A Schoolmaster's Apology Author:Cyril Alington General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1914 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green Subjects: Education Education, Secondary Public schools, Endowed (Great Britain) Public schools, Endowed (Great Britain) Education / General Education / History Education / Secondary Fiction / Classics Literary Coll... more »ections / General Literary Criticism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: IV The fundamental fallacy which underlies most criticism of the public schools is the belief that they are profoundly conservative and unchanging institutions. It is generally supposed that they were invented by Arnold, and that since his day things have in essentials remained the same. It would, on the contrary, be truer to maintain that there is no institution which has changed so much in the past half century, with the possible exception of the Church of England. I appeal to the experience of any parent who was himself a public school boy whether the school to which he takes his son has not changed enormously in the short period since he left it himself. And of course the changes which he sees are mainly external -- differences in food, in housing, in equipment : the changes which he cannot see are far greater still. The whole attitude of boys to masters, and of masters to boys, has changed or is changing faster than the outside world has any idea. The Times some years ago collected and published a series of Essays under the title of " The Public Schoolsfrom Within,"1 in one of which I expressed this view. I hold it still more firmly now. I well remember being soundly castigated by the Warden of All Souls, who reviewed the volume in The Times, for suggesting that anything could alter such etern...« less