SANE SCHOOLING

A Record and a Criticism

of School Life
by
J.H.SIMPSON
Author of An Adventure in Education
and Howson of Holt

London FABER AND FABER

24 Russell Square

FIRST PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY MCMXXXVI

BY FABER AND FABER LIMITED
24 RUSSELL SQUARE LONDON W.C. I
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE BOWERING PRESS PLYMOUTH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To
MY WIFE
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION page 9
I. THE SOCIAL MIXTURE 29
II. THE GENERAL MEETING 82
III. FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE 140
IV. INDIVIDUALITY IN THE BOARDING
SCHOOL 181
V. GAMES AND ATHLETICISM 227
VI. THE CURRICULUM 257
VII. EDUCATION FOR HEALTH 295
VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX 314

INDEX 345
 7

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I am indebted to the editors of the New Statesman and Nation and the St. Martin's
Review for permission to use, in Chapters I and III respectively, material which has
already appeared in their journals.

INTRODUCTION
It can hardly be doubted that too many books are at present being written about
education, and anyone who adds to their number should be quite sure why he is
doing so. Human motives are complicated, but I think I can honestly say that I feel
it to be a duty to try to write this book, however imperfectly I carry out my
intention. Some sixteen years ago an opportunity came to me such as is given to
few schoolmasters, and I feel that it is almost an obligation for anyone who has had
the chance to work in such novel and favourable conditions to share his experience
with others, though what he has to say will be useful only if he is prepared to
record his mistakes, doubts, and difficulties, as well as his real or fancied success.
If these notes of my experience, they do not profess to be much more-are useful to
others, it will be because they do, at any rate, come straight from school life. From
a more selfish point of view, writing them has helped me to clarify my own
thoughts, not only about Churnside, but also about other schools which my
experience there has made me want to criticise, not always, I hope, destructively.
The many unanswered questions which those twelve years left in my mind stand
out more clearly when

INTRODUCTION
I have written them, and if these pages are of any use to other schoolmasters, or
parents, or students, they will probably be so, less by giving them facts or
conclusions, than by provoking them to go to others for answers to questions
which I have raised.
The opportunity which I have mentioned came to me in the year 1919. Quite
unexpectedly I was invited by the founder of the school which in these pages I am
going to call Churnside to share his counsels, and to discuss with him his project of
founding a school of novel character in carefully chosen conditions. Subsequently,
when he had formed the Governing Body, over which till his death in 1927 he
presided as Chairman, I was appointed to be the first headmaster. Because without
him the school of which I am writing would never have existed, and because he
treated me with such kindness not least in the great freedom which he gave me in
directing the school- I cannot go further without repeating words which I wrote
elsewhere, after his death, about one of the most gracious and lovable personalities
that I have ever known. He lived to see the school accomplish some of what he had
purposed; but his death, seven years after we started, was an irremediable loss.
“Possessed in a great measure of the things that many people most desire, he could
not be happy unless others shared them. He did not despise wealth, for wealth was
to him the means of making others happy. With a quite exceptional power of
10

INTRODUCTION
perceiving and drawing out the goodness in others, he was impatient of the barriers
and prejudices of social class that blind one man to the virtues of another. Not that
he was ever a victim of the cant that holds illiteracy to be a proof of simple virtue,
or the horny hand to be necessarily the sign of an honest heart. But he knew well
enough how great a reservoir of ability and character our social system leaves
untapped and, just because he cared so much for the loveliest things of the mind
and spirit, he felt it to be intolerable that so many should be barred from access to
them. Churnside was an effort, within its own limits, to remedy this, 'enabling', as
he wrote, 'the best brains to go the whole way, and preparing them to take
advantage of these opportunities which have hitherto been more or less restricted'.
Two elements in education that he valued very highly were beauty of external
surroundings, and the promotion of bodily health and strength. It was his happiness
to feel that from the woods and hills round Churnside boys were drawing
unconsciously an inspiration that would affect them throughout their lives. In all
that concerned bodily fitness he took the deepest interest, whether in details of diet,
or the prevention of sickness, or athletic achievements.
Of his kindness as a friend and counsellor it is difficult to write with restraint. He
seemed to have a genius for communicating sympathy and encouragement. He was
not one to intrude advice on
11

INTRODUCTION
others, but his judgments were always penetrating and distinctive. He would
sometimes confront a situation presented to him for his advice with a certain
whimsical humour that seemed to draw the sting from anxiety and resolve
perplexity in laughter. His sympathy was no passing emotion, but an impetus to
generous and unselfish action. He had the power, so rare among men of great
wealth, and possible only in one who genuinely loved his fellows, of giving
without condescension. He gave in such a way that the recipient could not be
embarrassed, but rather felt that he, too, was taking part in a beautiful action."
His idea, as simple as it was generous, was to give to selected boys from the
elementary schools of his own county some of the educational advantages which
he himself had enjoyed. At first he thought of a school which should take these
boys at the earliest age that made selection possible, and prepare them for
admission to the great public schools, where they would be maintained by
scholarships founded by himself. But obviously there were great difficulties in this
project, and he turned readily to the idea of a school with a character and ideals of
its own, which would take the county scholars at the age when they would
normally move to a secondary school, and keep them till the end of their school
life. It was such a school that eventually he founded, and endowed so generously
that some forty-five boys could be maintained and educated as

12
INTRODUCTION
boarders, entirely free of cost to their parents.
I have said that the founder attached great importance to the influence of beautiful
surroundings upon growing boys, and he could scarcely have made a wiser choice
than the estate which he bought for his purpose. In this sense the great beautifully
timbered park, and the rolling hills beyond it, mattered more than the actual house
in which we lived. Everything that met our eyes, when we looked from the
windows, or walked about the grounds, was more than good enough for all except
those who cannot be happy without mountains or the sea. The sights and sounds
were those of the rather remote English countryside, I can remember one or two
new boys who were town-dwellers being startled at night by the shriek of owl or
vixen, which came from the "wilderness", only a few yards from one side of the
house, and sounded alarmingly near. It was in that "wilderness" that we constructed
in our second or third year a beautiful and serviceable open-air theatre. There were
at first no playing fields, in the ordinary sense of the words, and it was not
altogether easy to provide them, for the park sloped steeply down to the trout
stream, in which I always imagined, but succeeded in never discovering, that the
boys did a little healthy poaching. Eventually at the top of the ridge, several
hundred feet above the house, a portion of the park was enclosed, and football and
cricket grounds were levelled. Looking north-west from that

13

INTRODUCTION
ground on an afternoon in June or October I was prepared to swear that no playing
field in England enjoyed a lovelier view.
The house itself had been built about the middle of the last century on the site of a
Georgian house, which had been destroyed to make room for it. I always felt,
though I daresay I was alone in my feeling, that there was something of the temple
of mammon about it, quite alien to the spirit of the school. There were certainly
some rather trying remains of its original occupation, for example, painful stained
glass windows, and in the front hall, where it faced visitors rather forbiddingly, a
monstrous statue of King Saul, representing him as he was, quandocumque spiritus
Domini malus arripiebat, as the inscription informed us. But all this mattered little
in comparison with the fact that the house provided plenty of lofty well-lighted
rooms, which made cheerful classrooms, and healthy, if rather unconventional,
dormitories. It had, too, a certain dignity internally, and there was plenty of space
in the corridors. Moreover, as I have said, all ugly things were forgotten when you
looked out of the windows.
This was the opportunity, and in these remarkably attractive conditions, which was
offered to me when I already wanted to move, from the public school where I had
been teaching, to some different kind of educational work. For the second time in
my life I had been extraordinarily fortunate in the
14

INTRODUCTION
headmaster whom I served. Not only did I receive from him personal kindness
which I cannot attempt to describe, but he gave us a wonderful example of how a
new spirit can be breathed into old educational forms. He taught us, among many
other things, how much could be done, even within the conventional limits of the
public school, to develop in “ordinary" undistinguished boys qualities and
capacities which they were not supposed to possess. To one, at any rate, of his
masters he gave à quite new idea of what kind of place a public school might be,
even without any radical change in its composition. Nevertheless, I was doubtful
how far any one headmaster, however gifted with courage and imagination, could
put right those many things in public school life which seemed to me to be wrong.
Too many of them belonged to the very nature of that kind of school, and were
clearly outside the power of any headmaster to change. No headmaster of such a
school can, for example, get boys from anywhere but homes which are essentially
well to do, and therefore he cannot give them anything but what is in fact a class
education.
It was, as I explained to the founder, the idea of making a novel form of school life
that attracted me primarily, and not so much the project of giving to a number of
boys from the elementary schools of that county advantages which they would not
otherwise enjoy. That, heaven knows, was attractive enough, granted that the
advantages were
15
INTRODUCTION
genuine; but the real thrill lay in the possibility of a school society which would
not merely reproduce public school conditions in miniature, but would embody
certain other ideas then prominent in my mind. Some of these I had already tried
on a smaller scale. The chance of a wider field and greater freedom was not to be
missed, and I was encouraged to undertake the work by friends whose opinions
were not lightly to be disregarded.
If at that time I ever spoke of the proposed venture at Churnside as an experiment,
I was not using the word in the objective dispassionate sense of the scientist. If
there is one lesson more than another that I believe I learnt in those twelve years, it
is the power of suggestion, the fact that our minds do influence all the time, and far
beyond our knowledge and intention, the minds of those whom we teach. In
education, as elsewhere, things are accomplished by faith. I have no right to speak
of what was in the founder's mind, but I do not believe that he, any more than I,
ever had an open mind as to whether or not we might meet with complete failure. I
think that we took it for granted that we were moving in the right direction, though
we could not foresee every bend in the road.
It was with some diffidence, all the same, that I faced the prospect, for I knew
perfectly well that I had certain disqualifications for the work in the particular
conditions in which it was set. To these disqualifications I shall refer again in the
right place.
16

INTRODUCTION
But I was also fortunate enough to possess, I believe, certain advantages of
experience for the work before me. In order to make the following pages
intelligible I am bound, at the risk of seeming egotistical, to recall what I was
thinking generally about education at that time, and what lessons from my previous
experience both of warning and of example I most valued. Some of the ideas with
which I started have been modified by experience. Others, then vague, have been
clarified. New ideas, too, came in continually, supplementing, but not necessarily
displacing or disproving, the old. On the whole, with one or two definite
exceptions to which I shall refer, if I had to start again I should follow the same
lines as before.
My principal qualification, which reflects no particular credit on myself, was that
at least I had known the inside of boarding schools of different kinds, and had seen
boys living and working in widely dissimilar conditions. It is unfortunate that this
should have been a rather unusual qualification in English schoolmasters, but it
was so.
The public school master till quite lately rarely knew intimately any other type of
school than his own. The headmasters of public schools, who in books, and
articles, and more particularly on the platform on speech days, complacently assure
the world that the traditional public school has little wrong with it, or that no other
school is so good, have had, as a rule, no experience of any school life
17

INTRODUCTION
organised on quite different principles. They may be right, or they may be wrong,
but they have no appropriate standard of comparison for judging their own schools,
and they do not always seem to desire one. Their attitude is in fact quite
unscientific.
Of traditional public schools I had seen enough to enable me to compare them with
other places. My own school I had known as day boy, boarder, and master, thereby
seeing it in three very different aspects. I imagine that I can write as
dispassionately about my old school as most public school men, and, looking at it
as cold-bloodedly as I can, I believe that it was and is in spite of a strange kind of
unloveliness) about the best of its type. I can say that truthfully, without suggesting
that I feel any great enthusiasm for the type. I had also seen the inside of two other
well-known public schools during two periods of temporary teaching which came
my way soon after I left the University. One of them, largely derivative from the
school where I was a boy, was interesting precisely in its minor differences. Of the
other I will only say that I could not have believed, if I had not known them, that
boys of the upper middle class could be as degraded as some of the unfortunate
children in one of the lower forms with which I spent several hours in each week.
In more ways than one the school was admirably qualified to play before my more
or less innocent eyes the admonitory part of the intoxicated helot.
 18

INTRODUCTION
However widely public schools in the more restricted sense (in which that phrase
was used before the war) might differ one from another, I felt that all alike suffered
from certain grave disadvantages. I believed that the schools and houses were
almost always too large, and that, partly for that reason, the individual did not have
a fair chance. There seemed to me to be a very large wastage of undistinguished
boys, many of whom in different conditions would be capable of infinitely more
than was at present expected of them. I could not believe that the tremendous
strength of custom and convention and the worship of games were in any sense of
the word natural, or in the least necessary. Without doubt they were often
mischievous. At a time when the strongest and healthiest forces in other fields were
making for simplicity, I felt that the life and teaching of these schools were clogged
with a self-conscious and complicated formalism. The emotional side of education,
at least as important as the intellectual or physical, was not so much ill directed as
almost entirely ignored. At that time this defect appeared to me most unfortunate as
regards a boy's growth in his sexual life, and in his aesthetic sense. Later, I felt that
it was no less disastrous in the sphere of religion. Finally, I believed that in public
school life there was a great deal of preventable unhappiness.
Three years which I had spent on the staff of that original headmaster, G. W. S.
Howson, when

19

INTRODUCTION
he was at the height of his strength, had left with me a picture of a school life
infinitely more happy, and gracious, and less ridden by convention than anything I
had previously known. His power of breaking down ordinary schoolboy customs
and prejudices, and creating an order of life that was sane and well planned, lay in
his personal influence, used frankly and unsparingly, and in a cult of personal
loyalty, which to an astonishing extent permeated the school. The place was not
without its warnings. Loyalty might turn into dependence. It might be difficult to
keep self-satisfaction out of a community which was conscious, and not
infrequently reminded, that it was different from others. But for that picture of
school life, and for eight terms of extraordinarily happy work, I was, and remain,
deeply grateful.
But when I first went to Churnside, I was specially interested in ideas of a rather
different order. Like many other teachers I looked back to the appearance of
Edmond Holmes' What Is and What Might Be in 1911 as to a turning point in my
own education. I could not accept the whole of that gospel. I have never been able
to believe without reservation in the doctrine of natural goodness, which-speaking
as schoolmaster and not as theologian—I have always felt to be only less
incredible than the doctrine of natural badness. But from then onwards I thought of
education increasingly as providing the right conditions for
20

INTRODUCTION
growth, and decreasingly as bringing up, or moulding character, or training the
mind. I believed, too, that it must be growth of the individual and of individuality,
though not in the least individualistically in the political sense. It was to be growth
to and for a life which was essentially social. A brief period of inspecting schools
had given me a glimpse of how, in spite of difficulty and discouragement, similar
ideas were already animating here and there teachers of the younger children. That
experience indeed, revealed to me new worlds of education, which had previously
been right outside my knowledge. I have often wished since that some of our rather
cocksure young secondary and public school masters could be compelled to spend
a period of observation in the most enlightened infant schools, and could be
subjected to some kind of oral examination at the end of it. Their social as well as
their professional education would be the better for the experience.
It was about this time that the influence of the new schools of psychology was
beginning to be felt among the more wideawake section of teachers in England. It
is too soon yet to say how much that influence will do for education in this country.
No doubt at first, in the rush of enthusiasm, many of us talked and read a good deal
of nonsense. Education is, after all, something more than emancipation, to which
for the moment we were inclined to confine it. But in the practical work in the
schools which lay before us the emancipative side was often what
21

INTRODUCTION
had to come first, and if we were asked frigidly "emancipation from what?" I
answered then, as I should answer now, emancipation from a sense of inferiority--
social and personal--from unnecessary rules and restrictions which impede healthy
growth, from foolish and retarding customs and conventions, and from many evil
forms of fear. Throughout my time at Churnside that kind of emancipation and the
fostering of what I conceived to be individuality were two conceptions which I
tried to bear constantly in mind. Put in another way, this means that I tried to make
education there creative rather than possessive.
In speaking of my own attitude to education at that time, I must not leave out the
influence of Homer Lane, and the effect of a number of holidays spent at the Little
Commonwealth, watching the life of what he called his self-governing community
of delinquent boys and girls. There are probably many who feel that they can never
acknowledge adequately what they received in encouragement and inspiration at
that extraordinary place. "Canossa” some of us used to call it, for we felt that we
went there to learn humility. From our comparatively easy work in public schools
and elsewhere we would go there in our holidays, and watch human nature being
apparently reshaped before our eyes. It was a first-rate cure for the complacent
self-satisfaction that ordinary schoolmastering too often breeds. No wonder that
some of us
22

INTRODUCTION
were led to experiment on our account on what we believed to be similar lines,
with considerable benefit to ourselves, and sometimes, let us hope, to others.
A good deal has been written about Lane and his work, and much of it with
sympathy and understanding. But I have read nothing which seems to me to bring
out fully the virility and humour of the man, his versatility, and amazing talk-
nothing that quite does justice to the open-air Lane, working on the Dorset farm,
before he was made into the oracle of the rather overheated consulting room in
London. Lane was the last man in the world who ought ever to have been thought
of as a man of science. He was a man of imagination, action, adventure. I cannot
quite idealise him, as some of my friends do, and regard him as a flawless
character who was ultimately the victim of a merely unimaginative officialdom.
But when I have put together all that I can find to say against Lane --that he did not
realise, or want to realise, the force of his own personality; that he was led by his
love of paradox into slack thinking and second-rate argument; that, like most
people, he could on occasions make himself believe what he wanted to believe-
when I have said all that, it remains true that I think of Lane as the man who, more
than anyone else whom I have known among educators, loved those among whom
he worked with absolute unselfishness, without favour or sentimentality, and made
them feel that, whatever they might do, he
23
 INTRODUCTION
would still understand their actions and motives, and continue to love them none
the less. He really did seem to live and act all the time as if he believed that the
kingdom of heaven lay within us, and was ours for the asking.
In matters of education he had the power to make us feel at first that everything we
had ever done as teachers was wrong. And if on further reflection, and after some
hard mental wrestling, we came to the conclusion that some of it, at least, was not
wholly wrong, it was surprising how often we found that it was right for reasons
which we had only half apprehended, if we had apprehended them at all. Beyond
all the other legacies which he left to those who watched his work, or listened to
his talk, was the lesson that in dealing with the young, whether singly or in
numbers, when things go wrong, and boys and girls are difficult or disappointing,
we should ask first whether in fact it is not we ourselves who are in some way to
blame.
At different times I had met a number of educators of the extreme left wing, whose
work-sometimes derived directly orindirectly from the teaching of Lane--has
attracted attention during the past twenty-five years. They have provoked, and
sometimes withstood, a great deal of criticism, which too often has been prejudiced
and ill informed. It would not be easy to value too highly the work done at some of
their schools with "difficult” children, and I am grateful for much that I have learnt
from
24

