Public schools and the facts of life

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN

At the age of eight I was a loyal reader of The Magnet and The Gem. How eagerly I longed for the glories of Greyfriars and St Jim's : for the sumptuous study feasts, the splendid public floggings, the japes, the toppers, the massed battles in the dear old quad. I was therefore deeply distressed to see in Nanny's Mirror one morning a picture of a fiendishly grinning skull which sported a stripy

tie and surmounted the headline, ow SCHOOL SKELETON. The article which followed was full

of rancour and complaint. The public schools, it appeared, were the vicious enemies of progress and the people, pedantic, inefficient and corrupt, yet able, through sheer snob-appeal, to com- mand for their drivelling alumni every place of honour or profit in the whole Empire. They were a mediaeval survival, an insult to free and modern men, and they must go . . . the very next day.

I trembled as I read. 'Nanny,' I screamed, 'they're going to pull my school down.' (Already it was 'mine,' though five years must pass before I went.) 'Tomorrow, they're going to. Look, it says so here.'

'Does it indeed?' said Nanny comfortably. 'Well, it may take them longer than they think.'

Nanny, as usual, was right. Although thirty years have passed since then, the public schools are still standing, unrepentant and discredited as ever. What is more, everything about them is still almost exactly the same, right down to the complaints that are urged against them.

For consider T. W. Bamford's new book, The Rise of the Public Schools (Nelson, 63s). The object of this is fo examine 'the growth, evolution and influence' of the public school system through the nineteenth century, to assess its efficacy during the twentieth, and, above all perhaps, to measure the extent of its 'penetration into the elites of power.' It is a dismally written book, and its author, taking refuge in clouds of dubious statistics, is un- willing to commit himself to any very definite judgments; but several broad conclusions do in the end emerge, and they are these:

(1) Throughout the nineteenth century, and long after, the public schools ignored or dis-- couraged science and technology.

(2) The classics alone were long held to be a sufficient education for the upper class, as leading to a general development of mental powers which would enable the finished pro- duct to cope with anything at all that might crop up (the amateur spirit). Although exclu- sive attention to Latin and Greek is no longer possible, there is still an unshakeable pre- ference, even prejudice, in favour of 'arts' subjects.

(3) In these subjects the major public schools have always provided excellent teaching.

(4) However, so do many grammar schools; and it is noticeable that some of these have achieved far better results than even the greatest public schools in terms of open university scholarships and first-class degrees.

(5) Nevertheless, the public school men still achieve far the larger share of top appoint- ments—even in industrial or technological spheres, for which they have received a mani- festly inferior training.

J6) Since, therefore, the professional success of public school men is out of all proportion to their academic merits, we may assume that certain other factors, such as social prestige and 'the old boy net,' are helping public school men into the elites.

(7) This is unjust and against the national interest.

By this time it will be plain that all Dr Bamford has really - said (in 330 pages and twenty-odd diagrams) is what the writer in Nanny's Mirror was saying, more succinctly, some thirty years ago: that public school boys, though backward in the sciences and not all that superior even in humane subjects, still contrive to snap up all the best jobs, and that this is because they are assisted by snobbery and influence. It is just this point, commonly accepted as it is, that I now wish to contest. I concede that public school men are not neces- sarily superior on an academic reckoning; I further concede that, this being the case, they do seem to grab a disproportionately high share of the professional goodies going; but what I do not concede- is that this discrepancy is solely due to unjust factors of class privilege or institutional nepotism. It is due very largely, I maintain, to something quite different—to the superb training which the public schools provide in what I would call the way of the world.

This training is centred on realities. Take, for example, a feature of the public school system which is so often and so virulently attacked— fagging. This, we are told, is 'exploitation' at its most 'degrading.' In sober truth, however, it is just a sensible answer to an everyday need. The older boys, besides working for difficult examinations, are substantially responsible for the routine administration of the school; they are busy people who do not have time for tiresome chores and finicking though necessary errands. Such chores and errands are there- fore put upon the younger boys, all of whom save the most bloody-minded acknowledge the necessity, and most of whom will later inherit their own seasons of responsibility, when they will be glad enough to avail themselves in their own turn of the services which once they pro- vided. What could be more rational, more equitable than that?

Reality and necessity : what is, and what must be. As in the world at large, so in the public school, these conceptions are at the bottom of everything. Necessity rules that achievement must depend on ability and hard work, while - reality demonstrates that it is often rewarded with privilege and wealth. Able and hard-working boys are therefore highly prized at public schools, and their achievements, whether mental or physical, are recognised by ample privileges, these being bestowed, very properly, at the expense of their less talented brethren; for of such is the kingdom of this world, let cretins, weaklings and sluggards resent it as they may.

Yet it is when a boy is most successful that he should most beware; for reality further dictates (as in the outer world, so in the public school) that life should be a hard business even for the able and industrious; and- while the general rule says that these latter may be expected to prosper, there is one very important qualification—'time and chance happeneth to them all: And if time or chance should happen to you, if your skill should begin to fail or your foot slip on a banana skin, then it is no good whining that it wasn't your fault. Either you heave yourself out of the muck by your own unaided efforts, or you will be left to lie there and rot.

A good lesson to learn at an impressionable age; and there are many more—lessons which are not to be learned by the grammar school boy who cycles home at six o'clock to baked beans on toast and Mummy's loving kiss. For it is just at six o'clock, when the academic day is done and the masters withdraw behind their green baize doors, that the most important part of a public school education begins. The evening and the night are the times for intrigue: intrigue for pleasure, for place . . . for power.

There is no milieu in which the workings of ambition can be seen more true and naked than in an English public school. As Cyril Connolly has remarked in Enemies of Promise, the boy who is head of his house often wields more power than the housemaster himself. Small wonder, then, with such a prize at stake, that even good men will delate, bribe and betray, will perjure and prostitute themselves to get it; and all this is to be observed, not as the distant and speculative affair of unfamiliar men in Westminster Palace, but as an actual and blow- by-blow contest which is being carried on in the next block, the next room, the next bed. Oh, shameless, -odious and brutal; but what an unrivalled education for the world.

There is, indeed, no passion, whether beau- tiful or ugly, thA cannot be studied, in a public school, at the closest quarters;-no principle of life that is not illustrated in the most immediate and dramatic way. Alter six o'clock (as the grammar school boy starts his journey home) the public school boy can choose from a diversity of human spectacle. He can examine, as under a micro- scope, the writhing virus of anti-semitism; he can watch the agonies of spurned desire, as complex and devious as any page in Proust; or he can seek advice from the school crook, who can already teach him the invalu- able maxim that to sin without retribution in large matters it is only necessary to conform in small, for in a public school (as in the world) manners and not morals make the man. Lust, envy, guilt and spleen; treachery, im- broglio, humiliation; the forlorn hope, the last- ditch stand; cold, loneliness, misery and hunger; the arrogance of victory and the snivelling of defeat; even, on occasion, honour, loyalty and lovd: here is God's plenty, and he can see and know it all.

So naturally enough, when he goes into the world, he scoops the kitty from under the nose of experienced competitors from other kinds of school. Having himself survived four or five years at a public school, he can now survive anything; and if he has absorbed but a tenth of its lessons, he must succeed in any profession or circumstance which the world may offer. Although grammar school boys may know more science and even (as Dr Bamford claims) more Latin and history as well, they have not had the benefit of those terrible, soul- searing, but eminently 'educative hours after six p.m. It is these which make the public school boy what he is : not his accent or his tie or his knowing a school friend's uncle on the Board, but his grinding education in that most useful and rewarding subject of them all —the facts of life.