The influence on national life of military training in schools : [an address delivered before the Medical Officers of Schools, Thursday, February 15, 1906] / by T.C. Horsfall.

  • Horsfall, T. C. (Thomas Coglan), 1841-1932.
Date:
[1906?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The influence on national life of military training in schools : [an address delivered before the Medical Officers of Schools, Thursday, February 15, 1906] / by T.C. Horsfall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    own life was as much helped as were the lives of the people for whom he worked. He told me that, until he was grown up and came by accident under the influence of the Head of a University Settlement, he had never been asked to do any work for the good of anyone. Often the useless people we see are too old to be reformed. Here is a typical case. Many years ago a man holding high office was assassinated. A military officer who might have at least attempted to prevent the deed made no effort to do so. I was told by a man who knew his training that the unfortunate creature had never been compelled, or even asked, in childhood, to think of the welfare of anyone but himself. English boys of the well-to-do classes—that is boys just of the classes who can do most for the good of the community, and whose influence is most potent for evil as well as for good—are worse placed in respect of the chance of gaining desire and power to serve the community than the boys of most other nations, and than many of the boys of the English lower-middle classes. The “natural” way for a child to acquire the desire is to live with his parents and to acquire it from them. A child of good disposition who shares its parents’ life, if it receives from them a little instruction respecting the mutual dependence of the various social classes and of individuals, is soon influenced by their example, and gradually comes to share the interest which they take in the life and needs of the people of the village, town, or city near, or in, which it lives ; and as the village, town, or city contains the same mixture of classes which make up a nation, the child, as it gets older, grows easily into increased know¬ ledge of, and willingness to try to do its part in satisfying, the needs of the nation. Nob to receive in childhood this early training in the initial stages of patriotism is by itself a great misfortune, and it is an additional misfortune if, lacking it, a child is trained to care strongly for such a community as that formed by a preparatory school or a public school, consisting only of lads of his own social class and his own sex, which has inherited from many other generations of little boys modes of thought and feeling some of them very perverse and unwholesome, and which gives its members no idea of the constitution and needs of any normal human ■community of village, town, or nation. This, in spite of the influence of holidays, which, however, are not always spent at home, is the lot of the majority of English boys of the upper-middle and the higher classes. It seems clear that if those social classes are to produce as many patriotic citizens