INTRODUCTION
their books and conversation. But I confess that some of what I had seen and heard
in the years immediately following the war had left me with a dislike and suspicion
of "stunts", and an uneasy feeling that too many educational reformers leave out of
their various ventures both a sense of humour and a sense of proportion. Without
being aware of the fact, they are not always quite disinterested. It is so easy to
think that you are creating a new order through the children whom you are
educating, when really you are all the time only working off your own grudge
against a society which has failed to recognise you at your own valuation. And it is
one thing to be a rebel in your own person, and quite a different thing to make
vicarious rebels of children who are too young to understand the conditions of the
world for which you are, or, rather, you are not, preparing them. I am in favour of
any methods, however unconventional, which lead children to face the facts of life
(including their own natures) with "courage, and gaiety, and the quiet mind”. But it
has often seemed to me that it is a danger of some of the new education that the
facts themselves may become distorted. I repeat that I went to Churnside rather
suspicious of the kind of "stunt" that makes an instantaneous appeal to the gushing
and suggestible visitor. I can recall examples of the latter, who had heard of
Churnside as a place of novel ideas, and were disappointed not to find on a casual
visit anything sensationally
25

INTRODUCTION
different from other schools. In actual fact there was much that was very different-
at any rate from other schools of which I have had personal knowledge; but it
consisted in a spirit, and not in a number of happenings, nor even, in essence, in a
form of organisation. Of that spirit those who spent any length of time at the school
almost always spoke with appreciation. It was, I think, too subtle to show itself,
except in certain obviously pleasing personal relationships, to the casual or
indifferent observer.
How far I shall be able to convey something of that spirit in the following pages, I
do not know. The particular ethos of any schools is, perhaps, indescribable. If I
succeed in suggesting what Churnside seems to me especially to have represented,
it will be as much by comparison with the life of other schools, based on what
Churnside taught me, as by direct description of our own way of living. Some of
the things which I shall mention will seem very trivial; but school life is made up
of small things, and the art of directing it consists largely in calling attention to the
right small things at the right moment. In other places I may seem to be quite
unnecessarily personal. But education consists, after all, largely in the impact of
one personality on another, and I do not see how any educator can describe his
work in a way useful to others unless he is prepared to reveal himself, or, if it is the
more appropriate expression, to give
26

INTRODUCTION
himself away. Finally, I know very well that I shall mention things which were not
in the least original and are done, and often done better, at other schools. Yet
practices and customs which, considered separately, are not at all unusual may,
when set in a fresh combination, contribute to a whole school life that has its own
freshness and distinction.
Meanwhile there are a few definite facts which readers will do well to remember, if
they are to understand what follows. I am writing about a school of some sixty to
sixty-five boys, all of them boarders. Of these some forty were county scholars,
receiving an entirely free education on the foundation, who came to us at the
normal age of eleven. The other boys came at various ages, the greater number
about two years later, in fact, at about the time when the preparatory school boy
enters his public school. The range of age, therefore, was decidedly wide, for
whereas all the boys stayed till about sixteen, by which time they had taken some
kind of “first" examination, a fair proportion of them stayed till eighteen or
nineteen. Of the varied kinds of home from which they came I shall have more to
say later.
I have no claim to write as a professional psychologist. Readers who swear by the
names of Freud, Jung, Adler and others will find, no doubt, that I have misused
many words which belong to their particular vocabularies. That does not greatly
disturb me. I shall be satisfied if I can make clear
27

INTRODUCTION
at what points in the educational field one practising schoolmaster has felt the need
of their assistance. Is it unfair to ask that men and women who have to direct the
life of boarding schools and similar places should now begin to receive from
psychologists of the new schools rather less negative criticism and rather more
positive advice?
Anyone who writes in commendation of a novel kind of school or a novel method
of education suffers from one serious disadvantage. He cannot actually set down
on paper the evidence which will justify his belief. The evidence is flesh and blood,
or rather, in the Meredithian phrase, blood, brain, and spirit. The old boys of a
school must always be its principal justification. They form the best proof of what
a school can do, not immediately after they have left, but when a few years have
shown how far they are able to adapt themselves to fresh conditions, to retain the
best that they have acquired, and to continue to learn. I write these words not only
with a sense of deep gratitude to my old boys for what they taught me, but in the
firm belief that they do as a body justify the claims which I have put forward.
It should scarcely be necessary to add that when I write of the school I refer only to
the period of my headmastership, which ended nearly four years ago, and that the
opinions which I have expressed must not be assumed to be those of anyone other
than myself.
 28

INTRODUCTION
The intention that lay behind the original foundation of the school was that selected
Boys from the elementary schools of the county were to be given certain
advantages and opportunities which are commonly enjoyed only by the sons of
wealthier parents, or of parents in what is known as a better social position. They
were to be placed in surroundings not altogether dissimilar from those which we
associate with those boarding schools which have appropriated the name of public
school. I put it in that negative way, because I do not think it was ever the intention
of the founder-it was certainly never mine-to make Churnside a mere replica of
public school life. Nor did it ever cross my mind that only a few boys from the
elementary schools were capable of profiting from the education that Churnside
was meant to give, though unfortunately we could only take a relatively small
number. On the contrary, I was always glad when our county scholars included
some boys of what might be described as a good honest ordinary type, with no
special academic capacity or ambitions. Some of these proved, in my
29

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

opinion, to be the best justification of the school. I never had any doubt that the
boy from the village school, given sympathetic treatment and equal opportunity
with those from more prosperous homes, would show what great reserves of
character and capacity our present social and educational arrangements leave
unsuspected and unused.
If I had been asked in 1920, when we started, what special advantages I hoped our
boys would enjoy, I suppose I should have answered that above all I wanted them
to enjoy a greater freedom for the group and the individual, and a greater
responsibility of the group, than they would find elsewhere. But I should have
added that there were certain essential characteristics of the public schools which
we believed to be valuable, and which we intended to incorporate in Churnside.
About some of these I have become with longer experience a little sceptical. But I
believe now, perhaps more firmly than ever, that there is a unique value for
developing the social qualities in a period spent in a boarding school, if it comes at
the right age. Most public school men probably share a conviction, which they do
hot always care to express, that there is a sense in which even the least intelligent
and least interesting boy who has been to a boarding school is better educated than
the boy who has never been away from home. Personally I sympathise with that
feeling, though I also believe that in the traditional education of the English boy of
the wealthier classes
30

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

the time spent at the boarding school is quite unnecessarily long, and begins far too
early.
In its inception, when nearly all the boys came from the elementary schools,
Churnside was not, as it afterwards became, a "bridge" school joining the banks of
a wide social gulf; later on, as I shall show, we filled the school with boys from
almost every type of English home. There is something both difficult and
disagreeable in talking in this way about social classes and their different
characteristics. It is particularly distasteful to anyone who, like myself, has come to
find class divisions so hateful, and numbers many of his closest friends among
those who were born in circumstances widely different from those of the Victorian
professional class home in which he spent his own boyhood. Probably I shall be
accused of overemphasising the differences between the social layers, and even
called a snob for insisting upon the existence of what so many people like to forget.
There is a kind of hail-fellow-well-met heartiness which claims to override all
social distinctions, and can sometimes, for the moment, induce us to forget them. It
is often founded on a genuine kindliness. But it gets nowhere in the end, for it
ignores too many facts which it would find painful to recognise. If we are to
remove barriers, we must first see how high they are and how substantial. We must
recognise differences, however superficial they may be, before we can compose
them. It is bare honesty and good sense to realise
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that the other fellow does not think as we do, just as it is bare humility to put to
ourselves the question whether truth lies rather with him or with us.
I spoke just now of the village school, and I ought to explain that it was from the
relatively small schools of the village or the small country town that nearly all our
elementary boys came. Churnside lies in a rural county, and as we used the County
Scholarship Examination as a preliminary test for admission, we were unable for
administrative reasons to take boys from the few large cities which lay near. It is a
point of some importance that we never had to deal with the products of the great
barrack school of the industrial town, and one that I have to bear in mind when I
generalise about the characteristics of those boys who came from the elementary
schools. They were almost entirely country boys, and for the first year or two it
was these boys alone who, together with a very few nominated by the founder,
made up our number. Their parents represented fairly well the various occupations
of English villages and country towns. There were among them farmers, farm
labourers, small shopkeepers, craftsmen, and a few connected with the work of
smaller seaport towns. Others followed occupations which may be either urban or
rural, including some commercial travellers and minor local government officials,
a fair number of teachers, and a few artisans. It was not till we had spent some two
years building up our little school society from these
32

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

boys, who were educated free on the foundation, that I made a suggestion to the
founder which after some thought he accepted. My suggestion was that we should
admit to the school on a fee-paying basis boys from preparatory schools and
elsewhere, who would come to us just as if they were entering a public school. If it
turned out that these feepayers came in any numbers, we should have the
opportunity to create and to observe a school community of a novel and most
interesting character.
I made the suggestion, not only because I felt that the county scholars would
benefit from contact with boys of a different upbringing, and with different ideas
and experience. That, no doubt, was true enough, and it was sufficient answer to
the suggestion sometimes made later by foolish people, that in admitting boys from
preparatory schools we were in some way prejudicing the interests of the county
scholars, for whom the school had been primarily founded. But that was by no
means all. I had started my work with these boys from the elementary schools in
almost complete ignorance of what they would be like, or how I should get on with
them. Now, after living with them in the closest contact as members of an enlarged
family, I believed (and time has only strengthened my belief) that from the social
mixture which I was suggesting the benefit would be by no means all on one side.
On the contrary, I felt that, if the school could
33

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

be so organised as to give play to the best qualities of both, they would contribute
perhaps equally to a school society which might turn out to be far more interesting
and valuable than anything that I had contemplated at first.
If it sounds affected or exaggerated to say that when I went to Churnside I knew
practically nothing about the elementary school boy, I can only plead that it was
not at all easy or obvious for the pre-war professional-class boy, brought up in an
ordinary town, to know as companions boys from what may be called broadly
working-class homes. I doubt whether in that respect things even now are very
different. It was a great deal easier for the son of the country parson, or even the
country squire. The professional man's son passed from his preparatory school full
of boys from “nice" homes to his public school, where the conventional attitude to
the poorer classes was based partly on blank ignorance, and partly on a cultivated
sense of superiority. In my own experience nothing was done by those in
authority--apart from some quite unreal talk in the pulpit--to counteract this. It is
true that there were the missions and clubs in poor districts, supported by the
public schools for the benefit of less fortunate men and boys. The spirit that
inspired these undertakings was admirable. Many devoted lives had been spent in
their service, and, no doubt, incalculable good had often been done at one end,
namely, in the districts where they
34

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

were situated. But it is doubtful whether in my time at the other end-in the schools
themselves--- except among a very small minority of active helpers the effect was
at all what was intended. The impression we gained was, I think, in most cases that
we certainly ought to help boys poorer than ourselves, just because we had so
many advantages material and otherwise, that they lacked. But I never gathered
that we might have anything to learn from them, though they might be interesting
companions at the annual mission seaside camp, and the subject of pathetic or
amusing stories at the annual meeting in the school hall. On the whole, it all went
to confirm a sense of superiority, and did little, if anything, to teach the greater
number of us how, if at all, the other boy differed in his thoughts and habits from
ourselves, and from what social conditions those differences arose. Nor did these
activities have any bearing on boys who did not live (more or less picturesquely in
our ignorant eyes) in slums. That the "common" or working-class boy in our own
town streets might be a person worth knowing or talking to was never suggested.
When we had to make use of him in the form of the serving boys, of whom there
were two or three in each boarding house, we called him conventionally a lout, or a
blog, or an oick, or some other equally offensive name. Otherwise he was simply
an outsider. So, for that matter, was the son of the local shopkeeper, who went to
the secondary school fur
35

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

ther up the road. The latter was just, but only just, recognised, if he happened to
have gained admittance to our school as a day boy. Those were the days when at
least one housemaster at that school used to boast that none of his parents were "in
trade".
All this sounds very offensive, and thinking of it now I do not know whether I find
it more ludicrous or pitiable. But I believe that it represents fairly accurately the
attitude which I, and hundreds of young men in a similar position, took with us
from public school to university some thirty or forty years ago. At the university
new political opinions might, at any rate in theory, alter that attitude, and enlarge
our vision. The Liberalism of a young man of that time professed a good deal of
fraternity with the working classes, though not always at too close quarters. But in
my own case there had been no period of social work to give me any first-hand
experience of boys from the elementary schools, and my teaching posts were
essentially of the upper middle class. A brief period of inspecting elementary
schools had followed. But I do not think that my knowledge of the schoolboy
himself was sensibly increased by my experience as an inspector. Whatever else
the inspector of those days saw, or was allowed to see, he did not, unless he was
exceptionally fortunate, see boys and girls behaving naturally. Sometimes when I
was with the top classes of those schools there would be flashes of
36
 THE SOCIAL MIXTURE
humour and interest, when for a moment I caught a glimpse of something real, and
I remember how at those moments I ached (as I still sometimes do for a moment
when I watch students at practice) to be back at the schoolmaster's work. But,
though in that time I learnt a great deal that was new to me about methods of
instruction and school organisation, I do not think that I brought away from my
short experience as an inspector any special knowledge of the elementary school
boy himself, which was either new to me, or subsequently useful at Churnside.
That may have been due, of course, to my own lack of observation.
However ignorant I might be of what they would be like, I welcomed thankfully
the chance of working with boys who were outside the close circle of the public
schools. In fact, I was probably inclined to pitch my hopes too high, and rather
absurdly to idealise the working-class boy. The impressions left by my visits to the
Little Commonwealth were still very strong. At the moment I was feeling
disillusioned about the public schools, and sceptical as to the possibility of their
being reformed. I think I had almost persuaded myself that the actions and
thoughts of the boy from the elementary school, if they differed at all from those of
the boy of the same age from the preparatory school, would differ only for the
better, and that, apart from certain characteristics of speech and dress, I should find
the two boys indistinguishable.
37

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

Therein I was wrong. Radical differences of character and temperament have

nothing to do with social origin. But the two main groups of boys who came to
Churnside-those from the preparatory and those from the country elementary
schools did, taken as a whole, when they first came, show marked differences in
their habits of thought and action. But I want to emphasise as strongly as I can the
fact that these differences did not persist, The whole interest of that side of our
work lay precisely in the fact that, before they had completed four or five years in
that environment, the boys of each class had to an astonishing extent shed the less
desirable of the characteristics which had previously differentiated them. I cannot
make clear the meaning of that work, unless I state in some detail what seemed to
me to be the principal differences between the two groups when they first camę.
In making this comparison I am thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of the
social qualities, that is to say of those qualities which determine what a boy gives
or withholds in the common day-to-day life of a boarding school. I can imagine
someone objecting that this basis of comparison is rather narrow and artificial. It
would be possible, no doubt, to sift out and compare the qualities of the ex-
elementary and the ex-preparatory boy in commerce, and industry, and elsewhere. I
admit that the life of a boarding school is often narrow, and probably always
narrower than headmasters and
38
THE SOCIAL MIXTURE
headmistresses like to confess. But though the basis of comparison is narrow, I
think it is a good one for two reasons. The conditions in a boarding school are, or
can be made, exactly similar; the conditions in which the two types of boy work in
the great world are too often widely different. And secondly, though psychologists
may differ a good deal as to what characteristics are predominant at successive
ages, there is a pretty general agreement that at, or soon after, adolescence the
gregarious tendencies are peculiarly strong, and that age would, therefore, seem to
be an appropriate one at which to judge a boy's social qualities.
From this point of view I would say that the exelementary boy was, as a rule, at
first at a grave disadvantage in two respects—first in regard to his attitude to
authority, and secondly in regard to a quality for which I can find no better name
than social imagination.
I can hardly believe that there is any question more important to schoolmasters
than how to promote a sane and balanced attitude to authority; and I am not sure
that there is any matter in which our traditional methods so often go badly astray.
Recent psychological teaching has insisted that a right or wrong position in this
matter is almost a fundamental trait of human character, or, at all events, depends
upon factors which lie far back in infancy before school education begins. But
tendencies which first exist in infancy, and, it may be,

39

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

persist in a region outside consciousness, are often reinforced, or further repressed,
by later training or teaching. A boy's subsequent attitude to authority may be
largely determined by the kind of life he leads in adolescence at home and at
school. I believe that the right kind of school life can help tremendously.
Throughout my years at Churnside this problem was constantly in my mind, and I
will describe later some of the measures which we designed in our efforts to solve
it. Like all educators we had to try to remove or dissipate the exaggerated sense of
personal inferiority which is one of the commonest burdens of humanity, and one
of the greatest obstacles to the growth of healthy character. But we had also to
combat the sense of social inferiority. That is the feeling which, unremoved but
unrecognised, so often gives rise to one or other of two qualities equally
objectionable and (let us be honest) not infrequent in the boy who has "made good"
or risen in the social scaleeither an aggressive and assertive self-satisfaction, or an
attitude that seems over-deferential and lacking in self-confidence. On the other
hand, there are certain qualities which are essentially those of the socially free
man, who thinks of himself as one among equals. The problem was really this how
could we induce in boys an idea of authority as something not external or alien, but
something with which they could identify themselves?
For I confess that I was rather appalled at first
40

