MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
FOREIGNERS, I have often observed, are not very quick at understanding the methods or purposes of our boarding-school system. A French or Italian mother would not contemplate for one moment being parted from her children when they reach the tender age of eight or nine. When I, myself, at the age of eight, was shorn of my curls and, packed upon the steamer which took me from Morocco to London much criticism was aroused among the local diplomatic body. Two schools of thought developed. There were those who regarded my mother as some heroine of antiquity willing to sacrifice her sons upon the altar of her country's weal. There were others who felt for her that contemptuous sympathy which we accord to the mothers of Sparta who . were obliged by convention to expose their little ones upon Mount Taygetus, where there were many wolves. . It was in vain that my father sought to explain to them that it was a tradition among the English ruling classes that the males of the family should, while still of tender and therefore malleable age, be removed from the softening influences of the harem and educated by men and in communities. This system, he would explain, possessed many advantages. For a child to be exposed at an early age to the tortures of homesickness and the asperities of a boarding school developed what, in the nineteenth century, was known as " character." It taught the chila not to surrender to personal emotions in public. It taught him, so my father believed, to become " self-reliant." Above all it provided the State and the Empire with a constant flow of standardised recruits, trained in habits of obedience and command, forming an elite sundered from the rest of the community by the identity of their accents and prejudices, and in the mass impervious to any new- fangled or original ideas. In truth no educational system yet devised produces so high an average of honourable, modest, tolerant and reliable young men. As an instrument of Empire there was certainly much to be gained from the public-school spirit.
* * * * In the years which have intervened I have frequently discussed, in an objective spirit, the merits of the system with those foreign educationists who have had opportunities to study our boarding schools. Some of them have contended that this segregation of males between the ages of eight and eighteen is an unwholesome practice and one which tends to promote, not virtue, but vice. Others have argued that our much boasted ,public-school spirit is little more than a convention, and that muscular Christianity is apt to become more muscular than Christian. A few, who have spent some time as masters in one or other of our public schools, have criticised the prefectorial system. They contend that the prefects are them- selves corrupted by this premature power ; that the lower boys are encouraged thereby to toady the senior boys ; and that the whole scheme is due to the selfishness or indolence of the masters, who prefer to delegate their authority and to shirk the unpleasant duties of maintaining daily discipline. They would all agree that these eight years of arduous training and conformity do provide the State with a large number of reliable employees, but they would contend that by insisting so rigorously on the norm we discourage original development, and that a method whieh was useful in the days of Queen Victoria is not well adapted to the complexities of the modern world. I do not agree entirely with any of these criticisms. For one prefect who is corrupted by premature power there are forty who acquire thereby early habits of responsibility ; the toady type of lower boy is a phenomenon which is both revolting and rare. The adaptability to later life which is acquired in these early years is a dependable advantage ; and it is ignorant to assert that the public school of today is run on Victorian principles.
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Foreigners, moreover, are always shocked by what they regard as the brutality of our public schools and by the practice of beating little boys with canes. It requires long acquaintance with the cane, and much insight into the strange conventions of our boarding- school life, to realise that no per§onal humiliation is inflicted by this form. of punishment. We , are always told that if one allows the prefects to cane the lower boys one is introducing temptations to sadism. There may occur, for all' I know, some scattered instances of this perverse temptation ; all I can say is that, having been beaten at my schools some thirty or forty, times, I was only once conscious that any pleasure was derived by the person who swung the cane, and he was not a prefect but an elderly master of great scholarship and profound religious convictions. Nor do I agree for one moment that the standardisation of our boarding-school system destroys original talent. The need of con- formity does certainly retard the flowering of eccentricity, but is that so bad a thing ? The original and the eccentric are qualities which the English have always cherished ; they are given lavish scope in later years. Sir Max Beerbohm was right in contending that all the nonsense which had been knocked out of him at school was carefully put back at the university. Nor would it be denied that the French adult is far more bound by the conventional than is his British counterpart.
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These reflections have been suggested to me by reading this week a book about my own public school which has just been published. It is called Wellington College: The Founders of the Tradition, and is written by George F. H. Berkeley, an Old Wellingtonian of some seventy-five years of age. He writes of his old school with touching loyalty, a loyalty which no Frenchman could feel for the Lycee Condorcet or Louis le Grand. He recalls forgotten football matches of the 'eighties, and he remembers not merely the names, but also the initials, of the boys who were there with him sixty-five years ago. One can always recognise these eternal school- boys by this odd quirk of memory which induces them to think of Charlie Brimsmead as C. F. Brimsmead or of Willy Lloyd as W. R. De-la-P. Lloyd. In my own day at Wellington Christian names were regarded as effeminate, and we were known only by our initials and given a serial number which was stamped upon our books. Mr. Berkeley's study will be read with interest by all Old Wellingtonians, but the ordinary reader might find it a dull book, were it not for one important disclosure which it makes. We have become accustomed to the fact that our older public schools departed in the course of centuries from the intentions of their founders and becaine by gradual development seminaries, not for indigent scholars, but for the sons of the idle rich. It is curious to realise that Wellington, which was founded as late as 1853; passed through stages of development similar to those followed by our mediaeval schools. The original idea had been to found a military academy in memory of our greatest soldier, at which the sons of officers, heroum filii, would receive cheap education. Yet as the school established itself it was discovered that the military orphans had dropped to only fifty-six in number, whereas the sons of living officers—the " Military pupils "—whose fees were only L8o a year, had dropped by 1879 from 130 to eighty. It is not surprising that a Royal Commission was appointed to examine whether the terms of the foundation had been observed.
* * * * The Royal C,ommission of 1879 approved, although somewhat negatively, the policy of expansion which Benson and Wickham had initiated. Few people could question the value of this policy. Had Wellington remained a military academy for the sons of officers, it would have been unable to provide on its comparatively small endowment a standard of education comparable to that furnished by other public schools. It was essential to admit fee- paying pupils from outside. Thus fortified, Wellington has become (although I speak with bias) one of the most progressive schools in the country. It is no longer, and could not be, a seminary for orphans in uniform.
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