Too clever by half?
PUBLIC SCHOOLS PETER PARTNER
Peter Partner is a master at Winchester.
Anthony Sampson in his Anatomy of Britain concluded that public schools were one of three
things basically wrong with British society. The conscience, not of the rich, but of many of the quite comfortably off, has been saying some- thing like this for a long time. Many school- masters in the independent schools, including some powerful headmasters of whom Dancy of Marlborough is probably the most notable, have talked about 'social isolation' as something their schools should avoid. By this I think they may mean that they wouldn't mind their chaps taking out the girls from the high school; I'm not sure that their views would be the same about the girls in the non-academic streams of the secondary moderns. But whatever kind of mix they have wanted, they certainly wanted some kind of social mix. Social exclusiveness was the burden of the charge against the public schools made all along the line from the far left to the liberal centre; when the Public Schools' Commission was told three years ago to . investigate the integration of the public schools into the state system, this was un- doubtedly the kind of thinking which lay behind the whole idea.
The first report of the Public Schools' Com- mission will appear next week, after two years of fact-finding and of what might be described as negotiation with the public schools. It is ob- viously unfair to try to discuss the report in detail before publication (in spite of the numerous indiscretions which have been made about it). But I think it is fair to discuss what the report is about. It clearly concerns hardly at all what the general public probably imagined it would be about. The elimination of social privilege in education does not appear to be the main subject of the report, and I believe that John Vaizey says as much in criti- cism of the report, in a note which is published with it. The main debate inside the commission, the debate which has produced a minority note of dissent by the High Master of St Paul's and two others, was about academic selection and the comprehensive principle. A lot of the real horse-trading between the commission and the headmasters seems to have been about what IQ the public schools would take, and whether the public schools had enough boarding places for the lower IQS to satisfy the demand from the state system. It was this which inevitably brought the extension of the commission's in- quiry from the public schools to the direct- grant schools, because you can't be tougher in imposing the comprehensive principle on the public schools than on the direct-grant schools, and so on in a straight line to the voluntary aided and the maintained grammar schools.
Of course, the comprehensive principle has far2reaching social implications. But, neverthe- less, this is clearly not the sort of debate which a lot of people were expecting. When you think about something like Robert Morley's polemic television programme on the public schools, with its assertion that the best schools are the ones where the kids do nothing but play, you are in a world far removed from the world of 'A' levels and anger, a world which perhaps could never really have more than tangential contact with anything that any Royal Com- mission was likely to talk about. Quite clearly not a world that this Royal Commission talked about.
Not only among the mass media but also in the press which thinks itself informed, a lot of what has passed for debate about the public schools has really been sheer mythology. No Royal Commission is going to kill these beau- tiful myths, which for many people (as for Robert Morley) have grown out of childhood recollection. But there is quite possibly going to be strong feeling that the report is dull stuff, and somehow irrelevant to what one really feels about the public schools. Quite possibly also a sigh of relief that action must probably wait upon the further report that the commission is to write on the direct-grant schools. And per- haps further relief because no government will be forward in finding money, either now or in the reasonably near future. I may be wrong or unfair in predicting this fate for a report which I know to contain a great deal of im- portant new information about the British boarding schools, and ‘thich I know to have been written by able and practical men. But just because it is about practical issues, I sus- pect it will not find favour.
The comprehensive principle in education has been accepted by both the Labour and the Con- servative parties, and the principle of state com- prehensive education is very likely to be maintained by a future Conservative govern- ment. The grammar school approach still exercises a gravitational attraction on every- one, and it was therefore less bizarre than it seems that a Socialist government should set up a Commission which, if it was going to get its ideas freely (or apparently freely) accepted by the public schools, was obviously going to have to accept a watering down of the comprehensive principle. Whether you think this absurd inconsistency or a sensible prag- matic attitude depends on intellectual tastes. It seems to me to reflect (in part) a quite natural reluctance on the part of any government to demolish high-prestige elite institutions on grounds of political dogmatism. For the same sort of reasons the fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges have been allowed to go their conservative way in the middle of what is in effect a state university system.
Behind the carrot, there is also the whip. The compulsory powers which are said to be pro- posed in the report, and perhaps also the proposal (which could be called in a sense coercive) to take away the legal status of the public schools as charitable institutions, are an unavoidable part of what some people think of as a takeover bid for the public schools. This seems to me to be part of an argument well over a century old, about the historical inevitability of state control of social services. It is an argument as old as Sir Edwin Chadwick of the poor law commissioners. If people in the public schools think that this particular exten- sion of state control is inevitable, they are likely to want to make the best terms they can with the Government now, rather than accept worse later. If they think it is avoidable, they are likely to take the line of the minority note in the report.
Nobody likes being coerced, however inevit- able other people may say it is that they should be. I don't much like the idea of coercion, nor do I like measures which are going to make us put the fees up yet again. On the other hand, I feel that the public schools have nothing to lose from a reasonably unbiassed discussion of
what they are and what they do. Perhaps it's better for us all, while we feel thus uncertain about it, that the report is politically likely to be, for the time being, an academic exercise.
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