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

by the way in which the boys spoke and thought of all those people who in the
outside world exercised power or were in a position to give orders. I do not mean,
of course, the ordinary respect for law which is presumably proper to any member
of a civilised community. I mean that they thought and spoke of all those who
exercised authority as if they were quite apart from themselves and their own
friends and families, and even half hostile to them. Admittedly there is still a good
deal of “ feudalism " in parts of the countryside. Squire and parson still count for a
good deal politically, in some villages for almost everything. The squire may be,
and often is, something very different from the genuine antique article–-merely a
business man, or war profiteer, who has no interest whatever in the history or the
people of his village. And the parson may be socially a very different person from
the younger son of the big house, who held the living a hundred or two hundred
years ago. Still the old habits of thought and speech persist. The countryman may
be less class-conscious politically than the townsman, but he is more class-
conscious socially. But even in that country district it was rather depressing, after
so many years of a wide franchise and local representative institutions, to find how
generally any kind of government was regarded as something imposed upon
people, and not as something belonging to them. There was a "they", which
included parliament, the police, magistrates, county

41
 THE SOCIAL MIXTURE
councils, railway companies, and anyone who made any kind of laws and
regulations, and “they" were best regarded by "us" with a good deal of healthy
scepticism. In fact, "we" were inclined to view offenders against "them" with a
kind of instinctive sympathy, without pausing to reflect whether the offences were
not also against ourselves.
I sometimes think that this dislike of authority lies, quite unrealised, at the root of
some kinds of humanitarianism and internationalism, which profess to spring from
quite different feelings. It is, quite rightly, distasteful to the ordinary man that
native and backward peoples should be exploited, or deprived of what is due to
them. But it is peculiarly abhorrent that they should be exploited by just that kind
of person whom he more than half suspects of wishing, if he had the chance, to
dominate and exploit himself. Or, again, he may be inclined to sympathise with
what he conceives to be the desires of foreign nations, not because he has any
reason to believe that their governments are in the right, but because he habitually
suspects his own government-irrespective of party, for he knows very well that
there is still for practical purposes a governing class of being in the wrong. From
friends of this kind true internationalism and humanitarianism may well pray to be
delivered.
We shall see later that our organisation provided me with many examples of how
the ex-elementary boy at first looked upon authority as alien, or, to put
42

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

it another way, how much less easy he found it to identify himself with authority
than with an offender against it. Certain departments of the school life were handed
over to the boys themselves to direct through their General Meeting, where the
fullest discussion took place, and to a judicial body called the Council. Authority,
therefore, in this sphere was that of the boys themselves. The question sometimes
arose of punishing offenders against the rules of the General Meeting, not, as a
rule, vindictively, but by some kind of useful work or restitution. There was
sometimes opposition to punishment, not in a given case, but to punishment in
general, and, speaking generally, I should almost always have expected thisto
comefrom ex-elementary boys in their first years. There may be, of course, right
reasons for opposing all punishment; but there may also be wrong ones. "I don't
blame him", and “I don't want to get him into trouble" may be the expression of
genuine loving kindness; they may also cloak a good deal of muddle headed
selfishness and fear.
I think this attitude to authority is very closely connected with two charges that are
often brought, sometimes in a very exaggerated form, against the clementary boy
by public school men. When I first went to Churnside I was warned by a number of
self-appointed counsellors that in two respects in · particular I should find the boys
there ethically inferior to the public school boy. They would be less
43

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

truthful ¬ especially with regard to what is known in school life as "owning up”-
and they would "sneak" or tell tales, My experience soon convinced me that this
statement was, if unqualified, a cruel libel; but there was just enough truth in it to
call for examination, and I believe that these apparently individual characteristics
can be related to what I have called social qualities.
As to "owning up" it is probably true that, individual characteristics apart, the boy
from the elementary school found it at first more difficult. On the comparatively
rare occasions when I asked for someone who had been in fault to give me his
name, and there was no response, it certainly did appear more often than not
afterwards that the offender was an ex-elementary boy in his first or second year.
The public school boy's code in this respect is often very narrow and conventional,
but he does certainly find it harder to sit silent in response to a challenge. What lies
behind this difference? There are two factors, I am sure, one of which is a matter of
imagination. The boy must feel that others are concerned besides himself, that it is
intolerable that, owing to his silence, the innocent should be suspected, still more
intolerable that they should be punished. The other force that prevents a boy from
sitting silently guilty is the feeling "he trusts me, and I cannot abuse that trust".
This feeling, to which we commonly give the name of honour, implies a certain
moral equality between the two par-
44

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

ties to the understanding. It is not likely to grow readily from a sense of inferiority,
or the fear of being continually "dropped on" by a superior
power.
With regard to truthfulness generally, my experience was, roughly, that in his first
years the working class boy was the more likely to prevaricate. Individual
differences, however, play so large a part in the matter that I scarcely like to
generalise. I attribute this mainly to the weaker sense of personal honour that I
have mentioned. I fancy that another reason was lack of physical courage. Nearly
all the lies that one meets in school life are due to fear of the consequences, and the
traditional punishments of boys' schools are largely associated with physical pain.
After all, throughout history physical courage has been the virtue especially
esteemed by the wealthier and governing classes, whose lives, apart from the
voluntarily sought dangers of sport, are passed normally in comfort and security.
There is no glamour in a broken limb, when it means going without work and
wages. That, no doubt, is one reason why the professional footballer will stop the
game, and make what appears to be an inordinate fuss about some trifling injury
which a public school boy, playing in a house match, would not deign to notice.
I do not wish to imply for a moment that all, or many, of our county scholars were,
even at first, physical cowards. But they were, I think, prepared
45

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

to allow the question whether something would physically hurt to enter the mind
and stay there, at times when the preparatory school code would not entertain the
idea for a moment. They would even talk about it. I well remember one of the first
times when one of the county scholars came to me to be caned; “I hope you won't
hurt me much, sir," he said; “I am a very nervous boy, sir." There seemed to me to
be something so abject about this, it was so entirely different from anything that I
had ever heard on similar occasions, that I was flabbergasted, and almost disarmed.
I remember, too, a rather elderly visitor, who was having luncheon with us in hall,
remarking to the boy who was sitting next to him that in his opinion rugby football
was superior to association as a game for schools. "Isn't it rather a dangerous game,
sir?" asked the boy. Afterwards my visitor expressed his strong disapproval of this
question. Wasn't the boy a coward, or a weakling, or something equally dreadful, to
have made such a remark? In actual fact the boy was a rather specially tough
player of the association game. He was asking a perfectly objective question about
something of which he was entirely ignorant. But to my visitor, bred in the quite
different conventions of the public school and the hunting field, it was rather
deplorable that a boy should even have entertained the thought.
As a matter of plain fact, the argument is not all on one side. The growth of
courage is for many of
 46

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

us a long and subtle process, particularly if we have not been too fortunate in our
start. To frown heavily on any expression of fear in the school boy stages is not
always the best way to produce the mind which sails eventually on an even keel. It
may, on the other hand, have the effect of forcing in to the darkness what should be
seen and recognised in the light, and thereby of making progress still more
difficult.
The charge of "sneaking"-laying information against another boy, which may
involve him in punishment or disapproval—was, I found, grossly exaggerated, but
to some extent the two codes did differ at first, and I think that the difference
reflects two different attitudes to authority. It goes without saying that this is an
offence which is obnoxious to all healthy boys, particularly at their most
gregarious age. Where the difference seemed to lie was in this–that the preparatory
boy would always from the first hate the idea of giving another boy away, except in
the case of what he had been taught to regard as grave moral offences, while the
other boy, who at first, might think little of informing about trivial things, would be
the more opposed to it the graver the offence. The former, that is to say, would in
the long run trust authority, or would at all events be less frightened of it than of
the dangers lurking in certain kinds of misbehaviour. The latter looked upon it as
something alien, and likely to be more formidable in proportion to the gravity of
the offence.
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THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

I am inclined to think that with this idea of authority should be connected a certain
caution, which undoubtedly characterised many of the county scholars. George
Bourne has something to say about this quality in his admirable Change in the
Village. It is not a quality that one likes to find at an age when one would prefer
boys to look for the best, rather than to suspect the worst; and when they meet
people new to them, this quality is in fact usually overcome by their natural
curiosity and friendliness. But unquestionably it is there in the people of the
countryside--something deep-seated and intractable. Clearly it is closely related to
economic conditions. But it is also, I think, partly a matter of the way in which a
man looks at the powers that are over him. If he thinks that they will always in the
last resort be against him, or in favour of the other side, he will acquire the habit of
playing for safety.
The last phrase recalls one rather trivial but revealing way in which these boys
showed the spirit of wanting, as it were, to know the worst, to be quite sure of their
ground, before they committed themselves. I had been brought up in what is, I
think, the orthodox creed of the games-player, that you should take any advantage
which is offered you by winning the toss of the coin, and try to establish a position
of supremacy over your opponent. If you have the choice at cricket, take first
innings, unless you have reason to believe that the wicket will be
48
THE SOCIAL MIXTURE
easier later on, and try to put together an intimidating score. If you win the toss at
football, play first dowń hill or with the wind, and secure a lead that will encourage
your own side, and depress the enemy. I found that Churnside captains-and they
were mostly boys from the county–almost invariably took the opposite line. They
liked to know what they were up against, what they had to beat. I must confess that
this particular unorthodoxy worked; on the whole, extraordinarily well. There was
a kind of dour determination about it that I could not help liking. There was,
however, something definitely, if subtly, un-public-school about the policy which
seems to illustrate my point.
The second quality in which it appeared to me that the elementary school boy was
at first relatively deficient I have called social imagination. In that I include the
ability to think of your own actions as helping or injuring your community, and
that, too, beyond your immediate horizon; and the ability to feel that obligations
between yourself and a body of persons are as binding as those between yourself
and other individuals–the opposite frame of mind, in fact, to that of the man who
sees no harm in cheating A railway company. In the absence of that kind of
imagination a good deal of our teaching about unselfishness falls on stony ground.
I include also the ability in any community which allows free discussion to see the
other fellow's point of view, and to realise that all your opponents are not
necessarily

49

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

fools or knaves. The county scholar did seem to me at first less ready to think of
himself as a member of a team or group, and, after he had arrived at that idea, less
able to do justice to the claims of other groups. I think we must admit that, though
games probably play too important a part in the preparatory school boy's life, they
do give him a strong sense of fair play and justice as between sides and parties. He
is ready, at any rate within the limits of his conventions, to apply the same standard
of fairness to the other side and to his own. Anyone who has studied the difference
between the crowds that watch League Football and those that watch inter-public-
school matches will know what I mean. I admit that when transferred to the politics
of the wider world the standard of the sportsman is not always maintained; but it
has its value. It seemed to me that the preparatory school boy had usually learnt in
the close life of his boarding school to think habitually, though no doubt very
crudely and conventionally, of people and actions as being useful or the reverse to
the community. Like the early Greek he had experienced the joy and the
responsibility of belonging to a polis and his idea of arete was that which served
the polis, something of which the barbarians had no conception. On the other hand
this membership of a boarding school is often thrust upon preparatory school boys
before they are ready for it, and its conventions tend to
50

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

crystallise, and to assume an altogether disproportionate weight in the boy's mind.
In social imagination should be included the ability to think of a community
personally, and to recognise the existence of moral obligations between it and
oneself. We should treat its possessions as scrupulously as those of a private
individual. Here there certainly did seem to have been a gap in the education of
many of the county scholars, whether at home or at school. There was far too great
a difference between the care taken to preserve private and public in this case
school property. In another chapter I will describe the economic scheme, which
helped to remedy this particular weakness.
Rather doubtfully I will cite as another example of the same tendency a difference
which I noticed in the attitude to charitable giving. Like most schools we tried to
support, on a very small scale, various objects of charity outside the school. I may
be wrong here, but my impression was that while the boys from the elementary
schools were often extremely generous in helping anyone who was familiar or near
to them, they found it harder to contribute to a cause outside the range of what they
and themselves seen or heard.
I have written at some length of those aspects of that may be called his social
qualities in which the boy from the poorer home seemed at first to have worst of
the comparison. But in one quality I
51

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

always felt that he had the advantage, and it is surely one of the most important
qualities of all. Though the term may sound priggish, I cannot find a better name
for it than a sense of brotherhood. Negatively, it means the attitude of the person
who thinks little-unless his attention is specially drawn to them about the barriers
and conventions which separate one man from another; who meeting someone new
thinks first not "How is he different from me?" but "What have we in common?"
who gets quickly behind superficial differences to common humanity. Positively, it
is cooperative rather than competitive. It likes better to work with you than against
you. Nor is it too fearful of showing affection, when once that affection has been
earned.
With regard to this way of looking at people, in so far as it could be discerned in
immature boys, I think that the boy from the poorer home had at first the
advantage. He was more spontaneous, and far less bound by convention. He was
not continually stultified by the worship of "good form". This, as has often been
observed, is the real religion of many public school men, and the not over-
intelligent staffs of many preparatory schools sedulously initiate their boys into it.
It is one thing to grow into your conventions and to observe them unconsciously,
almost without realising their existence. It is quite another thing to idealise them,
and make them the measure of your superiority over other people. The village boy
in the presence of fresh people was less
52

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

conscious of dividing barriers, and more conscious of our common human nature.
He had a wholesome respect for honest work of the hand as well as of the mind.
He had gained a more immediate experience of the simple economic facts of life.
He therefore brought to many problems, when they were fairly set before him, an
understanding and a generosity not so easy for the boy who is commonly reckoned
his social superior, owing to the more elaborate conditions of the latter's home.
Moreover in those qualities which make for day-to-day peaceful living in a closely
knit community–patience, kindness, and tolerance-he had certainly something to
teach his friend from the preparatory school. His kindness of action was
compatible with sharpness of speech. Nobody who is at all acquainted with village
life will be surprised by that. But it was a kindness which, if my memory is correct,
was not too common in the life of preparatory schools when I was a boy.
He had, too, the great advantage of not having been sent away from home at the
age of nine, or ten, or even earlier, to the segregated boys' school. He had been
brought up continuously with girls, not only at home in the family, but also very
often at his school, and that meant that he had normally acquired a healthy and
open attitude to the other sex before the dawning of sex-consciousness-healthy, I
mean, underneath even if there was sometimes a layer of silliness on the surface.
This mixed educa-
53

THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

tion to the age of eleven or twelve I believe to be the healthiest foundation for a
right personal attitude to sex during adolescence, and, therefore, in the long run
most likely to lead the boy to a sane and enlightened view of sex in the social and
political sense, when he arrives at manhood.
There is one other difference which I mention, because I believe that it is a field in
which there is need for a great deal more enquiry. I certainly felt that the boys from
preparatory schools had, on the whole, received better and healthier religious
teaching, particularly on the central subject of religionthe nature of God. The word
God was not at any rate to them associated first and last with fear. Nor was it
always, I readily admit, to the other boys. But too often the latter thought of God
first not as a loving God, nor as God the creator, but as a punitive God. This came
out very strikingly when sometimes I used to ask boys soon after they came to
write a parable using modern language and imagery to describe the nature of God,
and how men should think of Him. Almost always these boys used as the subject of
comparison someone or something alarming or oppressive, very often someone
whose duty it is to catch you out, as it were, or to exact something from you. This
raises interesting questions. How far at different ages and with different kinds of
boy is it wise to stress the metaphor (for all human descriptive language about the
divine cannot be more than metaphorical) of the Fatherhood of God?
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Is the attitude to the idea of God which I have mentioned connected with the
attitude to human authority? If so, can we distinguish which is cause and which
effect? These are matters in which the psychologist and the schoolmaster can help
each other. Meanwhile my limited experience makes me feel that the boy who
comes from the preparatory school has often gained either at home or at school
something very precious which too many other boys are without. If it is an
essential of Christian education that a boy should be increasingly aware of a God
of Love, he is more fortunate than many others, who have had a different
upbringing, in the first two stages of his religious life.
Much as I dislike dwelling on the differences between boys from different kinds of
home, I do not believe that I have understated them. Our principal claim to have
been successful in the social side of our work was that after boys had been there
for four or five years their characteristic and dividing weaknesses so largely
disappeared, and the better qualities of each were merged together. I do not mean
that they blended into a single type. I cordially dislike school types, and it would
be most misleading to say that Churnside produced one. On the contrary,
individuality was, I believe, of the essence of the place. What I do mean is that in
the school life which came into existence there the better qualities of each class
seemed to harmonise and cooperate. Each emulated and assimilated
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what was best in the other, and in the common life, to which each contributed,
differences of origin were simply not heeded.
Does this sound vague and pretentious? I will try to be more explicit. In the
opinion of a great many people the pride and glory of the public school is the
prefect. His is the kind of leadership that these schools are so proud to produce,
and in practice the interests of younger boys are largely subordinated to the work
of making him the fine creature that he is supposed to be, and, in fact, often is. He
above all people is supposed to display the "public school virtues". Many public
school men make this their particular pride, and hold it against the day secondary
schools that their prefect systems are meaningless or ineffective. They have this
much justification, that the day school does obviously offer fewer opportunities to
the prefect of the traditional type, and it cannot be said that the newer secondary
schools as a whole have been particularly quick in this respect to develop traditions
of their own. At two very different schools I had seen, before I went to Churnside,
prefects of the public school type doing their work as well, I believe, as in any
schools in England; certainly, if one may judge from contemporary school novels,
a great deal better than in many other places. Sometimes they seemed to be,
through no fault of their own, prematurely oppressed by a sense of responsibility
too big for them. Occasionally they were out and out prigs. Occa-
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sionally, too, they were thorough humbugs, though that was usually the fault of an
inefficient or self-satisfied housemaster. But, taken as a whole, nobody would
deny, nor, I imagine, wish to deny, their loyalty, and sense of duty, and care for
what, in their own way, they conceived to be the good of the younger boys. Well,
on reflection I cannot find any point of difference between my Churnside prefects,
of whom the majority were county scholars, and the prefects whom I had known
elsewhere, in which the former were inferior. In some respects, as will be seen, the
organisation of the school made their position more difficult and delicate than that
of prefects elsewhere. Some of the boys, too, whom they had to look after were
younger than those to be found in public schools, which, again, increased the
difficulty of their work. But, when all allowances have been made for the
differences between the spirit of one school and another, and the various personal
relationships of headmaster and prefect, I maintain that they showed all the
healthiest "public school virtues" together with a sanity, and simplicity, and sense
of humour which made priggishness impossible.
Or to take another example, which, as it happens, is closely connected with what I
said earlier about the idea of authority. Some of my readers may be familiar with
resident communities of young men over school age, who began their education in
the ordinary primary school, and have not been away
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from home during their adolescence. If so, they may have noticed how easily these
young men, nice enough as individuals, slip into a kind of collective childishness
in their behaviour, particularly if authority is so unwise as to give them no
collective responsibility and how they sometimes exhibit those qualities to which I
referred before either the aggressive self-satisfaction, which indicates with some
stridency that one man is as good as another, or the inability to show self-reliance
and initiative. I can only say that I cannot conceive Churnside boys as a body being
accused of showing those qualities at that age. And I speak not only from my own
knowledge (and, no doubt, with my own prejudices), but from the testimony of
those who have known and worked with them after they left school.
The social mixture inside the school was a real mixture, and not merely the
juxtaposition of two separate elements. It is hardly necessary to say that the boys
did not show any snobbishness in their ordinary intercourse. * Boys are not
commonly snobs in that sense, unless they are influenced in that direction by their
parents. I well remember being warned in very early days by an anxious member
of my governing body that invidious distinctions would appear at night, when the
boys undressing in the dormitories noticed the quality
* The only boys who in my recollection ever showed any offensive sense of
superiority were, curiously enough, the sons of professional-class fathers who were
keen Socialists.

