STOP OF THE POPS
THE news that 'Pop', the senior group of prefects at Eton, is to be deprived of its independence, is extremely sad. Pop is self-electing, a survival from the better age of British education, before the Arnoldian mind systematised public schools and gave autocratic power to headmasters. The pre-
sent headmaster of Eton, Dr Eric Ander- son, has put Pop into commission on the grounds that its members were found to be smoking in their club room. He wants an arrangement, no doubt more 'responsible',. by which he, masters and other boys, presumably copper's narks of some sort, will choose the members of Pop. This will mean that Pop will become an arm of authority, instead of a boys' authority which agrees, in return for certain pri- vileges, to help the masters enforce the rules. It will mean that no boy of spirit will want to be a member of Pop, and that the 18th century independence which made England — and Eton — great will once again give way to the hunger for central- ised power which the modern authoritarian
dresses up as a desire for probity. Could not Dr Anderson simply sack the smokers, impose his own candidates and then allow the old system to restart?
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