Term Begins
1. Public Schools for Whom?
By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS T HAVE recently been involved in a consider- 'able correspondence about the future of the public schools. The popular conception of this controversy is that of a solid phalanx of re- actionary Old School Ties, fighting obstinately against the enemies of privilege who are calling for equality of opportunity. The reality seems to me enormously different. I am told that there are some Old Etonians who habitually refer to Mr. Birley as `Red Robert.' I have never met any of these epigrammatists, but I have no doubt of their existence. But in general the public school world is very different from what it was in the early years of the century and when Arnold Lunn wrote The Harrovians.
Then, there was an insanely extravagant loyalty to the old school and he who criticised it in the smallest detail was denounced as if he had talked smut about his mother. Such a series as the Spectator's recent 'John Bull's Schooldays' shows that the modern man, whether from a public or from some other sort of school, is today coolly critical—perhaps sometimes too coolly critical—of his school. Perhaps the Spectator's contributors were not representative, but most ex-public schoolboys today, I find, whether they enjoyed their schooldays or not, are yet quite objectively open-minded about plans for the reform of public schools—ask of these plans whether they are practical but do not think of denouncing them as blasphemous. The difficulty, as all admit, is to find a principle of selection of boys for free places which will be acceptable to ratepayer or taxpayer. The authori- ties of the public schools are almost without exception strong supporters of such schemes. Perhaps the strongest champion of the reform of the public schools is the headmaster of Eton. Such problems as those depicted in The Guinea Pig are quite remote from reality.
There is, I have discovered, much less support for reform from those parents of public school- boys who were not themselves at public schools and who are, as the Minister of Education said the other day, now the majority. They have sent their sons to public schools as a symbol of their own success in life, a proof that they' have risen in the world. They are anxious, as the late Lord Birkenhead put it, to 'see that their sons receive opportunities in life that they did not them- selves receive,' and they are cool towards pro- posals that the sons of those who have not taken the trouble to make good, should share those advantages. But what greatly amused me was the discovery that out of a large postbag almost all the really savage letters of opposition to any plan for 'democratising' the public schools came from women, and I was most interested to learn from Mr. Prior, the Member for Lowestoft, who introduced the recent debate on the public schools in the House, that his experience had been the same. These ladies are not as a rule greatly interested in problems of curricula or examination results. Their argument is that at State schools their boys will learn to use filthy language and to indulge in coarse habits from which the more gentlemanly regime of the public school will protect them.
To an ex-public schoolboy the point is, it must be confessed, somewhat comic. A good lady wrote to me the other day to explain how a re- lative of hers had sent a boy to a State school from which he returned to call his mother 'a — old bitch.' Horrified not so much by the biological confusion as by the ill-breeding of such a phrase, she had determined to send her son to `a very expensive public school'! The point is odd, for whatever the other defects of public school instruction, no one can doubt that a boy there will learn to use filthy words, to lie and to crib as effectively as at 'any place of instruction, and, if the school is 'a very expensive public school,' his chances of enjoying some pre- mature sexual experience are considerably greater than at a less exclusive establishment.
He will also admittedly learn a certain social savoir-faire which will make him less likely to air these accomplishments in front of ladies and in particular in front of his mother, and I do not deny that that lesson is a valuable one, but it is a different lesson from that which the good ladies imagine him to have learnt. Nor is it quite certain even that his manners will be better than if he had been educated elsewhere. A male correspondent complained to me that he had recently been beaten up first by some ex- public school drunks and then by some Teddy boys. He therefore thought that the remedy was to' reintroduce fees into grammar schools. His experiences were doubtless uncomfortable, even though 1 was not very clear why the reintro- duction of grammar school fees would guarantee him against a repetition of them. Still, it did prove that these sweeping generalisations about good and bad manners are highly selective.
The whole trouble about the debate seems to me that we are far from clear for whose benefit we are planning in our proposed reforms. Mr. Crosland, for instance, in his recent article in Encounter, dismisses as 'ridiculous' Mr. Birley's plans to fill 10 per cent. of the places at major public schools with free boys. Mr. Crosland and his faithful Achates, Mr. Vaizey. want 75 per cent., if not 100 per cent., of such places to be free. But Mr. Crosland and Mr. Birley are not really on the same wavelength. Mr. Crosland does not want to reform the public schools; he wants to abolish them—in any meaning which the phrase has ever borne.
Mr. Crosland thinks that England is a class- ridden country, that the ineffectiveness of our political leadership and the lack of energy of our industrial production are very largely the consequences of this class-consciousness, that it is a great evil and that the public schools are to sonic extent the consequence but to a large ex- tent the cause of it. This is a perfectly tenable point of view, and I do not quarrel with him - for holding it; but it is not in the least Mr. Birley's point of view. Mr. Birley on the w hole believes in the public schools and believes in the training of an elite for leadership. It is obviously true that if you take our twenty leading public schools, which between them have about 12.000 boys and give a tenth of their places to free boys, you do not sensibly alter the class structure of English education. The State school would re- main the normal destination of the working-class boy. But I do not fancy that Mr. Birley would think that the creation of equality of opportunity was the object of the exercise; its object is to weaken the power of snobbery in the public schools. The purpose of introducing the 10 per cent. of free boys would be not only to benefit the free boys . but—perhaps even more—to broaden the minds of the other 90 per cent.--to send them out as leaders but as more intelligent leaders than they are at present.
I would not myself take sides as between these two ambitions. I can see something to be said for both of them, but at the moment there seems far more chance of getting Mr. Birley's scheme adopted than Mr. Crosland's. Fashions may change, perhaps quickly, but at the moment outs is a savagely equality-hating democracy, and the main obstacle to the abolition of. the public schools is the thoroughly demociatic objection that very few people want them to be abolished. The buckets of praise poured over them by Socialist Members in the recent debate is ample proof of that.
The great majority of boys will then still go, whatever the reforms, to State schools. Therefore the most important problem is to improve the State schools and the only real hope of achieving equality of opportunity is so to improve them that there neither is nor is thought to be' any disadvantage to a boy in going to them. For this many things, such as an improvement in teachers' salaries, are necessary, but also it is necessary not to reform the public schools in such a way as to damage the State schools. Therefore it would be a mistake to cream off the best gram- mar school boys into the public schools. Nor in- deed, since it costs six times as much to send a boy to a public school as to send him to a State school, is it likely that either ratepayer or tax- payer will agree to pay for many such transfers.
But it costs rather more to send a boy to an approved school than to send him to a public school. No one can ask the public schools to take sex maniacs or mental defectives. But the rather naughty boy, perhaps from an unsatisfactory home, possessed, of Li certain ability and initiative which, if disciplined, may turn to good and, if undisciplined, may turn to hooliganism, is just the sort of boy from whose company the public school would most benefit. He is indeed much more like the average public schoolboy than the wholly virtuous 'good examinee' from the sixth form of a grammar school and much more likely at a public school to find schoolfellows who, like him, come from a broken home and divorced parents than he is at the grammar school or the secondary modern school. It is essential if the reform is to succeed, that the free entries be recruited, predominantly from this type of boy.
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