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of each other's underclothing. This seemed to me to be nonsense at the time, and I
never had any reason to change my opinion. Whether it would have been the same
in the case of girls is an interesting question. In actual fact the boys were unaware
to an extent that surprised me of the origin of many of their number. County
scholars, who came every second year in groups, knew all about the other members
of the group. But I have known fee-paying boys, who entered the school rather
above the usual age, quite unable at the end of their time to say with any accuracy
which boys belonged to each category. But the social mixture went far beyond that.
I have known many intimate friendships formed between boys from the most
different homes -friendships which flourished during the holidays, and lasted
beyond the end of school life. I can recall one boy from a middle-class professional
home who in the same holidays stayed at the homes of two of his schoolfellows-
first in a country house, and afterwards in the cottage of an unemployed miner.
One rather interesting point, of some practical importance when the boys were old
enough to seek employment, was that certain rather subtle differences of
appearance, which at first sometimes pointed to differences of origin, after a few
years lessened or disappeared. I became familiar with the kind of visitor of the
public school kind, who used to pause before the school photographs, as I took
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him round the house, with the words, "Now let me see whether I can pick out the
county scholars". He was usually quite confident that he could do this, and it is
hardly necessary to say that he invariably failed.
In the ordinary daily work and play of the school I can only repeat that all these
differences were simply forgotten. There was absolutely no self-consciousness
about this, and I think it was with a certain amount of amusement that we used to
read articles about holiday camps and similar ventures for mixed public school and
working-class boys. The writers seemed to think that the boys had made a rather
wonderful discovery in finding each other to be such good fellows. It is not, after
all, very difficult for boys to be happy in almost any company in holiday
conditions for a few weeks by the sea. The real test and the real social training are
for them to work and play together week after week and term after term.
I think this lack of self-consciousness in social matters, which I find it so difficult
to describe, was, after all, the most interesting effect upon the county scholar of
three or four years at Churnside. May it not be called properly a kind of inner
social freedom? I do not mean that boys when they left were unable to face and
consider the existence of social distinctions, and the grim and unpleasing facts
which can be associated with poverty. I mean that they were for the most part able
to face these facts

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impersonally, because the facts did not emphasise a feeling of personal inferiority.
One proof of this, to my mind, is the ease with which I have heard old boys discuss
with strangers of different kinds just those distinctions and conventions which
usually cause embarrassment. This seems to me to be the very opposite of what
was felt by the character in one of D. H. Lawrence's novels, who, having been
promoted for a time from among his working-class friends to be an officer in the
Army, returned again to his own people, and found them intolerable. He found
there "what he had forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and vulgarity
of manners extremely distasteful. ... A penny more or less on the bacon was worse
than a change in the Gospel. He could not stand it." That is the picture of a man
who could not think impersonally of the facts of poverty, but allowed them to be
coloured by his own helplessness to alter and emerge from them. How, except by
some kind of planned social education can the imagination of such a man ever free
itself from a clogging sense of inferiority, and allow him to see, as it were from
outside, what was truly pitiable, and what was hateful, in the conditions which
oppressed and disgusted him?
In one respect I found that people often wondered whether this education was not
bought at a dangerous price. The question most frequently Addressed to me was,
“But do you not make the poorer boys discontented with their homes?" I
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soon learnt to distinguish between two kinds of questioner, and two motives for
putting the question. There were those who put this highly pertinent query with
genuine curiosity; and there were those who disapproved in their hearts of the
whole idea of doing so much for "these poor boys", and hoped that my answer
would satisfy their worst suspicions. The question was, indeed, very much to the
point, and I should have been extremely unhappy if I could not have answered it
truthfully. But there are different kinds of discontent. If one result of a boy coming
to us was that he wanted to improve the material conditions in which the less
fortunate of his fellow countrymen lived, I, for one, was delighted. Similarly, if
boys wished, as they often told me they did, that their brothers and sisters could
share the same advantages, that was natural and right. And it was inevitable, and in
my view desirable, that the more able of them should want to know what political
and economic remedies were being propounded for the present material
inequalities. No school for older boys can honestly evade the duty of giving that
information. It should give it without personal bias, so far as that is humanly
possible, and give it openly and fully, Certainly we were not deterred from that
duty by the totally untrue rumours put about by some of the local panjandrums to
the effect that we were promulgating Socialism or Bolshevism. We en-
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couraged boys to read and discuss, but nobody sought proselytes.
That kind of discontent, however, was not what was usually in the questioner's
mind. What he wanted, quite reasonably, to know was whether the boys when they
were at home in the holidays, or after leaving school, were “superior", or unkindly
critical of their own people, or, like the character I have already mentioned, found
them intolerable.
To this point for several years I gave a great deal of attention. I tried—tactfully, I
hope to get the truth from parents, and I have talked about it quite frankly to old
boys. On several occasions, too, people spontaneously gave me useful information,
notably when the former teachers of several of my boys compared them favourably
in this respect with other boys who had gone to local grammar schools. My
conclusion is that, though there may have been one or two exceptions, speaking
generally I am confident that this false superiority did not exist. Often, to my great
delight, I was told that “he is so much more useful than he used to be", or that "he
is such a help in the house". The belief of my wife and myself, to which we
remained faithful, was that in the long run our own attitude to the boys would be
reflected in their attitude to their people. If in our ordinary intercourse with them
we were kindly and sensible, and, without condescension, showed our affection for
them, there was little danger of their making others unhappy or being themselves
un-

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happy at home. To that must be added that there must be nothing to encourage
priggishness, or conceit, or false cultural values inside the school.*
The gulf between "secondary" and "elementary" is, in all conscience, sufficiently
wide and ugly. I can say without hesitation that in that part of the country
Churnside did nothing to widen it.
A less imaginary danger which came “from taking boys out of their station” arose
after they left school, when they first led more or less independent lives, and made
friendships with girls of their own age. I think we may take it for a fact that (for a
number of reasons not wholly easy to describe) a
* I am not in the least convinced, however, that the result would be equally happy if a suggestion
now sometimes put forward were adopted, that a small number of carefully selected boys from
the elementary schools should be admitted as boarders to the great public schools. Certainly, if
the experiment were to succeed, the life of those schools would have to be greatly simplified-no
doubt to their advantage. It is one thing to mix the poorer and the more prosperous boys in what
may be called a natural proportion in a community specially designed for the purpose, with a
staff and parents wholeheartedly believing in the value of the mixture. It is something quite
different to place a handful of boys from the elementary schools in a strange environment where
they will be hopelessly outnumbered by boys with different conventions and traditions, and
where it is not likely that all the staff and certainly not all the parents and old boys--will approve
of their admission. The effect of the proposal would be, I believe, to do no more than tinker with
a great social problem, to rob the secondary schools of some of their best boys, and to create a
certain amount of unnecessary unhappiness.
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country boy who had been to Churnside was often a rather exceptionally attractive
companion to a girl from his own kind of home, whose education, in no merely
academic sense, might compare very poorly with his. One respect in which the girl
was sometimes less well educated than the boy was that she had not learnt to look
ahead in economic matters, and to see things of that kind in their right proportion.
More than once a boy was persuaded to give up a job with lower pay for the
moment, but with good prospects, for one which offered more pay immediately,
but led nowhere. The girl might have "a better time" for a few months at the boy's
expense, but the final result was not happy. Even when there was an understanding
with the employer that the boy should be promoted when he had showed his worth,
the girl did not trust the former to carry out his side of the bargain. “You are being
wasted here," she would say, "you are doing a man's work for a boy's wage," and
so forth. In fact, it was another example of dislike and distrust of authority,
On such occasions there were not many—I used to remember a remark frequently
made to me when I showed the school to women visitors. "What you want", they
used to say, "is a girls' Churnside as well." No new venture in social or ethical
education is finally sound unless it is thought of in terms of both sexes. That is not,
however, the same thing as saying that it ought necessarily to be, in the ordinary
sense of the word, co-educational.
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If my readers have believed at all my description of the changes which were
brought about by the life at Churnside, in this particular side of our work, they will
wish to know how the result was produced. I will deal in the following chapter
with our plan of joint control and our economic scheme. These were of the greatest
help, though they were designed without reference to this particular problem, and
had their own educational justification. Setting these aside, though I admit that for
most purposes school life should be thought of as an undivided whole, how did we
manage to do it?
First of all, though it may sound paradoxical, by forgetting altogether for the
greater part of the time that any such problem existed. There were times when it
was necessary to sit down and make the appropriate plans. At all other times the
only rule was to treat everybody absolutely alike, and to forget that they were, or
could be, different. This was made easier for me by the fact that those who worked
with me in the first years were people to whom this came entirely naturally. Not
only did they want to treat everyone alike (that, fortunately, is a fairly common
virtue), but they were incapable of acting otherwise. My wife and I tried to carry
out what seems to me to be the one safe principle for the schoolmaster–-to treat all
who are in his care as if they were his own children and that principle could not
recognise differences of class. This was easier during the first eight years, when

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we lived in the main house with the boys, together looking after them. We tried to
make the community more an extended family of our own than a facsimile of the
ordinary boarding house at a public school. We deliberately avoided anything of
the institutional kind, knowing very well that a certain kind of efficiency was
occasionally to some small extent being sacrificed, but believing that the gain was
greater than the loss. There was no heavy baize-lined door, separating the 'private
side" from the boys. In fact, from our point of view, there was the minimum of
privacy in a house which was not built to be a school, and the boys knew, if they
wished, at least as much about our intimate daily life as we knew about theirs. This
family life made its own demands, as well as bringing its own peculiar happiness.
The most serious of these for the first eight years fell on my wife, who, in addition
to the other duties of a mother and a headmaster's wife, had to think and plan for
the household needs of the whole community. But this life helped enormously in
the first six or seven years to create the tradition which we wanted. In fact, without
it the school, as it developed, would have been impossible.
At first my ideas as to how the boys would turn out from the social point of view,
and how the result, whatever it was, would be achieved, were rather negative. I did
not, at any rate, want a veneer of academic culture without any reality behind it.
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I remember in our first term being visited by a local landowner, reputed a great
reactionary, who knew something of the East. “I only want to say this," he
exclaimed. "Don't turn out baboos. For God's sake, don't turn out baboos." I did not
feel that I agreed with the old gentleman in many things, but there I was entirely at
one with him. Nor did I feel at all attracted by the rather dreadful people who used
to ask me if our intention was to make “little gentlemen" of the boys, except in so
far as they seemed to be thinking of a reasonably high standard of manners. About
manners we did care a great deal. But we tried not to impart them as something to
be acquired or imitated because they were a mark of our "betters". They might be
thought of, quite coldly and objectively, as habits of great practical use, which you
would be wise to acquire on grounds of expediency. It was in this way that I tried
in later years to get the boys to think about speaking “King's English”. There was
nothing discreditable in speaking Doric. Only, in an imperfect world, you might
miss the chance of many good jobs, many happy experiences, and many delightful
human contacts, if you could not speak the other language as well. Or there was the
far sounder argument that manners were aesthetically pleasing. At any rate, the
teaching was successful. I once asked a visitor, an old boy of a school where
manners are perhaps a little overdone, whether he thought that there was much
difference between ours and theirs.
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"Very little," he replied; "but we were self-conscious about our manners, and your
boys are not."
From the first I tried to eliminate everything which could create a feeling of
inferiority. There were difficulties which arose from our actual surroundings-those
surroundings which made one of my colleagues say that he felt always that he was
living not in the country, but inside an estate in the country. It was typical that
parents of the county scholars, when they visited the school for the first time, *
often went to the back door. I am afraid that this always irritated me, but I can see
that it was perfectly natural. The only solution of this particular problem was to
laugh quite openly at what was grandiose, or slightly vulgar, in our material
surroundings, and never to let the boys be in the least impressed by evidences of
wealth or social pretensions. Sometimes I had to be on my guard to preserve them,
when they were young, from well-meaning visitors who would have liked to tip
them for small services, or otherwise to adopt a condescending attitude, which
would have been quite out of keeping with the spirit of the place. I
* It was a vitally necessary part of the work that contact between school and home
should be as close as possible, and that all parents, especially, perhaps, the parents
of the local boys, should feel that they were welcome visitors. I think that they did
feel this. In this connection I often regretted that the delightfully informal and
friendly Parents' Days of the earliest years perforce gave way to more formal
occasions.
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recall one delicate situation in our first term, when an important visitor, connected
with the school, had been watching the boys at a drawing lesson. He asked if I
would mind his setting the boys an amusing little competition, and added that he
would like to offer a five-shilling prize for the boy who won. He was quite hurt
when I asked him not to do this, and felt, I think, for the moment that I was both a
churl and a prig. But, apart from the fact that I had resolved to have no prizes in the
school while I was headmaster, I knew that anything which would make the boys
feel that they belonged to the casually tippable class was a mistake.
I do not want to hide my errors, and I think that in one respect I went too far in
trying to avoid in their early years anything which could remind them of social
distinctions. In the first year or two, before we had any fee-payers, the question
arose whether we should introduce any formal speech training, which would
modify the pronounced local accent. It was mainly because I thought it would
emphasise the class question that I never did much to encourage this training. In
the first few years, while the healthy traditions were growing which would enable
the boys to face the facts of social differences without lack of confidence, I may
have been right. But once these traditions were established, it was quite possible,
as I have said already, to attack this problem objectively, as a matter of practical
expediency. If I could have the time again,
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I should have systematic and compulsory speech training for all the boys in their
first two or three years.
It is worth recording that in the conditions of the school life the speech of the
country boys often "improved" very greatly. One strong impression which I gained
while watching this process was that the difference between so-called educated and
so-called uneducated speech is far less than is commonly supposed a matter of
vowel sounds, and far more a matter of rhythm. The rhythm of the genuinely
educated man's speech is the rhythm of the man who is mentally poised and
socially free. When people told me that the change in the speech of our village
boys came from mixing with boys from different homes, I knew that there was
some truth in what they said. But I knew that there were subtler causes for the
change as well.
When our community included boys from so many different kinds of home,
marked differences of dress would have been inevitable, if I had allowed them all
to wear whatever they, or their parents, liked. On the other hand, I have always
disliked the school uniform, complete from collar to shoes. In this case I
compromised. All wore the grey coat and shorts which the school provided, but
there was no uniformity of stockings, or ties, or collars.
There was, indeed, a school tie. You wore it when you felt inclined, but under no
compulsion, and with no sense of virtue.
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Next to the family life, I am not sure that one of the strongest influences in this part
of our work was not the fact that we did quite clearly and avowedly esteem work
done with the hands. At none of the boarding schools which I had known was this
really the case, unless dexterity on the cricket field and in the science laboratory is
brought under this heading. At Churnside manual work received a great deal of
attention, and those who excelled in it were esteemed at least equally with those
who did well in other ways. The products of their skill could be seen in many parts
of the building, and I am glad to think that some of them, who had done reasonably
well academically, became professional craftsmen. It was all to the good that for a
number of years this work was entrusted to a member of the staff who was a
university graduate, and not, as is so often the case, to a master whose training had
been different from that of his colleagues. In another sense, too, the boys learnt that
work done by hand was honourable and natural for any ablebodied person. In the
circumstances of our school any kind of luxury would have been unpardonable.
The boys were encouraged to depend as much as possible on themselves, and as
little as possible upon the efforts of other people paid to serve them. There was, as
will be seen, no fagging in the oldfashioned sense of the word, that is to say work
for the private benefit of a fag-master. But all the boys, not only the younger ones,
did a number of things
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which public school boys would be all the better for doing.
It would have been strange if during twelve years spent in this environment I had
not thought much about English education as it is concerned with the existence of
class divisions. Of my personal reactions to what I saw and learnt during those
years I do not mean to say much. I know that the experience made me think
differently in all kinds of ways. It made me ashamed of much that I had formerly
believed and upheld. It made me laugh at many of my own conventions and
prejudices. * It has brought me a great deal nearer to some people, and between
myself and some other people it occasionally puts a kind of constraint. But, apart
from such personal reactions, I came away with certain impressions of a more
general nature, as well as with a number of unanswered questions.
One impression-strengthened on returning to the ordinary world from our rather
secluded and unusual community—is that, in spite of several decades of soft talk
and specious legislation, the English possessing classes still have ineradicably and
unashamedly in regard to education the "two nations" mind. In the first place, they
are astonishingly ignorant about the facts and achievements of
* Why is it, for example, that all my life I have been happily calling people Tom,
Will, Harry, and Bob, but cannot, even after twelve years at Churnside, without a
slight shudder call anyone Reg, Alf, Wally, or Bert?
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our national system of education. But it is not only that they are ignorant. They
want at least some of them want the children of other people to have what they
would call a good education; but they certainly do not mean, if they can help it, to
let them have the same education as their own children. And that is not because
they believe the latter to be not necessarily the best education for everyone. That is
an argument for which there is a good deal to be said. For the matter of that, there
is plenty that is wrong with the secondary education which most of their own
children receive. The root of their attitude, consciously or unconsciously, is fear.
They are afraid of any system of education which will obliterate present
distinctions, and incidentally throw open to genuine competition a whole host of
jobs and positions which in practice are a preserve of their own sons, who have
been educated at a number of privileged schools. And the two nations" mind is
common not only among the county families and in the higher suburbia, but, often
without being aware of its own existence, in government departments, local
education committees, and, unfortunately, in large sections of the teaching
profession. I used to realise how strong and suspicious it was, when I was showing
the school to visitors of the disapproving kind. Not that they actually disliked
anything that they saw going on. It was the fact that so much had been done "for
these boys-these lucky boys”, as they sometimes called them, with an
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emphasis on the word which implied that the boys were enjoying something which
really belonged to someone else. And how nice it would have been, they
occasionally added, if the founder had confined the school to the sons of officers
killed in the war, or to impoverished boys of the middle classes. I suppose that
from a purely self-regarding, or familyregarding, point of view it was quite natural
for such people to fear and dislike what we represented. If, for example, you have
several not too intelligent sons at public schools, for whom jobs will have to be
found, you can hardly be expected to be enthusiastic about developing in poorer
and more intelligent boys those qualities which you have believed to be your son's
principal assets. One of my colleagues was fond of saying principally, no doubt, to
provoke me-"Say what you will, this is fundamentally a bolshevik school." In the
literal sense of the words, as he well knew, he was talking nonsense. But from
another point of view, I am not sure that he was not right. As seen by the upper
middle classes, is there not something essentially revolutionary in any education
which admits absolute equality of opportunity, implying the existence of no closed
doors to any coveted position?
Our life at Churnside was continually revealing to us new possibilities for good in
human nature. But in the nature of things it also brought us into contact with a
good deal of snobbishness. I am not thinking so much of prospective fee-paying
parents,
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the questions which they used to ask about these scholarship boys", and the
hesitation–nearly always stronger on the part of the mother than the father–to take
the plunge. Rather, I should acknowledge gratefully the enterprise of those who
saw the value of our novel venture, and willingly cooperated in it. Nor am I
thinking of such amusing and quite unimportant incidents as occurred in
connection with the arrangement of school matches against schools which rather
fancied their social status. What really did matter–for it shows how dangerously
ineffective we are in recruiting the best brains and character for the important
positionswas the bigoted preference for the well-known school which I often
found, when I was placing my boys in employment. I can remember more than one
business man who was a good example of that particular prejudice, men who
themselves showed no particular evidence of education, who had, in fact, from the
public school point of view, the word "bounder" written large upon them, but who
smugly assured me that they recruited only boys from the best schools. They meant
schools with a well-known name, or a reputation for athletics. It was Churnside
that really taught me how great is the wastage of boys of first-rate capacity and
character owing to social conventions and family interests.
I have used the word snobbishness, and in ordinary conversation the word has a
fairly definite mean-
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THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

