The school life is the life of the herd, and to be successful in it the boy must mingle with the herd, not break from it or shun it.  Good form—­if we came to analyse the conception that underlies it—­consists only in a close approximation to the standard pattern; bad form, in any deviation from it.  It is this similarity of type and community of ideals which makes it so easy for most public-school boys to get on well with one another.  When in after life they are thrown among a set of men who know nothing of their conception of good form, and whose training has been on completely different lines, there may be a corresponding difficulty.

Now what is true of public-school life is of course also true of the larger life after schooldays are over for which all education is a preparation.  These qualities of sociability and good sportsmanship will stand a man in good stead throughout life.  Even the most ardent and active spirit will benefit by being subjected for some years to this steady pressure of public opinion.  The most part will learn from it good sense, consideration for others, and self-control.  As they pass from the lower forms to the higher in the school they will learn too to support authority without doing injustice, and to bring the weight of public opinion to bear upon others.  And to all this training many a man owes his happiness in after life—­a happiness which he could not have secured if his character had been moulded only by the environment of his home, or by the home in combination with the less-powerful corrective of a day school.  For the nervous child the passage from home to school life may involve considerable mental strain.  He may be morbidly self-conscious and timid, or, unknown to himself—­because he has as yet no power of self-analysis and has no opportunities of comparing himself with others—­he may have developed certain eccentricities.  In most cases the plunge into school life will be taken well enough; in a few the little vessel will not right itself, and proves permanently unseaworthy.  No doubt as a rule a private school will have preceded the public school, and this gradation should make the entrance to the public school a lesser ordeal.  But it often happens that it is just in the case of the nervous child that this intermediate stage has been omitted, and that his thirteenth birthday finds him still in the home circle.

If the boy’s father has first-hand knowledge of life in the lower forms of public schools, his experience may enable him to form some estimate of the effect of school life upon the nervous system of his son.  It is when parents or guardians have no such experience of their own to guide them that mistakes are most liable to be made.  I can myself remember the unhappy state of some solitary and eccentric schoolfellows of mine who aroused the resentment of “the Herd” by their behaviour or opinions.  If it is clear that the boy has a peculiar temperament and is likely to suffer in this way, some via media