But perhaps the greatest difference that the change would effect would be in the boy's attitude to his own life. Six years is a very long time to be in one place. I remember at the end of my first year overhearing a conversation between the barber and a boy who was leaving the next day.
'Well, Mr. Meredith,' the barber was saying, 'I suppose this is the last time I shall cut your hair. I have cut it a good many times.'
'I have been in this town,' said Meredith, 'for ten years: five years at the prep, and five years at the school. I'm jolly well sick of it.'
It is certainly a mistake to send a boy to the prep. of the school to which he will one day go. Ten years is too long. But six is too long, too--at that age.
It is not easy for any one under thirty to picture himself in six years' time. We look back and remember ourselves six years ago in the discomfort and disquiet of khaki. What a lot has happened since then. Who can tell what the next six years may hold? Very few men under thirty can look far ahead, and the new boy at a Public School who can see his life mapped out for six years naturally does not look beyond them. He hardly realises that there is a world outside. He will have to travel so far before he reaches it. He comes to consider his Public School not as a prelude, but as the whole sphere in which his personality has to move. Certain prizes and certain honours await him. He does not pause to think whether those prizes and those honours will be of much or little service to him after he has put the cloistered world behind him. Not only is he incapable of viewing his life under the hard light of eternity, he is incapable of viewing it under the light of the fifty odd years of traffic that wait for him among phenomena. He accepts unquestioningly the standards and values of his school. He does not feel that he is preparing for a contest. That phase of endeavour belonged to his 'prep.' He has started the race.
There is a big difference between four years and six. It is a wall over which even the fag can peer on tiptoe. The passage of ambitions and loyalties and jealousies is much more swift. It is possible to consider four years as a prelude; and as soon as public school life is regarded as a prelude the scale of values becomes changed. The boy begins to wonder whether he is doing his best to fit himself for after life. He will cease to be contented with the honours that come to him on the way. Because his school is a fixed institution, because the scope of his masters is fixed within its walls, there is a tendency to regard him as an inhabitant and not a sojourner there. That is what the schoolboy should never be allowed to forget--that he is passing through one phase of his life into another; it is because he has forgotten that that he so often pauses bewildered and irresolute on the threshold of life.