ing. But what is snobbishness in education? We can hardly apply the word to
people who desire, for its own sake, a higher cultural standard. I am assuming that
the culture is itself genuine, that it springs from real exercise of the intellect, or the
imagination, or from the practice of some traditional mode of skill. But if you seek
this standard for what it will bring you socially or materially, or if, in attaining it,
you lose anything of sympathy or your sense of the value of what is individual in
yourself or others, if, most of all, you lose anything of the · love of your fellow
men, then I believe that, whatever else you may be, you are educationally a snob.
Is that the same thing as saying that to be a snob educationally is to desire a higher
cultural standard, which will not include, or contribute to, a higher moral standard?
In that sense there is truth in the words of those headmasters of public schools who
tell the world that the great public schools are not snobbish places. In the
conventional sense of the word, they are certainly not snobbish within their own
ranks; and, in the sense in which I have been using the word, they do in their own
way put "character" before "culture".
But the public schools, though they may not be snobbish, do remain class
institutions. They do stand for cleavage, and the division into two nations. That is,
surely, sufficiently obvious on general grounds. But in two ways my experience at
Churnside brought it home to me with special
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force. First of all, it made me realise, as I had never done before, the sheer blind
ignorance about the lives of masses of their fellow countrymen which the public
schools do so little to dissipate. Ignorance may be far less objectionable than
snobbery, but it is not necessarily less dangerous. Secondly, Churnside made me
realise how baseless is the legend that there are certain virtues which are an innate
possession of one section only of English society. If we proved anything at all it
was that a boy of the humblest origin is capable, given the chance, of developing
just those social qualities which are often claimed to be distinctive of the public
schools.
The public school man may insist justifiably and usefully that his particular kind of
education does develop valuable qualities, so long as he also admits how much that
education leaves out. But when he assumes, as he often seems to do, that those
qualities are a kind of hereditary endowment of all English families with an income
of more than a thousand pounds a year, he is entirely wrong. It is a dangerous
fallacy, for it makes him even more incapable of understanding the working man,
and the man from overseas, and the "scrubby" person, who wears the wrong kind
of collar and tie, than he would be otherwise. I am a sceptic about the born "sahib”,
a word which, by the way, before the war was scarcely ever used in England, and
one with which, west of Suez, we could well dispense.
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My readers will not be surprised that I left Churnside wondering whether a
secondary education which made for unity was not one of the greatest needs of our
country. Wondering, too, how much, in fact, the day secondary schools are able to
do, both to promote a genuine mixture of the classes, and also to establish that
attitude to authority of which I have already spoken. It is for others to answer the
second of these questions. One thing is certain. The secondary schools will be
successful, in this as in other fields, only by forming and cherishing their own
traditions, and not by imitating quite inappropriate methods prevailing in the public
schools.
We may have to wait a long time before we find generally boys and girls from
every kind of home being educated in the same secondary schools. Meanwhile
cannot we do a great deal more to promote unity within the teaching profession
itself? It would be an immense advantage if the Training Colleges and Training
Departments contained a wider mixture of students of different upbringing and
traditions. How many schoolmasters are there to-day teaching in the public schools
who began their own education in the infant school? And how many men who have
been educated in the public schools are now teaching in the service of local
authorities? The latter have not always met with Encouragement. Some ten years
ago a friend of mine, a public school man, wanted to apply for a

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THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

post on the staff of a secondary school, where the staff had all had a different kind
of education from his own. "Don't do it," he was told by an experienced friend
whom he consulted; "if you teach better than the other men, they will hate you; and
if you teach worse, they will despise you." Things have moved a great deal in ten
years, but the teaching profession has yet to do much, before it can set an example
of solidarity to the nation.
One final note of a personal nature, before I pass to the more agreeable work of
writing about boys as boys, and not as members of one or another of our social
grades. I said that my experience at Churnside sometimes seems to put a kind of
restraint between myself and other people of my own kind of upbringing, men,
perhaps, whom I have known for years at school, or university, or worked with as
colleagues. It is true that I can overcome the constraint almost as soon as I realise
its existence, but it is there. It comes as a rule when someone to whom I am talking
speaks casually and disparagingly about "servants", or "the working classes", or
people, as he would say, "of that kind". It springs from my knowledge that not only
have we entirely different points of view, but that my companion does not even
realise that my point of view can exist. It is almost like being in possession of a
secret which one has no right to keep to oneself, and yet is not able to
communicate to others. The other man is, probably, kinder, more tolerant,
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THE SOCIAL MIXTURE

and more benevolent than I am, but he has never had the experience of real
friendship with people who are outside his own social circle, and above all he has
not taken their childen into his own household, and made them, so far as that is
possible, members of his own family. To that extent, then, I have found that
Churnside has made life more complicated. But that is a small thing to set against
all that I learned there of what boys can do and be in favourable conditions, against
the wider freedom of feeling oneself unclassed or non-classed, and against all the
new possibilities of friendship and happiness which came my way.

81

CHAPTER II
THE GENERAL MEETING
Most people who knew Churnside fairly well, or by repute, would say that one of
its two most distinctive features was that which I described in the previous chapter.
The other they would call its “self-government".
I want, if I can, to avoid the use of that term for two reasons. In the first place, it
has been appropriated for a long time now for the traditional English prefect
system, though such government is only in reality a kind of administration.
Government should include legislative and judiciary as well as administration. On
the other hand, I do not want to appear to challenge comparison with some of the
extreme left-wing communities, which have claimed for themselves the right to use
the term "selfgovernment" in a quite different sense. Some of these are schools in
the ordinary sense of the word. Others have been communities existing in quite
different conditions, and designed for a different purpose.
By far the best known of the latter in this country was the Little Commonwealth
directed by
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THE GENERAL MEETING

Homer Lane. I have already said something about what the man and his work
meant to some of us who used to visit the Commonwealth, and tried to understand
what was happening there. No wonder that in our first enthusiasm we sometimes
made extravagant claims for method or machinery, which could really effect little
without the right personality behind them. In this respect we were sadly misled by
Lane himself, who used to deprecate as strongly as he could anything being
attributed to his own personality, maintaining that all his success was due to right
method and the innate qualities of his pupils.
For my own part, I believe that this distinction between personality and method or
technique is in education largely false. If education is thought of as "simply a
science, no less and no more", there is something in the distinction. But if it
approximates more nearly to an art, an art in which the artist is constructing in
terms of human thought and emotion, the teacher's own personality (if only he
understands it at all rightly) is one aspect of his technique and method. However
that may be, we certainly at first often paid too much attention to the mere
machinery of this new kind of self-government. We also sometimes forgot that a
great deal of what society demands, and probably rightly demands, in the
education of normal children was inevitably left out of the life of communities
designed to educate or re-educate abnormal and delinquent children.
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The essential features of this novel way of managing a school, or rather, as
enthusiasts would say, of allowing it to manage itself, were some kind of general
meeting- usually including the grown-up helpers as well as the children–which
made laws and regulations; a judicial body, which punished or admonished
offenders against these rules; and election by the general meeting of those who
held posts of particular responsibility. Obviously there was room for any amount of
difference of detail, and the actual part played by the adults might vary
enormously, but these features, taken from nineteenth-century democracy in
England and America, were essential to the working out in practice of this new
idea of social education.
Having been greatly impressed by what I had seen of its results elsewhere, I not
unnaturally wished to borrow what seemed to me to be best in it. I find, however,
that in April, 1920–two months before we started at Churnside–I noted down some
misgivings as to how far the same methods could apply in such different
circumstances. To some extent these misgivings were illusory. For example, I
realised how greatly the economic side of the Little Commonwealth life helped the
citizens to realize that the good of all was affected by the conduct of cach
individual citizen; and I wondered whether ordinary school work could be any
substitute for this, and, if not, how could the same feeling of solidarity be pro-
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THE GENERAL MEETING

duced. I underestimated the extent to which, once the school were fairly started, a
spontaneous feeling of solidarity would grow up. independent of any external
machinery-call it, if you like, the pride in the school, a desire to compete with other
schools in work or play, a general sense of common responsibility. Again, it always
seemed to me that an essential element of all previous experiments in “self-
government" had been that the boys were acquainted with a worse alternative. To
avoid this was one motive for constructing and cementing a new form of society.
For instance, in the Little Commonwealth, many of the boys knew very well the
meaning of the phrase "reformatory methods", with which they could compare
their own less restricted conditions. Adult democratic society knows the meaning
of anarchy and despotism as alternatives to democratic government. Was there not
a real difficulty here? In practice, however, I did not find that there was the
slightest need to labour the distinction between our conditions and those of other
schools. It was almost immediately apparent to the boys that there was such a
distinction between our methods and those that they had known or read about, and
that it was infinitely preferable to be treated as responsible beings, and to be free
from all but the minimum of rules and restrictions.
In one respect, however, my first misgivings were justified. I find that I asked
myself the ques-
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tion whether the age of our first boys was not too young to make a really useful
start with this form of group government? I was right, and I can see now that we
made several false starts before the right time came. I shall have more to say later
on about the right age for this kind of organisation.
Looking back over the twelve years. I feel that this particular form of group
freedom, or collective responsibility, or whatever it is best called, contributed
wonderfully to the growth of individuality, and to that general process of release
from fear, which was one of our chief aims. In other words, it helped to produce a
sane attitude to authority, and the balance, stability, and self-respect that we rightly
regard as important elements in character. Moreover, I am quite certain that it gave
to a relatively greater number of boys a sense of active membership of the
community than is given by any other form of school government. That is very
much what I hoped would be the case, but it does not mean that my own views did
not change and develop in the course of these years. I find that in some respects I
hold my original views at least as strongly as before. For example, I am quite clear
that any kind of group responsibility must involve the opportunity to make
mistakes, and to learn from experience. There is no room for any kind of softness
as regards this. The boys must not, of course, be allowed to suffer too much from a
wrong choice; but it is mere sentimentality to prevent them
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THE GENERAL MEETING

from learning that mistakes have to be paid for. And, again, I hold more and more
that it is advisable for the consequences of such failures to be, in part at any rate,
visible or tangible. There are many occasions when a concrete example is worth
more than any amount of talk, or denunciation, or even mild reproof.
On the other hand, I have modified, or altogether rejected, some views to which at
first I was inclined. In the first place, I no longer feel that it is wise for the adult
members of the community to be members of the general meeting, on a nominal—
for it can never be a real-equality with the boys. In the early days I tried the system
of all the staff attending the meeting, and voting and speaking like the boys. I came
to the conclusion that this was a mistake. First, it has to be admitted that a master
must be specially qualified for this particular work, either by temperament, or by
training, or by personal experience. He must, of course, have faith and
understanding. But he wants more than that. He requires a great store of patience
and sympathy, and at times the ability to make quick decisions. He needs,
moreover, the insight to detect when what is apparently a decision of the boys is
genuinely their own, and when it is only a half-accepted suggestion from outside,
against which there will be a mental reaction–expressed or, even worse,
suppressed. The presence at a meeting of any adult who is inclined to be shrill or
resentful, who is in-
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THE GENERAL MEETING

clined to rail, or to cajole, does not help either the boys or the man himself.
I think, too, that in a sense it puts a too severe strain upon the boys to hear
discussion in which the grown-up people may differ strongly. That boys should
hear every possible variety of opinion about things in general, and the problems of
the greater world, is naturally to be desired. But with regard to the life of their own
school, and the problems which most immediately lie before them, they expect
adult authority to be one and undivided, and apparent dissension among their
elders is perplexing. On the other hand, a suspicion that discussion was not genuine
and sincere, and that the masters were suppressing their real opinions, would be
even more unfortunate.
Later on I tried the expedient of appointing one master, as my special
representative in this matter, to be a member of the meeting. A rather obvious
objection to this is that the distinction might be regarded as invidious, and that the
relation of that master with the boys would almost inevitably be rather different
from those of the rest of the staff.
I have not, however, changed my opinion that there are occasions when it is good
training for boys to be able to reject adult advice, after full and frank discussion,
provided they can experience the results of their action, if it proves to be a mistake.
But, as I shall show, such opportunities can be provided, without the staff being
members of the general meeting.
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THE GENERAL MEETING

Secondly, I no longer believe in the least that the forms of modern democratic
government are for boys in any sense the "natural" alternative to anarchy. The
opposite of anarchy is government, not selfgovernment, and boys' self-government
is "artificial" in the sense that it is a planned educational device for producing a
certain result, like a history syllabus, or a scheme of athletic training. Some
advanced teachers have spoken as if you had only to let boys experience the result
of complete disorder, for them to turn spontaneously to create a fullgrown
nineteenth-century parliamentary system.
I can remember so well the incident in very early days which brought this home to
me most forcibly. A General Meeting had taken place, and some decision had been
arrived at (I cannot recall the exact terms) which meant that a certain room was
allocated to the use of a particular group of boys for what particular purpose is
immaterial. This decision had apparently been acquiesced in, while we adults were
present. But half an hour later, when I happened to pass that room, I found that
another party was trying to take it by storm, and that a very pretty free fight was in
progress. In fact, as I arrived on the scene one small, but aggressive, member of the
assailing party was literally hung out through the door—the first time that I had
seen a human body projected through a doorway in mid air since a certain night at
the old Empire in the early days of this century. With what I thought to
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THE GENERAL MEETING

be the real self-effacement of the most advanced school of thought, I walked away,
hoping to leave the boys to discover the right alternative to anarchy. But the noise
persisted and, when I returned a little later, I found a grim collection of bruised
limbs and bloody noses. I thought then, and I think now, that to have left things
alone would merely have allowed a few of the strongest boys to obtain the mastery.
Quite possibly they would have established a leadership that would have been
readily acknowledged, once it was settled by force; but that leadership, whether a
good thing or a bad, would have been something quite different from "self-
government" in the sense of government by meeting. It was no time for serenely
theorising about liberty. I felt that I had to act immediately. This I did, and quelled
the disturbance, using the ordinary authority of the master, which the boys
immediately obeyed. Probably that was one of the several critical moments which
decided that Churnside was to preserve its sanity, and not become a freak school.
Nor, thirdly, can I accept the idea that the discussion which takes place at meetings
can be any substitute for individual, private, talks with boys even as regards their
attitude to authority. So far as I remember, Lane used to suggest that it might. But I
am inclined to think that some of the rather tense scenes which used to take place,
at the Little Commonwealth, when there was a case of someone
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THE GENERAL MEETING

