Harrow, it is announced, has appointed a “careers master” to its staff; he will be in charge of a special form at the top of the school, where he will study the intelligence and aptitudes of the boys who are committed to his care and give advice on the careers which they should seek. He is even prepared to “get into touch with business firms so as to secure places for boys who cannot find them for themselves,” though it is added that that function is not so important at Harrow, where, it would seem, most boys are born to careers which “their parents have already mapped out for them.”

In their cases it is a little difficult to see what the “careers master” is to do - unless it will be his business to argue with the parents and point out that the careers which they have selected are the wrong ones. It almost sounds as though the parents ought to be in his form and not the sons. In some cases he will certainly have a double duty to perform; first he must diagnose a lad’s abilities, and then he must persuade the parents into allowing those abilities to point their own way to a career.

As a first step in the right direction the whole of the new form is to be tested by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology - which certainly seems about as good an illustration of the new trend in the conduct of famous public schools as could be well devised. One wonders what would have been the report if the young Byron and his friend Sir Robert Peel had been sent up from the Harrow of their day for their talents to be examined by an equivalent court of appeal.

But the speculation is idle; the flogged and rebellious Harrow of those days is not to be conceived in terms of Institutes of Industrial Psychology. Passions, interests, and propensities mapped out the careers of the ruling classes at that earlier period, and the only way of testing the propensities lay in the rule-of-thumb method of seeing how they applied themselves in practice. The world in general has now acquired a somewhat larger sense of responsibility, and Harrow’s new form for initiates into the wider world is one of the latest and most remarkable proofs of that changed outlook.