I want you, sir,” a prospective parent asked Dr William Haig Brown, the great
Victorian headmaster of Charterhouse, “to assure me that the boys who come
to your school are the sons of gentlemen.” The doctor, who had a keen eye
for business, replied: “Well, they always leave gentlemen.”
Update the language a little, and tone down the snobbery, and you still
capture the sales pitch of today’s public schools. Although they now prefer
to stress their modern caring side, there’s still a seductive appeal in the
idea of letting an ancient institution mould a child’s character.
With fees of up to £25,000 a year, parents expect a public school to give
their children not just academic and career success, but manners,
discipline, respect for others and self-confidence. However, the reality is
often quite different. Because the ethos of many schools has changed little
since the days when society needed a made-to-measure elite, they frequently
turn out pupils with a weirdly anachronistic view of the world.
This is hardly surprising when obeisance to long-established customs remains
de rigueur at most establishments. The cook at Westminster still tosses a
pancake reinforced with horsehair over a high bar every Shrove Tuesday.
Similarly, only pupils in their senior year at King’s School, Canterbury are
allowed to walk across the Green Court, the central lawn, while less exalted
mortals must walk round the edge.
Then there are the uniforms. Uppingham wears mostly black, supposedly to mourn
Queen Victoria, while Eton still laments George III’s demise and insists on
tailcoats, high collars and strict hierarchical rules on the wearing of
waistcoats. Christ’s Hospital manages to surpass both with its Tudor costume
of long blue coat, knee breeches, yellow socks and bands at the neck.
Such an environment has always encouraged pupils to develop their own customs,
including rigid hierarchies and, historically, torture of the weak. From
reports as recently as last weekend little would appear to have changed: a
leading independent school is under police investigation over allegations
that younger pupils were restrained in a chair and forced to watch internet
images of torture, murder and child pornography.
Elsewhere, the Commission for Social Care Inspection has reported “birthday
beatings” and “dorm raids” at Bedford School; younger pupils at Lancing
College suffering an undefined practice called “bundling” or “the gauntlet”
and being locked in the “room of doom”; and children at Giggleswick being
subjected to “mattress flipping”, in which they were hurled off their
mattresses, often on to various solid objects.
Schools take a dim view of this, of course, but given that boarders are
together 24/7 it’s hard to see how such bullying can ever be eradicated.
From our own school days we remember illicit initiation ceremonies (feet
tied to scalding pipes or being locked in trunks, for instance), routine
kicks and punches aimed at insubordinate juniors and — of course — the ethos
of not telling tales. Group loyalty can be a laudable quality, but when you
witness an enraged teacher hurling a ball full pelt into a child’s face, and
no one dares say anything, you do wonder if it is the greatest virtue.
Some parents, though, draw comfort from the fact that, in a changing world,
where old hierarchies and certainties are crumbling, public schools are
havens of tradition that offer their children shelter not only from many
awkward realities, but also those sections of society they deem undesirable.
Eventually, though, their children will finish their schooldays and will have
to learn to rub along with different people and (sometimes) members of the
opposite sex. They might do what we did and attend a university like St
Andrews, where a strong public school ethos and a small undergraduate
community provide a sort of social decompression chamber in which they can
become acclimatised to the rest of the world. Or they can simply carry on as
before and use the type of charming, understated ruthlessness which is the
best way to thrive in many schools to backstab their way to the top
positions in politics, business or the law, where they will find many old
friends.
We gladly risk our words coming back to haunt us in 12 years or so by saying
that we do have, or would have, higher aspirations for our children. Apart
from anything else, we know from experience that a public school education
does not even guarantee courtesy and good manners in a pupil.
Both of us went to schools where theft was more common than either
establishment would like to admit (and often hushed up too) and where there
was a strong atmosphere of denigrating social “inferiors”. At Uppingham it
was normal to refer to all townspeople as “skivs” (derived from “skivvy”).
Stamford boys were keener on persecuting “plebs” or spitting at passers-by
from the school bridge.
But even if we could be convinced that public school pupils today avoid this
(and the yobbish behaviour of many public schoolboys in Cornish resorts each
summer doesn’t help to do so), nothing would induce us to expose a child to
an environment that still endows many with a pathetic and self-limiting form
of status anxiety. It’s easy to get a good flavour of this simply by looking
online. For instance, on some of the more popular social networking sites,
you’ll find groups such as “The Public School Society” or “I Went to a
Proper British Boarding School”.