"defying the court," did not really help the child to a better attitude to authority,
and that a private explanation of the child's own impulses, without quite so much
public agonising, might have obtained the desired result. And I should have
thought that public sympathy-open, or, far more dangerous, concealed–for the
offender was sometimes aroused by Lane's cross-questioning. However that may
be, I often found a private talk with a boy, after a general meeting extremely useful.
It helped him to understand his own conduct and motives, and to appreciate the
actions of other people. Sometimes it led to an explanation of many points
connected with the general nature and purpose of the school.
Finally, I cannot any longer believe that, as some claim, it is necessary for each
generation of boys to recreate their form of school society. A school should, surely,
give a sense of continuity, as well as providing the fullest scope for initiative and
adventure. On the other hand, it is certainly one of the duties of the headmaster, in
such an organisation as I am describing, to provide the boys with a constant
succession of fresh tasks and problems, on which they can make their collective
decisions and exercise their common responsibility. If he fails to do this, the
meeting virtually, if gradually, will fail to function.
Some of my earlier convictions, then, have been strengthened, and some discarded.
In certain other
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THE GENERAL MEETING

respects, where I kept to my original way of doing things, I changed the emphasis,
or found that there was new value and meaning in forms and methods that were
adopted for a different purpose. For example, I came to look upon the actual
procedure of a legislative body, with its rules, committees, etc., as no longer
valuable principally because it taught the necessity for law. That was the chief
argument in the case of delinquent children, and it may apply in a few exceptional
cases of retarded boys. But the ordinary boy of thirteen or fourteen did not need all
this in order to learn the necessity of law. The value seemed to me to lie elsewhere.
In the first place, it gave first-rate preparatory training for the life of the citizen in
the adult world. Of this I have received considerable evidence from old boys, who
have told me how valuable they have found this earlier experience. Secondly, in
the case of boys who had come from the poorer sections of society, and who had
been brought up to think of law and authority as something alien, something
belonging to "them", and not to "us", that model of democratic institutions had the
great value of teaching them that laws could be theirs, and of their own making.
Now I will try to describe the actual working of this form of co-partnership in
school government. In the first place, we must try to picture all those boys who are
members of the General Meeting, gathered together in Big School. In practice this
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THE GENERAL MEETING

meant some forty boys or more, aged from about thirteen to eighteen. The younger
boys, who were not yet members of the Meeting, were sometimes allowed to
attend as passive spectators, sitting apart in an alcove, and sometimes they were
not permitted to be present, and the decisions of the General Meeting were
communicated to them either by one of its officers, or by myself. Though the latter
alternative presented certain difficulties, I am fairly sure that it was better for them
to be absent. The members stood or sat, quite informally, round one end and the
two sides of a room that was not too big to make speech at a conversational pitch
quite easy. At the other end sat the Chairman, at a master's desk, and beside him the
secretary, who had with him the minute book, and probably the book of rules. The
regular meetings took place on one morning in each week, though emergency
meetings could be called at any time out of school hours; and in the last few days
of term, when there was usually a press of business-elections to be made, and
accounts to be presented and passed meetings might be quite frequent. A visitor
present at one such meeting in the last few days of term might very likely find that
elections for the next term would almost monopolise the allotted time. He would
notice that nearly all of these would be taken by ballot, after names had been
proposed and seconded in the ordinary way, and he might also notice two or three
small boys collecting and
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THE GENERAL MEETING

counting the votes—the office of Vote-Teller being, by a rather curious tradition,
the only one that was given to boys who were not yet full members of the meeting.
The list of Officers and Committees to be elected was a long one, and requires
some explanation, The most important position was, of course, that of Chairman. It
was given usually, though not always; to a prefect. It was undoubtedly a
compliment to a boy to be elected as Chairman, but I do not think that this point
should be overemphasised. The meeting soon discovered that efficiency and
coolness were the first requisites of a Chairman, and that to elect a boy as
Chairman for his moral worth, if he had not these qualities, was apt to be
disastrous, I noticed once or twice how a boy who had exercised great, and wholly
good, influence as an ordinary member, became ineffective when he was made
Chairman, through lack of the necessary gifts of shrewdness and judgment. The
best Chairmen were very good indeed, and naturally did more than anyone else to
keep alive the tradition.
The secretary was almost always a rather younger boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen,
while the Chairman was more likely to be seventeen or eighteen. The secretary was
chosen as a rule because he was considered to be neat, businesslike, and intelligent.
His duties were certainly no sinecure. He not only kept the minutes, and looked
after the rule book, but he did, in fact, undertake a good deal of other
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THE GENERAL MEETING

business. More than once a secretary entirely of his own free will did a
considerable amount of rather laborious work, by way of copying rules and
records, in his holidays.
The names of the other principal officers will, for the most part, explain their
duties. Such are the Captains and Secretaries of the various games, the Banker, the
three Shopkeepers, the Auditor, who audited the accounts of the shop, the Games
Wardens, who looked after all games materials, and a number of minor officers,
whom there is no need to mention in detail. Practically all these positions were
held for a single term.
In addition to these individual posts, to which elections were made at the end of
term, there were a number of committees to be chosen in whole or part (for the
members of certain committees retired in rotation), and there might be vacancies to
be filled on the Council. The Council, of which I shall say more later, was the
judicial body, of seven members, from which there was an appeal to the General
Meeting. It met when required, or sometimes weekly, and its members were
elected for "life", i.e. as long as they remained in the school.
More important in some ways than the individual officers were the various
committees, chief of which were the Games Committee, the House Committee, the
Entertainments Committee, and, in one sense, co-ordinating their work, the
Finance Committee. The Games Committee looked after everything
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THE GENERAL MEETING

connected with outdoor games, though there was a special committee elected in the
Easter term to arrange for the Athletic Sports, which were held with another
school. The House Committee's province was a more varied one, and cannot be
described so shortly; but it included, among other things, everything to do with
breakages, and the provision of newspapers and periodicals. The Entertainments
Committee functioned almost exclusively in the two winter terms, and it was their
duty to organise and direct entertainments, and amusements, and indoor games, not
only on Saturday and Sunday evenings, but during the period of recreation which
was provided every evening of the week after the first preparation was over, and
before the younger boys went to bed. There were other Committees for specific
purposes, but these three were the chief spending committees", and just as the last
meetings of one term might be devoted mainly to elections, so the first two
meetings of the next term might very likely be largely taken up with the
presentation and discussion of their estimates.
At this point I feel I must digress, and explain in some detail the system of school
economics which I introduced a few years after we started, and which not only
proved of real educational value in itself, but gave, as was hoped, a solid basis of
reality to the "self-government", and, above all, made it easier to let the boys learn
by making mistakes.
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THE GENERAL MEETING

This system was not, as some people thought, introduced at first as a means of
teaching boys to save money. I have always believed that training in the use of
money should be part of education, and that a boarding school offers an excellent
opportunity for giving this training. But such training should be something much
wider than the mere encouragement to save. The virtue of saving for a remote
future is likely to appear to most boys rather negative and abstract. Habits of thrift
are, of course, to be encouraged. But we want some system which will allow boys
to learn that true economy sometimes consists not in saving but in judicious
spending. They should learn to spend judiciously, and sometimes boldly, and at the
same time the results of their efficient, or inefficient, management should be seen
immediately in their everyday life.
The conditions which seemed to me to be demanded for such training were four,
and it will be seen how well they fitted in with the form of school government that
on other grounds seemed to me to be desirable :
(1) If boys are to be trained in wise expenditure, they must be free, individually
and collectively, to make mistakes, and to profit by their experiences.
(2) They must have at their disposal enough money not only to buy small personal
luxuries (upon which money is usually spent), but also to spend on things which
are of interest to them all,
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THE GENERAL MEETING

