Suggested Reforms in Public Schools; By C.C. Cotterill (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: '27 CHAPTER II. OUTDOOR EXERCISE. I Will begin with the great subject of outdoor exercise. And before considering reforms, let us first clearly understand the state of things usually existing at the present time in our great Public Schools. During the football season most boys are supposed to play about three times a week. But this rule is by no means rigorously enforced throughout the school, and it sometimes happens that a boy escapes notice and scarcely plays at all, and such a boy is often the very one who suffers most from not being forced to play. Those boys who are forbidden by the doctor to play are frequently left to look after themselves, and take exercise or not as they please. During the period when practice for the athletic games is going on, only those boys necessarily take exercise who intend to be competitors. And this is usually only a small portion of the school. During the cricket season a certain proportion of theschool, varying in different schools, is expected to play two or three times a week The rest of the school play or not, according as they feel inclined, or can find a ground to play upon.1 The members of the eleven usually practise with assiduity; the competitors for the eleven usually with mischievous excess, frequently prejudicial both to themselves and their cricket.2 But I will not content myself with a general statement of this kind. I will describe what I have myself 1 How many of the great schools possess grounds sufficiently large to admit of the whole school being employed at the same time in playing either cricket or football ? Even under present conditio'ns, when only a portion of the school is playing, the cricket games are frequently played in such close proximity to one another as to be dangerous to the players and...