Many of the comments are hilarious, if Pooterish in their status anxiety:
“Clayesmore School should be counted, you all should know it, an Only
Fools and Horses episode was filmed there” — or quite beyond parody:
“You inferior lot are all very amusing, but I’m afraid it has to be MALVERN
GIRLS’ COLLEGE . . . we have the virgins, the sluts, the lesbians and the
9pm bedtime . . .”
Nor are these attitudes confined to the children. Many parents believe that
the social cachet is vitally important. It’s for this market that Tatler
produces an annual guide to 175 “top” schools, including tips that social
climbers find handy. In 2005, for instance, readers were warned that
Uppingham was “not particularly grand . . . parents tend to be bankers or
BMW estate-driving lawyers”. Anyone put off by this is more likely to warm
to Marlborough College where — an almost unbeatable inducement this — one
can “look out for Fergie on the touchline as Princess Eugenie works up a
royal sweat”.
Of course, any parent who chooses a school because it educates a brace of
royals is a snob of the worst sort. But there’s a practical side too: they
are paying for the chance to mix with those people themselves. Speech day at
many public schools is a highly coveted networking opportunity.
Luckily for busy social climbers, it’s now much easier to send sons and
daughters to the same school. One of the biggest changes in recent years has
been the move to introduce girls at many formerly single-sex establishments.
Although this has gone some way towards dispelling the stereotype of the
public schoolboy who is utterly unable to relate to women on any level,
there are still many examples to suggest that developing a mature and
healthy attitude towards the opposite sex is proving tricky, especially
where the boys heavily outnumber the girls. In the words of one girl who was
sent to Uppingham, it’s all too easy to feel like a “lone banana in a cage
of monkeys”.
Many mixed schools insist on the “six-inch rule”, which forbids male and
female pupils from ever getting within that distance of each other.
Notwithstanding that no one has ever devised a satisfactory way of enforcing
it (“But Sir, we were actually seven inches apart, it’s just the angle that
made it look like five”), it’s symptomatic of a system that
easily takes fright at the proximity of the two sexes.
Nor does this enforced restraint breed a courtly ambience. We have heard of
schools where boys have been known to hold up score cards to “welcome”
female newcomers with marks out of ten for attractiveness. And this is the
thin end of the wedge: in the past few weeks two sixth-formers at Rugby have
been expelled for having sex on the pitch where the game was supposedly
invented. Yet the romance of this palls when compared with the antics of two
young gentlemen at Wellington College in 2003, one of whom filmed the other
having sex with his girlfriend (she was unaware of the camera) and then
showed the film to their friends in the common room.
Nonetheless, increasing numbers of parents are adamant that a public school
education will provide a boost in later life. Academically, this has some
merit — schools such as St Paul’s, Westminster, and Winchester see over 90
per cent of their students’ GCSE papers marked between grades A* and B. But
at others the benefits are less clear. Over the past couple of years at
establishments such as Ellesmere fewer than 50 per cent of their pupils’
papers were marked at these higher grades. Similarly, recent research
indicates that pupils at top schools are winning more places to Oxford than
they did in 2001, but so are more pupils from state schools. The losers,
presumably, are candidates from mid-ranking public schools.
To us it seems unthinking to argue that today’s public schools automatically
provide children with the best start in life. For one thing, anyone who can
afford the fees could easily buy a house in the catchment area for a good
state school where their children would learn to engage with a wide range of
people from different backgrounds and emerge with a more realistic, and
well-balanced, view of the world.
This, surely, provides a better all-round, character-building education than a
public-school one, which often breeds some of the finest neuroses money can
buy.
Of course, this practice is hardly fair either, but that’s a problem for
politicians and society. No reasonable person is going to try to stop a
parent seeking the best education for their child. But no reasonable parent
should seek to insulate their child from that society within the artificial
and archaic bubbles that are Britain’s public schools.
Ben Locker and William Dornan (with Jonathan Owens) wrote Swinesend:
Britain’s Greatest Public School, out now (Atlantic Books, £8.99).
www.crappublicschools.org
State v public school: is one better than the other? Post your comments below