and which appear to them to be necessary to the life of the school.
(3) The amount of money at their disposal must bear some relation to the objects
upon which they are free to spend it. In other words, the amount must
approximately be fixed and decided by the authorities.
(4) There must be regular meetings of the boys -our General Meeting—at which
they can discuss how the money is to be expended on objects of collective interest,
and can form the necessary organisation.
In passing I should like to point out that what are normally called subscriptions for
games, O.T.C. and other purposes, and are so frequent at the public schools, do not
give any genuine economic training. They are, in fact, merely extra fees. The
parent keeps them quite distinct from the pocket money which he gives his son,
and, as a rule, boys have no say at all in how this money is spent.
At Churnside the boys received money from two sources. In the first place they
received a weekly allowance, which was commonly paid to the boys by myself on
Monday. The boy was paid this money, and initialled a school list as a receipt– a
small piece of formality which may seem absurd to some people, but which was, I
believe, useful. The amount of this weekly allowance (normally is. 5d.) had been
very carefully worked out by myself and a colleague years ago in relation to the
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possible objects of expenditure. I can remember very well that my Governing Body
were rather taken aback when I first asked them to provide these weekly
allowances; but they took heart when I pointed out that, if they would meet my
wishes, I would not ask them to spend money on a number of objects for which
they had been willing to make themselves responsible. Such were, for example,
games materials and, to some extent, the transport necessary for matches, certain
kinds of stationery, papers, magazines, and all those breakages and injuries to
school property which do not come under the heading of fair wear and tear. But
this list is by no means exhaustive. In the case of breakages, if I felt that they were
not fair wear and tear, I "put them on the taxes" (a phrase of which the meaning
will be clear later), and it was for the boys themselves through the appropriate
Committee to investigate the matter, and to decide what individual or group should
bear the cost. In practice, too, I sometimes put on the taxes breakages which might
be counted as unavoidable, or at any rate excusable, if they had not been reported
to me at once.
In addition to the weekly allowance, I allowed boys to bring with them at the
beginning of term a certain amount of pocket money, but an amount strictly limited
by school regulation. As a rule it was not more than 6s, od. for a boy below the
fifth form, and not more than 10s. 0d. for a boy in or above that form. The
question, of course,
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arises how far that rule was strictly observed, and how far it could be enforced. In
practice I believe that the great majority of parents helped me most loyally. Nearly
all of them understood, at any rate roughly, what I was driving at, and liked to
think they were cooperating in a scheme designed partly to teach the sensible use
of money. Most of them, too, had none too much money of their own, and were
quite glad to have the amount of pocket money limited. But from time to time I
knew or suspected that the rule was infringed, and it was necessary, and not at all
difficult, to make the boys themselves see that there was a kind of disloyalty, or
perhaps it would be better to say vulgarity, in deliberately exceeding the allowance.
I always felt that, if the rule proved to be really impossible to enforce, it would be
quite easy to fall back on the Little Commonwealth method of a separate coinage,
though that would involve all shops being put out of bounds; and on one occasion
when I knew that one boy had considerably exceeded the sum, I contemplated
deducting the amount of his excess from the total allowance for the next week, and
letting the General Meeting itself recover what they had lost by a special levy on
him. It was of course quite impossible, nor was it perhaps desirable, to prevent
boys bringing back property in kind, e.g.cricket bats, cameras, stamp albums, and
cycle accessories, which logically, if they were to be used in term, should have
been purchased inside the economic scheme;
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but I never felt that these articles really affected the principle of the fixed
“income", and anything too extravagant could usually be prevented by a little
sumptuary legislation.
It is now possible to see how the boy could have disposed of his weekly allowance,
after he had received it in preparation, or in my study, on Monday evening.
Probably he would first of all glance at the notice board, if he had not already done
so, to see what proportion of his allowance would be claimed by the weekly
"taxes"; having done this he would enter a room where the three members of the
Finance Committee were seated, and pay them what was due. This he was
compelled to do by a rule of the General Meeting. In the same room there might be
sitting the Banker, with whom he might like to deposit some of what he had left.
Possibly he had started his banking account for the term by depositing some of the
pocket money that he had brought back from home; or, though it was unlikely, he
might have a balance left over from the previous term.
The amount of the taxes was finally fixed by the Finance Committee, who had
been elected at the end of the previous term. But in practice the Finance Committee
as a rule only collated, without much modification, the estimates of the chief
"Spending Departments”, i.e. Games Committee, House Committee, and the
Entertainments Committee. At the first General Meeting of the term
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these Committees had each presented their Estimates, through their Treasurer or
Chairman, who had, if necessary, to fight his estimate through the General
Meeting, very much as a Minister responsible for a Department does in the House
of Commons. In early days each of these Committees had a master as adviser, but
that did not last long. Sometimes the estimates went through the Meeting with very
little discussion. At other times there was lively controversy. For example, there
was usually in the summer term a definitely anti-cricket party, opposed to
excessive expenditure on that particular game. The estimates for newspapers and
gramophone records were other examples of contentious proposals. There were
always boys who were, so to speak, ratepayers by tomperament, who were opposed
to any raising of the taxes for public purposes; and there were others who were
attracted by the idea of building up a reserve fund for some big expenditure when
the time came. The sums involved were not inconsiderable for boys of secondary
school age. The Games Committee estimates for the summer term often amounted
to more than thirty pounds. I believe that the discussions of these estimates (apart
altogether from the many general questions that were connected with them) were
extremely educative, and that the estimates as finally passed did, on the whole,
represent the wishes of the Meeting. It is important to remember that, before the
new Committees were elected at the
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end of term, the accounts of the old Committees had to be accepted by the General
Meeting after being audited by an adult, usually the Secretary of the College.
The Banker, too, had his accounts carefully audited at the end of cach term. In
some respects his work was more exacting than that of any other officer of the
Meeting, and a boy who did it well learned a good deal about book keeping and the
handling of figures. It is a possible line of criticism that the work of the Banker
was an almost unfair strain on his honesty. But in twelve years I knew only one
Banker who yielded to temptation, and that was in early days, before there were
any boys in the School as old as those who later normally held the chief offices.
The Banker received deposits, not only from individual boys, but from
Committees, whose deposits were, in fact, a good deal the largest. In order to
relieve the Banker of what seemed to me to be unnecessary responsibility, I did not
allow him to keep in his possession a balance of more than five pounds. Anything
over that sum had to be entrusted to me,
Another possible destination for what was left of the boy's allotted weekly
allowance was the school shop, which was open at certain times every day. It sold
certain kinds of sweets, stationery, stamps, and a number of other articles. It was
controlled by three shopkeepers, elected by the General
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Meeting, whose accounts were submitted at frequent intervals to an elected auditor.
Goods were sold at retail price, and the profits went to the funds of the General
Meeting, which, however, guaranteed a certain sum per annum for the Lecture
Fund. The efficiency of the Shopkeepers was not, on the whole, equal to that of the
Bankers, though there were notable exceptions. I came to feel, on other grounds,
that to have the shop open between meals was open to damaging criticism; but,
from the point of view of school economics, I am quite certain that the shop, both
when it was more or less successful, provided a very great deal of useful training,
It will be apparent how valuable this economic scheme was as providing a basis for
the direction of affairs by the General Meeting, as well as for other purposes. It
meant that there was no suggestion of "playing at it" as regards the work of the
General Meeting. The latter dealt with real problems of which the consequences
had real tangible results; and, once the machinery for dealing with these problems
had been established, it was not surprising that this same machinery was extended
to deal with any number of other problems and enterprises, which might arise in
every department of the school life outside the class room.
In fact, I believe that one justification for this kind of school society at the
adolescent stage is that it is an introduction to many of the circumstances of a real
adult life, and that it is quickly felt to be so
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by the boys. Whereas in the preceding stage there is a natural and healthy demand
for the element of pretence and make-believe, which is one of the most valuable
elements in scouting and similar movements.
Perhaps it is time now to describe a few typical Meetings, with the object, first of
all, of showing how varied the business might be, and what kind of discussion it
provoked. But I should like to emphasise the fact that General Meetings, like all
other meetings that I have known, were often very dull. Some of our "stunt"
educationalists have led people astray in this respect. There were not always,
fortunately, severe emotional crises to be faced, or dramatic issues to be brought to
a head. A great deal of our business was more or less routine. On the other hand, it
is equally true that I never entered a meeting without feeling that some problem of
first-rate interest might arise.
I have looked more or less casually into my notes of meetings, to find some which
will illustrate their variety.
Here is one example. My notes tell me that in the forty minutes of the Meeting, six
subjects were dealt with. In this case they were of very varying importance.
(1) A more or less minor matter. The question was raised whether it was wise to
permit hockey practice on a piece of enclosed turf near the College, which had
been intended originally for a
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tennis lawn. After a very few minutes discussion it was decided that this practice
should discontinue, for the grass, though too rough then for tennis, might be
improved for other summer games.
(2) Another minor matter. The question of whether the Entertainments Committee
were taking adequate precautions in their use of the Meeting's gramophone, or
whether they were allowing it to be used by irresponsible persons.
(3) A much more important point. It was decided that the shopkeepers should not
be allowed to give credit. The possible abuse of credit can easily be estimated. So
far as I remember, there were few, if any, who ventured to uphold the practice of
giving credit.
(4) An example of how an apparently minor proposal might have led to an
extremely interesting discussion. Someone suggested that the Games Committee,
as an alternative to football or hockey, should arrange for a scouting game. Several
years before it had been not uncommon for the Games Committee to arrange a
number of these games on half-holidays, but the practice had dropped. These
games had been arranged in the Park and the surrounding country for two sides,
rather on the lines of the schemes and operations carried out by an O.T.C., but
naturally of a more informal character. The actual schemes, however, had usually
been expressed in more or less military terminology, e.g. there had been convoys,
outposts, enemy positions
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to be located, etc. Some boys had thoroughly enjoyed them, others had been bored.
Now it was proposed to revive them; but, rather to my surprise, there was quite
considerable opposition from some of the oldest boys on perfectly sincere, though
rather crude, anti-militarist grounds. They were assisted by the rather less sincere
arguments of the extremists for ordinary school games. Finally it was resolved to
leave the matter to the Games Committee, which virtually meant a defeat of the
proposal.
(5) Some of the youngest members of the College, wandering about the park on
Sunday afternoons, had been throwing various missiles, both at each other, and at
various livestock. It was nothing but boyish fun, but one boy had nearly suffered a
baddish accident to his eye. I had spoken to the School, but made no rule or
restriction. The matter was now brought up spontaneously by one of the older
boys. not to bring about the punishment of anyone, but to express a public protest.
(6) A small point, but a very practical one. The group on duty for each week
provided servers, who waited at meals. Someone had noticed that the servers of the
week before had not been careful to pile the crockery properly in the serving room,
with the result that there were some unnecessary breakages, of which the cost fell
upon the Meeting. This was now mentioned, and action taken.
Here are some more of a rather varied nature. (1) A representative of the Library
Committee
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proposed that they should have power to suspend boys from using the Library
(either from using it as a recreation room or from borrowing books) for a certain
period. I think the original suggestion was for a week, but the Meeting reduced the
proposal to three days. The kind of offence they had in mind was either neglecting
to return borrowed books, or making too much noise in a room that was never
regarded as a place in which to indulge in ragging.
(2) One of the most senior boys raised a question which recurred on several
occasions, soon after the entry of a large group of new boys. After the midday meal
was over, there were occasionally the remnants of puddings to be found in the
serving room, and some rather primitive people had not resisted the temptation to
finish these up there, a practice which did not look particularly nice. The speaker
on this occasion pointed out that they had every opportunity of eating as much as
they wanted in the dining room, and in this case the Meeting felt that a rule, and
not merely a protest, was advisable.
(3) The Entertainments Committee often arranged informal acting for Saturday
nights. A group of boys, who had voluntarily got up some acting at the suggestion
of the Committee, found they had to buy certain properties, and asked for a grant
from the General Meeting. This was sanctioned.
(4) One of the older boys referred to what was a standing temptation of the General
Meeting, though
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periodic protests prevented it from becoming too dangerous. That was the
temptation to elect the same boys to too many offices. When a Meeting was tired,
or hurried, it was always liable at times of election to prefer the boy who had
already proved himself efficient, rather than to look for new blood, and to give it a
chance of proving itself. On the other hand, few boys, even the most public
spirited, or self-assertive, cared to hold too many jobs for long. On this particular
occasion the protest was to some extent justified, for one boy, of extreme
efficiency, who happened also to be Senior Prefect, was undoubtedly
overshadowing the Meeting. There was, I think, a little personal pique behind the
protest, but that did not affect its validity. The Meeting seemed to be aware of both
aspects.
These are some instances of more or less ordinary business. I have purposely not
taken any cases of a graver kind, which involved intimate personal problems.
Glancing through my notes I find plenty of variety in the business of both a
General Meeting and the Council. The latter was the judicial body and here are
some examples of business that it transacted in a short time:
(1) A boy was brought up for not being able to pay a debt to a Committee, probably
a debt to the House Committee for some breakage for which he was responsible.
Questioning by the Council revealed the fact that he was more or less bankrupt, i.e.
that he owed small sums to various other boys,
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as well as the larger sums to the Committee, and that he was also spending money
in the shop. It was decided that one of the prefects in his group should be appointed
as a kind of Official Receiver. The latter would have the boy's weekly allowance
paid to him by myself, and from it he would pay the boy just enough for necessities
(e.g., stamps for his letters home), retaining the remainder to pay his taxes and
debts, until the latter were cleared off.
I need hardly say that this particular difficulty, which happened several times,
could only occur in the case of one of the younger boys; and the supervision of the
older boy was always exercised both kindly and judiciously.
(2) Three boys were brought up by a member of the Finance Committee for
forgetting to pay their taxes by the appointed time. It was a trivial offence, but a
very annoying one for those who had to see that the money was paid into the bank.
The sentence was one and a half hour's work to be done for the Games Committee.
That would probably mean rolling the cricket ground, or something similar. In this
case two of the three offenders were prefects.
(3) A smallish boy had lent his cycle to another boy of about the same age, who
had badly buckled one of the wheels. The owner was represented by a prefect of
his group, and the Council asked another prefect to represent the defendant. The
owner's case was that the cycle had been used and broken after the time for which
he had lent it had elapsed.
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There was a direct conflict of evidence, and the Council, unable to arrive at a
conclusion, left the matter to the whole Meeting. The latter decided, I am quite sure
correctly, that the borrower was at fault, and he had to pay for the damage.
(4) One member of the cycle-shed Committee (which looked after all cycles and
things connected with them) had proposed at a former meeting certain regulations
in the name of the Committee". It now appeared that he had not in fact consulted
his colleagues, and that the regulations-sensible enough in themselves-were his
own invention. This was obviously not a case for a penalty, but there was decidedly
a principle involved, and the offender was made to look rather foolish.
(5) Three younger boys had forgotten, or omitted, to carry out work set them in the
regular routine by the Games Committee. This work was set on compulsory days,*
and the efficiency of the games of the school largely depended upon it. They were
placed at the disposal of the Games Committee on compulsory days for a fortnight.
Some of the above cases are more or less trivial, but they show the kind of ordinary
business that might occur within a few days.
What I have already said will make it perfectly clear that the organisation which I
have described
* By a rule of the General Meeting the Games Committee arranged games or other
general activities on three afternoons in each week.
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differed in general respects from other examples of educational "self-government”.
(1) The economic scheme was never intended to make boys self-supporting. The
latter was, of course, the aim of the economic system at the Little Commonwealth.
In my view it is altogether premature in adolescence to talk about economic
independence, though, incidentally, I believe a good deal of ordinary school
punishment (for disciplinary, not moral, reasons) is best justified as an anticipation
of the economic and social demands which the boy will meet in adult society.
The economics at Churnside were designed first, as I have explained, to give
reality to the organisation; and secondly, to give definite training in how to use
money and avoid waste. I have explained already why I believed that this last point
needed to be emphasised.
(2) The organisation at Churnside was emphatically a dyarchy, both as regards in-
school hours as opposed to out-of-school hours, and as regards the province of
headmaster and prefects, as opposed to the practice of the General Meeting. There
was never any pretence that the latter was to cover the whole school life.
With regard to the second distinction, the number of "transferred" subjects tended
to grow and some of the "reserved" ceased to exist. I find, for instance, thata
number of things were taken over by the General Meeting which were not
originally given to it, e.g.,
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the shopkeepers, originally appointed by myself, were afterwards elected, and the
cycle shed, drying room, and playroom came under its authority. I had sometimes
to meet the criticism that this dyarchy created an unnatural dualism. In actual fact
one can find a similar dualism in the life of a public school, with the rules of
masters and prefects on one side, and the tremendously strong schoolboy
conventions on the other; but in that case the conventional side of school life is
quite "unorganised", and public opinion expresses itself in custom and conventions
which are frivolous, or childish, or positively harmful.*
(3) At our General Meeting, unlike those of some experimental schools, there were
no adults present except myself, and I was not in the ordinary sense a member.
That is to say, I did not vote. Originally, as I said before, this was not the case. All
members of the staff were members of the General Meeting, spoke, and voted, and
were theoretically subject to its rules. I have already given some of the reasons
why I came to the conclusion that it was better for the staff no longer to be
members of the General Meeting, but I should like to emphasise my feeling that
boys do not really regard it as natural that adults should be placed on this
theoretical equality with themselves.
* About another dualism–the freedom of the out-of-school life, and the compulsion
implied by a time-table and an imposed curriculum–I shall have more to say later.
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Perhaps this is the place to point out that the General Meeting, both in what it did,
and in the training that it gave, had nothing whatever in common with the ordinary
school Debating Society. I sometimes find that people think that some of its
educational functions might be performed by the latter. There is just this much in
common, that in both of them a boy, by practice, learns to address a number of
people without self-consciousness. But there is nothing else in common. Not only
has a Debating Society no practical responsibility for carrying out its decisions,
nor, as a rule, any real relation with the boys' day-to-day life, but I always believed,
and hoped, that the debating-society mind was exactly the kind of mind which was
least encouraged by our methods.
I want to deal now with some of the questions which have been put to me, or
which I have put to myself, arising from the practical working of these methods.
One of them is–What is the place of the assistant master in this form of school
society? Let me say at once that in one sense it need not affect the assistant master
at all. This form of organisation is most applicable, I believe, to a body of some
thirty to sixty boys, that is to say, to a body approximately the size of a house at a
public school. In that connection it would obviously apply to the internal affairs
and management of the house, and in practice at a public school it is not the
business
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of any master, except the housemaster or house tutor, to concern himself with the
internal affairs of a house. Similarly, in a small boarding school, which for internal
purposes may be regarded as a single house, it can only be the duty of one master,
or at most two, to deal with internal management, though in such a school, as in
larger ones, there may have to be school rules imposed by the headmaster, which it
is part of the duty of the staff to see are carried out. In so far as they do that they
will be dealing with the “reserved subjects” of the dyarchy.
În actual practice I found that the boys, not unnaturally, having been granted
certain powers and responsibilities, which developed with the approval of
authority, very much resented any apparent interference by a master in their own
particular sphere. On the other hand they were, as a rule, scrupulously careful in
discussion not to mention the name of a master, except in a quite formal way, and
not in appearance or reality to invade the sphere which did not belong to them. I
can think of very few exceptions to this generalisation, and the few that I can recall
are revealing, and sometimes amusing, I find, for instance, that on one occasion a
boy was very severely punished for a piece of personal rudeness to a master. In this
case there was, so far as any pressure was brought to bear, no earthly reason why
the General Meeting should take this action, except that it thought that a
discreditable thing had been done by someone who would be all the better
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for correction. One other case where a master's name was introduced, in rather
early days, was in several respects revealing. To my great surprise one morning a
boy proposed that new boys should not be allowed to sit at Mr. X's table at
luncheon. I could not for the life of me think why not, until he gave his
explanation, and then the situation was rather awkward, though I sympathised with
him. Mr. X was a young master who had, no doubt, derived great benefit from the
important grammar school and distinguished college that had nurtured him. But his
table manners remained very rudimentary. I had been talking generally to the boys
on this subject, and it was a fact, though an unfortunate one, that his example was
exactly the wrong one for little boys in their first term. This is what the proposer of
the motion said with emphasis.
The motion was carried, nobody ever breathed a word about the matter outside,
and I had no reason to think that the master in question ever noticed that on the
weekly table lists, which were made up every Sunday night, no names of new boys
were subsequently entered for his table.
Generally, however, the names of masters simply did not come into the
discussions, and, conversely, it may be said that the boys did not talk about the
affairs of the General Meeting in the presence of non-members. The reason that
was frequently given for this silence was that (1) a younger boy would inevitably
tend to be influenced by an older person,
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and, therefore, his opinion and vote would really represent not himself but
somebody outside; (2) in ordinary conversation a master might hear only half the
story of any particular incident, possibly from someone who had personal reasons
for bias, and might gather a quite erroneous impression of what had actually
happened.
Another question that arises is, was not the range of age at Churnside too great for
this kind of boygovernment to function properly? My answer is that our range of
age was, in my opinion, decidedly too great for it to do all that it might do, and to
that extent I feel that we were always working under difficulties. In everything that
I have written or said on this subject, I have always maintained that this was not
the best kind of organisation for the boy under thirteen, and our success was, I
believe, obtained in spite of the presence of the younger boys. Ideally, I should
have preferred for the purpose a community ranging from thirteen to sixteen and a
half or seventeen, and these are the ages to which in my opinion the truly
adolescent community should be confined. In a community of that kind I should
have been quite prepared to abolish prefects, and the dyarchy, and to have let the
General Meeting manage the whole out-of-school life, with my own veto left in
reserve.
The difficulty of having younger boys arose not so much in general discussion
(there are some subjects which, obviously, should be discussed in a

