demands upon the teacher, and can only be carried on in a small group. Thring thought twenty-five a sufficiently large number for the chief subjects ; and in order that the fullest advantage might be reaped from such an arrange- ment, he insisted that the form master should also act as tutor to his group ; thus he could by concentration do justice to his boys, and also he would have no convenient person on whom he could throw his responsibility of neglect or failure. These main facts, all based upon and resulting from practical experi- ence, being admitted, with the usual curriculum for such a school, he considered that the total numbers should never exceed or fall short of about 300 boys, for two reasons : (i) because unity in a school ultimately depends upon uni- formity in the treatment of individuals, especially in the matter of punishment, and such uniformity could only be secured, so long as the head master knew each boy's charactersufficiently well to enable him to check the reports of his assistants ; im- mediately this became impossible he was reduced to the position of policeman of his assistants, and had to act in important matters merely in accord- ance with their directions, — thus the door was thrown open to inequality and capriciousness in the administration of the school code ; (2) be- cause the work of such a school as Uppingham naturally fell into about ten stages. With a total of 300, not only would it be possible for the head master to know each boy, but the school, if the classes were of proper size, would be subdivided into the right number of groups. With such limitations set upon numbers there would be least waste of teaching power and of schoolboy ability, if also buildings and equipment were of the right sort — if ' the almighty wall ' was on the schoolmaster's side. Nothing should be demanded of human power which could be more certainly accomplished through machinery. Buildings should be planned with complete pre- vision of the possibilities of school life, with the object of minimizing occasions of offence, and of conceding the maximum amount of personal freedom. ' Trust should be unlimited in action, suspicion unlimited in arrangement.' Bricks and mortar, however, were not merely to play the negative part of policemen ; they were to be positively instructive, instilling the love of beauty by their external form and internal decoration, and by association suggesting 'honour to lessons.* They were also to provide that amount of privacy which was necessary for giving depth and refine- ment of character. Each boy was to have his own sleeping compartment and his own study. A still more potent instrument of prevention, a still more positive support of individuality was to be the curriculum, of work or play or recrea- tion, offering such a variety of occupations that no boy could fail to find interest and display ex- cellence in some one of them. These were to be so many nets for catching vagrant talent. So modern languages, science, singing, drawing. 290
