AN INDIAN PUBLIC SCHOOL
By A. E. FOOT (Headmaster of the Doon School, Dehra Dun)
MANY English schoolmasters who meet me after my absence of ten years in charge of a Public School for Indian boys assume that my problems have been very different from theirs. They have heard of religious strife in India, of exclusive castes and classes, and think that the headmaster of a boarding school for 300 Indian boys of all castes and creeds must have used some uncanny ingenuity in establishing it on a firm and popular basis. Actually his problems have not been fundamentally different from those of a Public School in England, although the absence of an old tradition has made some of them easier to tackle, and the different economic and political condition of India has altered the emphasis for others.
Adult English visitors to the school seem to find life to have a similar atmosphere to that of an English Public School ; differences may become apparent when they prolong their acquaintance, but they are only differences of the sort that exist between different English schools. The interest of the school is not of an exotic nature, but is only in the modifications of a similar fundamental plan which is the basis of all Public Schools and is derived from three main sources: the contribution of Arnold, that senior boys must be trained to take the responsibility for the spiritual atmosphere of the school ; the contribution of Thring that the mental, physical and moral welfare of the boys is more important than the buildings or the masters or the prestige of the school ; the contribution of Sanderson that faculties other than those developed by book-learn- ing and organised sport must have full scope in the school.
The mention of Arnold at once suggests the need of giving some account of our treatment of religion. We do not have any doctrinal teaching at the school ; but we have daily prayers, of which the purpose is to emphasise that there is an element of the divine in each individual, and that it is the duty of each one of us to develop this element in ourselves and to recognise it in others. This rather simple faith does not make any assumptions about the nature of immortality, nor does it ask for any supernatural intervention in the affairs of the world. It can be called humanism, pantheism, auto-suggestion, or we can be just dismissed as a godless academy, but I have plenty of evidence that boys who grow up in an environ- ment in which values are rightly emphasised are able to translate into their lives an urge to make the proper choice between right and wrong ; this, I believe, is the ekection in which the School Chapel in England really influences the lives of boys. The association with ritual, doctrine and mysticism may make the influence stronger in some cases, though in others this association may have a negative or even repellent effect.
We naturally place the responsibility for the tone of the school in the hands of prefects, who are in close association with each other and with .he headmaster ; the capacity for leadership, as in other schools, has considerable scope in the management of about eighteen school tocieties and in the training and captaincy of the teams in competitions between the four houses in about fourteen different events. Senior boys all take a course of training as physical training leaders, and the school P.T. classes are all taken by boys. The training in the qualities required for leadership is effective, and all but one of the boys who have appeared before the Officer Selec-
tion Boards have been selected. The 65 old boys who have com- missions in one of the services at present have almost all done well.
Derived from our religious outlook is the need for boys to develop their brain and body as well as they can, and for this we try to avoid using individual competition in class-work as a stimulus, but boys acquire merit by improving their own standards ; in the same way we have established standard tests in athletics, swimming and apparatus work. Boys all take the St. John's First-Aid Course some time before they leaye school, and those capable (about twenty-five a year) take the Royal Life-Saving Society's Certificate ; we have recently made a short course of elementary motor mechanics a regular part of the curriculum for senior boys.
The boys all take the Cambridge School Certificate and thereafter either the Cambridge Higher Certificate or an Indian Intermediate. The academic results compare very favourably with those of English schools. In sport we would hope to beat most English schools at hockey, swimming and athletics ; we might give them a good tussle at soccer and boxing, but should not be able to take on any of the larger schools at cricket, though we can hold our own against regi- mental teams and the Indian Military Academy. An opponent of organised school games would find no consolation at the Doon. School. Boys in India, as in England, usually enjoy games more than geo- metry, and learn in them lessons not easily available in text-books.
Visitors are usually interested in the Art School, which includes stone-carving, pottery and book-binding sections as well as painting and modelling ; and in the carpenter's shop, which includes a forge, turning shop and metal-working machinery, a sectioned motor-car, an aero-engine and a wrecked air-frame. The music-school is a separate building, with pianos, a good stock of Indian orchestral instruments and a gramophone with Indian and Western records. All the boys for their first two years spend six school periods a week divided between workshop, art and music.
A natural fruit of our religious outlook is in Social Service. This is managed by the School Council, a democratically elected body of four boys from each house and four masters (the masters, of course, are both Indian and English), with the headmaster as chairman. The school societies are responsible to this body, which through its finance committee sees that their accounts are kept properly. The council, some years ago, instituted a compul- sory weekly quota of service for all boys over 13f. The council decides what types of work shall be counted for a quota, and there is a wide choice. It may be work directly for the good of the school, such as rehearsing for the orchestra or for a play, coaching games or working in the " Grow More Food" plots ; or in the social work for which the school is directly responsible or in out- side work in which the school is asked to co-operate. The latter at present includes parties of boys to take patients at the Indian St. Dunstan's for walks, help to the local Rotary Club in their scheme for improving the cleanliness in local Primary Schools, and taking games in an orphanage. The direct responsibility of the school is, firstly, to an Adult Education Society, which started by arranging to make the school servants literate, and now is more concerned with organising their games and sports, occasional lantern- lectures or evening discussions at the servant's club, and help in the primary school for their children ; secondly, to the Dehat Sabha, which has established a school in a village four miles away and helps in various village affairs. Both these enterprises are financed by subscriptions, or perhaps it is more an income-tax on pocket- money, and by occasional entertainments for the public.
During the last three years the school has organised in the holi- days four parties of boys and old boys in charge of masters to distressed areas—the first three to Contai in Bengal after the tidal- wave and cyclone in 1942 and during the 1943 famine, and to the Kosi flood area in North Bihar in December, 1944. They have made a good impression of competence in organising and 'super- vising the building of huts and dams and in distribution of relief, and they showed themselves fully adaptable to third-class travel and a diet of dal and rice. I hope that some organisation will appe'r in India that is able to make use of such holiday work, as its edu- cational value is great, apart from the work that is done ; at present it is very difficult to arrange for the reception of such a party.
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