The end of the boarding school?

There is a small eddy in the discourse about boarding schools, for example here and here. Just a couple of books and articles, but I think they represent a deeper shift in the hidden iceberg of English middle class opinion. Fifty years ago, sending children to live at boarding school at the age of, say, eight was a normal thing to do. Today, to many of the same people, including boarding school kids themselves, it seems weird and wrong.

This shift seems basically right to me (I went to boarding school at eight, and was miserable). The stories in the Bloomberg article are horrifying. They also correspond to my own memories. I remember two paedophilia scandals, one at my prep school and one at my public school.¹ Both were hushed up: the teachers involved were sent packing, and that was that. And everyone seemingly accepted this as normal! At least, we children did: we simultaneously knew that whatever had happened was very horrible, and understood that the perpetrator would just be sacked and that would be that. I don’t recall anyone saying “this is a crime, the police should be involved”. (The teacher from my prep school was hunted down and prosecuted, much later.)

Still, these stories have something, not wrong exactly, but missing: in one fundamental aspect they don’t capture my experience. Let’s check if that generalizes. You can answer this whatever school you went to, but don’t answer if your school days were uniformly positive (so yeah, basically everyone can answer).

To me this is a no-brainer, almost a comedy question because the answer is so obvious. And I suspect to most of my generation also? Like, since at least the eighties, Hollywood high school movies have shown pupil culture being terrible and teachers being ineffective sideshows, and this sells because it corresponds to people’s reality.

Maybe if you are twenty years older that’s not true. It’s not what George Orwell says:

‘Here is a little boy,’ said Flip, indicating me to the strange lady, ‘who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?’ she added, turning to me, ‘I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you’.

And it is not the vision you get in Terms and Conditions, Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s excellent history of girls’ boarding schools, where the teachers stand out, for good and bad.

Putting it in Morrissey lyrics, these articles come from the world of ‘The Headmaster Ritual’: “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools”. But my generation actually lived in the world of ‘The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils’.

The history of English public schools gets interesting in the nineteenth century, when the institution was rejigged by a set of reforming headmasters. It’s probably good to drop your images of top-hatted toffs and think more in terms of Harvard and Yale today. These were institutions at the top of the most powerful society in the world. They attracted interest in the same way that top US universities now do. Even their sports matches were taken seriously far beyond the schools themselves, just as American college sports are. Their headmasters, most famously Thomas Arnold of Rugby, but also Vaughan at Harrow, or Farrar and Cotton at Marlborough, had the same level of prestige and fame that a Harvard president does now. And they were modern and innovative. They transformed the public schools into engines focused on building Christian gentlemen, based on key principles: the independence of the headmaster; the pastoral role of individual teacher; pupils’ loyalty to the school; ruthless expulsion of bad apples; and the use of prefects to make the school partially self-governing.

These 19th century schools were essentially a transmission mechanism. By putting the sons of the rising middle class side-by-side with actual aristocrats, they would build an artificial aristocratic caste. It was a socialization system as intensive as a Sweat Lodge. Those systems can work as long as the staff are intensely committed to the values they want to pass on. (Headmasters were typically clergymen; of Thomas Arnold one ex-pupil wrote, “I felt a love and reverence for him as one of quite awful greatness and goodness, for whom I well remember that I used to think I would gladly lay down my life.”)

But putting a large group of adolescent boys together in a “total institution” is likely to work much less well when the surrounding society is rather unconfident of its own values. In 1982 Pink Floyd released The Wall and enabled a generation of teenagers to shout “hey! teacher! leave them kids alone!” That song was popular at my school, but in a kind of jokey way because again, noone could seriously think that our teachers were brutal oppressors exerting thought control. At their best they were nice people who were genuinely concerned to help their pupils flourish; at worst they were just AWOL, absent without leave. As for the pupils? Well… Thomas Arnold said on seeing a group of bad kids, “it makes me think that I see the Devil in the midst of them.”

The fall of the boarding school isn’t just about changing attitudes to childrearing, it’s about changes in English social structure. Britain just isn’t run any more by a tightly-knit social elite which needs to slurp up new talent and socialize it into its values. A point along this change was when intellectuals like Orwell lost respect for those values; one reason that happened, if his essay is at all accurate, is that the values indeed had become shopworn.

(What an extraordinary essay it is, even by his high standards:

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Who else would have the imagination to think that?)

The boarding school’s USP, a ticket into the upper middle class, just isn’t that valuable any more. Instead, today we have a democratic system of mass schooling in which every kid gets a fair chance at a decent education.

Ha ha, kidding obviously. What we have today is elitism via place. The smart thing to do is to get your kid into a highly competitive North London state school. They’re open to everyone who can afford to live in the catchment area! From the linked article:

we find that a one-standard deviation change in school average final test scores brought about by school age 7 to age 11 value-added raises prices by around 3%. There is a similar association between higher age 7 achievement and house prices, which can be mainly attributed to the background characteristics of the school intake…

This in turn reflects Britain’s 21st-century elite: culturally and ethnically open, but very “metropolitan”.

Horror stories about boarding schools are not new — there was Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby — but a new idea in the discourse is that boarding schools are responsible for the failures of other British institutions. From Alex Renton’s Stiff Upper Lip:

if this was how the ruling class cared for its children, no wonder the public institutions of Britain that they went on to run — from the BBC to the NHS — seemed so careless, so arrogant and so prone to cover-up.

I mean, maybe! It doesn’t seem to be the kind of causal claim that will ever be rigorously evaluated using a natural experiment and advanced statistics. But you can see the logic. This argument is probably best thought of as a new elite reckoning with its predecessors.

---

If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.

1. For non-UK readers, a preparatory (“prep”) school is a private school typically for ages 8-13 and a public school is also, weirdly, a private school, for ages 13-18.