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wholly different way by and among children of twelve and young men of
eighteen), but on the judicial side, or in cases such as those in which a younger boy
did not own up to an offence. I was struck many times both by the remarkable
success of a committee of boys in investigating and sifting evidence in the case of
boys of about fourteen and upwards, and their relative lack of success in trying to
do the same thing with boys below that age.
I was often asked, too, what exactly was my own position with regard to the
General Meeting. I cannot answer this shortly, for I performed a number of rather
different functions, sometimes simultaneously; and I must take them separately, in
order to make myself clear. Perhaps I should add that I usually sat at a boy's desk
in one corner of the room taking notes, if I thought there was anything interesting
to record, very often opening my morning's letters and, though obviously alive to
what was going on, not appearing to display any kind of intenseness or, if I could
help it, emotion. If I interpolated a remark I always tried to do so as quietly and
objectively as possible. If I ever, as I sometimes did, showed any sign of
impatience or annoyance, I always knew that I had made a mistake.
First of all, I sometimes intervened to make quite certain that the meeting was
actually facing the real problem at issue, and also to point out, after the event,
when a mistake had definitely been made, and not too magisterially to point the
moral.
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The best example, I think, that occurs to me, was connected with the purchase and
use of a rather expensive wireless set. Some bad mistakes were made in the first
instance, both as regards taking inferior advice of a semi-technical nature on the
type of apparatus that had been bought, and also as regards supervision and control
of the instrument. A considerable sum of money was, on the face of it, wasted—
though the various lessons that were learned were, in my opinion, not expensive at
the price, Another rather similar case, which I notice in my records, was when I
warned the General Meeting against their proposed method of dealing with a
particularly difficult boy, whose social sense was very undeveloped for his age.
They had proposed virtually to make him an outlaw, i.e. to deprive him of all the
rights and privileges of a member. I pointed out what seemed to me to be the issue
at stake, and that they were in fact proposing to narrow their own sphere, for
clearly the boy then would have to come under the supervision of myself and the
prefects.
Very occasionally I gave advice, or my advice was asked, on points of procedure
(complicated amendments and similar things), and occasionally I felt it right to act
as a kind of legal expert, where there seemed to me to be a principle involved. I
will give one example of the latter. One of the shopkeepers –the senior one-was
occupied by a public examination at the usual time for opening the shop.
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Another boy, who happened to be senior prefect, in all good faith borrowed the key
of the shop with his permission, and opened it at the regular time, for, as he
thought, the public convenience. They both in this way broke rules of the General
Meeting that only shopkeepers should serve in the shop, and that the shopkeepers
were not allowed to let the key out of their possession. They were punished by the
Council, on the ground that it was an accepted principle that duties should not be
delegated without permission. I remember intervening to say that in my opinion-
whatever might be the merits of the case—any boy who had used the shop when it
was thus illegally open was condoning the offence, and that it was something like
hypocrisy to condemn these two for providing a convenience which many of them
had, in fact, enjoyed. In this particular case the two boys appealed from the
Council's decision to the General Meeting, and their appeal was allowed by a ballot
majority.
It also happened, naturally enough, that I was sometimes consulted on matters of
precedent, for my memory went back a good deal further than that of anyone else.
There were times, too, when I allowed myself to comment on what seemed to me
to be inefficiency on the part of a committee or an individual. Great patience is
often required if one is not to make these comments, and a belief that in the long
run things will be put right. And in practice I believe it was
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nearly always a mistake to make such comments, unless they could be quite
impersonal. I can remember, for instance, one occasion when the Chairman was
definitely weak—probably the weakest Chairman we ever had and the least
responsible. The members were becoming aware of this, when a rather serious
matter cropped up which required careful investigation. The Chairman seemed to
me to be making very little attempt to get at the facts, and I said so openly. Almost
certainly my remarks were an error of judgment, and they would probably have
revolted against the Chairman, or rather against his attitude, more quickly had I
remained silent,
It was certainly one of my duties, too, to bring new material before the General
Meeting. The headmaster of a school managed on these lines (or the housemaster
of a house) should never be lacking entirely in fuel with which to feed the fire. Not
infrequently in bringing forward this new material I stated both sides of the case, as
I saw them, and, without any dissembling, gave my opinion in favour of one
solution or the other. But I only did this when I was quite prepared for my advice
to be rejected if the boys decided to do so. The master supervising this kind of
organisation should either keep the issues in his own hands, right outside the
meeting; or, if he deliberately puts them before the boys, he must be prepared to
abide by their decision, without the slightest feeling of resentment or dis-
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appointment if his view is rejected. That is absolutely vital.
Lastly, there were occasions, though very rare, when, at other times, I spoke to the
school as a whole, or to separate forms, about the principles underlying an
organisation, and commented on its working in particular cases. Rather similar to
this were the talks that I gave to groups of new boys in their first term, explaining
the meaning of such things as taxes, and telling them what they would find when
they were old enough to become members,
A point that I have often heard put forcibly, and in my opinion erroneously, is that
boys enjoy punishing each other, and that the habit of punishing and taste for
punishing grow with practice. I have noticed some signs of this in connection with
the punishment given by prefects at public schools, but I never saw the slightest
sign of it in connection with the General Meeting, or the Council, at Churnside.
Certainly there was never any rush to bring accusations before the Council, and a
frivolous or malicious or petty accusation was always most sternly rebuked.
Personally, I sometimes felt that the fear of such personal motives was rather too
strong.
In the General Meeting itself there was always a party definitely opposed to almost
any kind of punishment, and, for no prejudiced reasons, disbelieving in its efficacy.
One has to admit that in
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this respect the attitude of the boys was bound to be coloured by the general
practice of the school outside their own sphere of management. In a school where
there was a great deal of punishment inflicted by masters and prefects I should
expect punishment to play a large part in the activities of any meeting or committee
of boys, if such a thing existed. When punishment by masters had been reduced to
a minimum I found the opposite result.
To come to details at one time I allowed the Council to inflict a very limited
amount of corporal punishment, though only in my presence. This I subsequently
disallowed, because I believe it to be the safest plan to prohibit any boy from
inflicting corporal punishment on another. At the same time I should like to add
that corporal punishment seemed to me to be a very different thing when inflicted
on the decision of a Committee of boys, and by an appointed and quite
disinterested person, from what it is when the sentence is given at the whim of an
individual and carried out by the same person.
The actual form that punishment took was almost always that of "work", i.e. so
many hours of useful and necessary labour to be done for one of the committees.
The greater part of this work was done out of doors, connected with the cricket
ground, the tennis courts, or the out-of-door theatre. But occasionally more
exacting punishments, or rather methods of correction, were adopted.
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For several younger boys who had been a general nuisance through untidiness and
unpunctuality, and who had appeared to be making no particular effort to mend
their ways, a "nurse" was appointed, who was responsible for seeing that the boy
kept his engagements and performed his daily duties. On one occasion this "nurse",
who changed from day to day, was necessary for several weeks, but as a rule the
ignominy speedily effected a cure.
The question of collective punishments is a difficult one. No schoolmaster, I
imagine, likes them. But in cases where an offence had been committed which
nobody owned to, the Meeting sometimes employed them, and more than once
inflicted a penalty on the whole school. I heard some extraordinarily illuminating
discussions on the value of such a punishment, and I am not by any means
convinced that such a collective act of penance for an offence, when the offender
was unknown, was without value. They even went further than that on occasion,
and drew lots for a number of boys who would have to bear the penalty. And on at
least one occasion I can remember older boys volunteering to be placed on the list
of those who had to be punished. Certainly on one occasion a decision that a
collective penalty was to be enforced upon a number of guiltless people was
sufficient to bring confession from a boy who had been guilty of a trivial form of
theft. I should like to make it plain, however, that to
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be brought before the Council and found guilty did not at all necessarily mean that
you would be punished. Often publicity itself was the best cure and a sufficient
penalty. Admonition from the Chairman of the Council might be all that was
necessary, and I have heard some very sensible words, and hardly ever any
priggish ones, spoken on these occasions.
We are sometimes told that boys are bad electors. I am tempted to reply in the
words of Mr. Lonsdale's play, "Aren't we all?" Like most people, they are
sometimes swayed by personal bias and momentary excitement. But they may be
quite good electors, if they know that there is something important at stake, and if
the elected officers are to be generally responsible to the electorate. They must
know that quite definitely unpleasant or undesirable consequences will follow from
unwise choice. That is to say, once more, there must be some reality in their form
of government. And, secondly, they cannot be expected to take a wise interest in
the election of officials who, when elected, are no longer answerable to them. I
should not, for example, myself be in favour of a body of elected prefects, if in
other respects the prefects were in the same position as those at an ordinary public
school.
I am sometimes asked whether what I have described does not tend to produce the
demagogue, who plays to the gallery. My answer is that I have never known any
way of showing up that particular kind of person in his youth so effective as that of
a
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General Meeting, in which he can be questioned and criticised, and the wisdom or
unwisdom of his advice can be tested by practical experience. It is irresponsible
demagogy that is dangerous, and that is exactly what government by meeting does
not mean.
Did our form of organisation at all affect the relations of the school with the
outside world? Hardly, for the headmaster clearly had to represent the school in its
"foreign policy". In practice the elected Games Secretaries arranged matches with
other Schools, but that was the extent to which the Meeting dealt with the outside
world, except as regards the purchases made by the elected shopkeepers. But I
remember an incident which showed rather amusingly that the working of the
Meeting was not unknown and unappreciated elsewhere. A neighbouring
headmaster and I had been discussing points connected with some of our periodical
contests. He and I both wished that certain changes should be made which
involved a certain departure from traditional athletic orthodoxy. I made suggestions
to the General Meeting, which was, in my opinion, enlightened enough to accept
them. He laid the same suggestions before his Staff Meeting, which proved to be
obstructive. “I am inclined," he wrote rather wistfully, "to envy you your General
Meeting."
People sometimes ask, and very naturally, how all this affected the prefects, who
were responsible
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officers in the other sphere of what I have called the dyarchy. Did it not make it
more difficult to be a prefect if, in another capacity, you were an ordinary member
of the General Meeting, on an equality with everyone else? The answer is that it
probably did make it more difficult, but it also made it more worth while, and it
certainly tended to prevent that intellectual and moral priggishness which I
remember so vividly from my public school days as a not uncommon characteristic
of the efficient prefect. Whatever else a prefect might be, he could not be pompous
or pretentious, for those were just the qualities that aroused opposition and ridicule
at a General Meeting, and probably before he became a prefect he would have been
laughed out of them.
Yet, on second thoughts, I can see that in another sense it did not make it more
difficult to be a prefect, for the whole tendency of the Meeting was to teach boys
why rules are necessary, and that was bound to make them more law-abiding. But
about the whole question of prefectship at Churnside, I shall have more to say in a
later chapter.
Now I must try to state, in sum, what appear to me to be the final value and
justification of this form of school society, bearing in mind that in a large school a
good many of the details of what I have described might well be adapted to a house
or some other unit inside the school, rather than to the school as a whole. In the
first place, it introduced into the school an
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element of reality—and that in two ways. The economic scheme did make the boys
deal, within a limited sphere, with practical issues, and took away the atmosphere
of pretence which, I confess, does seem to me sometimes to have vitiated so-called
experiments in self-government. But, beyond that, it did provide admirable civic
training both in the narrower sense of the word, by which I mean that it prepared
them for conditions that they would find existing in the adult world—the procedure
of a meeting, the functions of committees, the elements of public finance and also,
in a wider sense, in that it promoted the idea of public service and responsibility to
an elective body. Further, as I have said before, there was the highly useful training
in judicious expenditure and the avoidance of waste. There is no doubt, a need for
far more to be done in schools for older children in the way of civic training by
way of instruction. But such teaching, even when the teacher enriches it by
intelligent discussion and by encouraging his pupils to read widely and
independently, should supplement a form of school life which is itself a civic
training, The ideal conditions are for the teaching and the life to illustrate and
support each other.
I have had plenty of testimony from old boys that their experience of work in the
General Meeting and on its Committees was of great practical use to them after
they left school, and still more that it did give them an understanding of democratic
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government which, they found, other boys often lacked. As a training for
democratic citizenship I feel that our organisation fully justified itself.
I said in the previous chapter that I conceived the creation of a right attitude to
authority in his pupils to be one of the most important tasks of the schoolmaster,
and I explained why this part of our work seemed to me to demand special care.
The second justification for our form of group responsibility appears to me to lie in
the fact that it did help so wonderfully to break down that idea of government
being something alien, and vaguely hostile, to which I have alluded. They learnt
that government, and authority, and the power to make rules could be "ours" and
not only "theirs". They gained a tradition of collective self-respect. It was a
tradition to which they were as much attached as schoolboys proverbially often are,
but it was unlike other social traditions in that it carried within itself the possibility,
and indeed the necessity, of continuous change as fresh circumstances had to be
faced. Without any general bumptiousness or conceit, they felt that the General
Meeting was their own, and that it did give them a real freedom to say what
collectively they wanted and felt. I believe that the last resolution passed by the
General Meeting before I left expressed something more than a mere passing
emotion. It spoke of the help which had been given them by "the originator of their
assembly" in the past, and expressed their deter-
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mination to continue in the future the work of that assembly with as much success
as their enthusiasm can command".
This changed attitude to authority is only another way of saying that the meeting
helped boys to lose a sense of inferiority, as regards both other boys and grown-up
people. I believe that on the personal side membership of the Meeting did help
very greatly in this respect, giving to many boys, as time went on, the confidence,
and balance, and feeling that they were of some real use, which in traditional
schools are given, if at all, mainly by the prefect system. But prefects are
necessarily few, and it was the very essence of our way of doing things that the
public duties were spread over a large number. It is the effect—conscious and
unconscious—in setting free from fear and the sense of inferiority, and in making
the boys tolerant, united, and yet sanely critical, which I want to emphasise.
Behind the rather trivial and pedestrian details of allowances, estimates, and rules
there was growth of mind and spirit.
It would take too long to describe in detail the effect of all this upon the many
different types of boy who did clearly benefit from it. There was the frothy, self-
assertive boy, possibly coming from a home where he had been over-indulged, who
found that the bubble of his importance was rudely pricked in public discussion.
There was the pompous or priggish person, who gained from a little
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healthy laughter. There was as there is in the adult world—the specious person,
whose counsel always seems so wise, till it is put to the test of action. Greater still
was the benefit to the over-suggestible boy, who had always done what he was told
to do without thought and without question. It was extremely good for him to
realise that there were not only times when I was prepared to stand aside and let
the boys decide, but that there were times when I was even prepared to lay my
advice before them, and let them, if they liked, reject it. I can remember, too, boys
who have told me how their first efforts at addressing the meeting helped them to
overcome nervousness and shyness, and others who used to force themselves to
speak on subjects in which they were not specially interested, till they thought that
they had learnt how to say what they had in mind with reasonable fluency. And in
passing I should like to say that the boys often seemed to be almost superhumanly
patient in listening to speakers who seemed to me insufferably dull. Their sense of
fair play was in this respect more highly developed than mine.
Then there was the potential rebel, whom every schoolmaster knows. Or, rather,
there were two kinds of rebel. One of them, often full of generous qualities and
high spirits, is the boy who in ordinary school life is always making things difficult
for the conscientious prefects, and generally getting into minor trouble. There is, in
fact, no very definite
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place in many schools for this kind of fourth or fifth form boy, no place which
gives him any sense of being a useful member of society-unless he happens to be
outstandingly good at games. To such a boy it means a great deal that he can have
his say, on an equality with older boys, in matters which seem to him to be
important, and, perhaps, put the case for his own little circle of friends. It matters
still more, though he may not know it, that he should have the opportunity of doing
definite practical jobs, to do which he is elected by his fellows, and that he should
find himself in the position of making rules and seeing that they are enforced; most
of all, perhaps, that he should have to obey those rules himself. The method gets
him off the defensive, and sets him free to show the more sensible and serious side
of himself, without lifting him out of his own gang of friends into a separate
prefectorial caste.
The other kind of rebel is a more serious problem. I mean, the boy who has a quiet,
largely unexpressed, feeling of dislike and suspicion of anyone set in authority
over him, or at all event of anyone who for the moment represents “the boss". No
doubt in most cases this is founded on some repressed hatred belonging to his very
early childhood. To him the schoolmaster may have to be a father-substitute in the
most unfavourable sense, the recipient of a dislike, or suspicion, of which the boy
himself is only half aware. To get rid of this attitude—if he does
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ever get rid of it—may take the boy many years. It may be inevitable or advisable
that for a time the full load of adverse prejudice should be borne by one person, the
schoolmaster or someone in a similar position, in order that the boy may not be
hampered by this emotional trend while he is expanding in other directions. That is
one reason why it is so misleading to judge a schoolmaster by what only one or
two of his pupils may think of him. But it is all to the good if some of the hatred
can be dissipated while the boy is passing through adolescence. If the schoolmaster
is aware of the situation, and acts wisely, he can do much himself to help. But if
the actual conditions of the school society can also help, so much the better.
Actually, I believe that a form of government shared by master and the whole body
of boys can help to a considerable extent. In the constantly changing groups of
friends and opponents in any kind of government by discussion (however amicably
conducted) authority, in the sense of those who support and enforce a resented rule,
is represented now by one person or group, and now by another. His feeling of
opposition will not be concentrated upon one individual, but dispersed over a
number, with any one of whom on another occasion he may be acting as ally. He
will be more likely, therefore, to begin to look at himself and his prejudices from
another's point of view, and this elementary self-criticism may be the beginning of
his re-education.
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There is, finally, the strong-minded boy with a gift for leadership, who in the
traditional school becomes the model prefect, and the right hand of his
housemaster. Have we not all known those boys, who obviously enjoy exercising
that kind of power, and exercise it with extraordinary efficiency? Sometimes they
do it so well, and are such outstanding figures during their last year at school, that
their subsequent careers, from the point of view of influencing other people, seem
to their friends to be something of an anticlimax. Their only chance of having such
opportunities again is to become schoolmasters, and this is what they frequently
do. They find that their particular conception of what government means, and their
way of treating people are not tolerated-in this country, at any rate-in the world of
men, and they return to the world of boys, where they can assert themselves to
their heart's content. I believe that it is all to the good that such a boy should learn
quite early, from contact with a critical though perfectly friendly meeting, that
there is more than one side to many questions, that civilised leadership includes the
power to persuade as well as the power to compel, that to be patient under criticism
is a quality of men of the finest temper, and that shrewd opinion and public spirit
are often to be found in what are apparently the most unlikely quarters.
I said that the tradition of the General Meeting was necessarily a tradition of
change and facing new
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problems. It was certainly not a tradition which supported that tyranny of custom
and convention (wrongly called schoolboy conservatism) which is so powerful and
so narrow in many of the public schools. It is in fact one of the chief merits of the
form of school government which I have described that it does break that tyranny. I
readily admit that these binding schoolboy customs are an expression of the group
feeling which is predominant at a particular age. But I maintain that the almost
obsessional support of those customs is a perverted and not a natural expression of
that feeling, due to the fact that the latter is given no healthy and constructive
outlet. In the Churnside form of self-government the collective opinion of the boys
did have a constructive way of expressing itself, and practically no overflow of
thought or emotion went, in fact, into foolish customs.
One indication of this was the fact that the General Meeting never paid the
slightest respect to the argument “We have had to go through it in our time, and the
younger boys ought to go through it now". That point of view was occasionally put
forward by a few individuals, when some change was being discussed which
would make for comfort or convenience. It is an argument very often heard in
public school life. But, so far as I can remember, it never carried the day, and
usually excited the ridicule which it deserved. I believe, too, that the General
Meeting was
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justified as a method of moral education, and, when I say that, I am not thinking
for the moment of what individual boys may have gained from the part that they
took in its proceedings. I mean, that it gave an opportunity for moral ideas to be
introduced into the life of the community through the older and more thinking
boys. The important point is that these ideas were then tested and worked out in
practice. For example, I might have discussed some point at a prefects' meeting, or
in casual conversation with older boys, and, arising from this, one of them might
make a most valuable suggestion at the General Meeting. There was a definite limit
to these possibilities. Everything would have been spoilt, if the General Meeting
had thought, rightly or wrongly, that it was continually being "got at". But there
were times when I felt that this was the best possible way for such ideas to be
introduced to the schooljust because they would be rejected, if the school were not
ready to assimilate them. I can remember one rather good example of what I mean.
So far as I possibly could, I refrained from being too obviously the censor of
papers and periodicals which the House Committee bought for the library. There
was, in fact, scarcely any need for me to be. But at one time they did take a well-
known, and apparently popular, pictorial paper of immense fatuity, which
contained a number of intentionally suggestive illustrations. I was not specially
concerned about these in a school which I believed to
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be generally healthy in regard to sex, but one day, in a frank conversation with
some older boys, I referred to these pictures, and tried to analyse and examine their
appeal in some detail, as it might affect the boy of twelve or thirteen. Soon
afterwards on the motion of one of the older boys it was resolved that the paper
should no longer be taken in the library. On the whole, I think that was a gain.
Perhaps I ought also to mention that I remember this to have been one of the
occasions when I wished that the youngest boys had not been present; for the
discussion would have been far more educative. One must not expect complete
frankness on such subjects from boys of seventeen or eighteen in the presence of
children of ten or eleven. As I said before, it was always a disadvantage that we
combined in one community boys of such varied ages.
I came to feel strongly that proceedings and discussions of this kind gave a
headmaster a wonderful opportunity of learning what was the genuine moral level
of public opinion, provided that he could sit quiet and listen, and not interfere. It
helped him to avoid the danger of being out of touch with it in his own teaching,
and bewildering the boys with instruction which was quite unrelated to their
collective experience.
When people ask me, "Can anyone make this system work?" I am inclined to say,
"No. Why should anyone want to?" As I said before, the method is not independent
of the director's per-
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sonality. Other people naturally have their own methods of obtaining similar
results, and, no doubt, in many cases obtain them more successfully. I believe that
it was the right method for me, and I think I can be sufficiently objective about it,
to know some of the qualities which it demands. It certainly requires patience, not
patience in the classroom sense (of which I have deplorably little), but the patience
which is prepared to let things go wrong time after time, in the belief that the boys
themselves will finally put them right, and that there are many times when it is
better for them to be put nearly right by the boys, than to be put wholly right in the
eyes of adults) by someone else. In other words, it requires a great deal of faith in
what boys of that age can do, when they are trusted and unimpeded. In that sense I
suppose that it would be true to say that the successful working of the whole thing
did largely depend upon myself. For the faith that I had in them must have
communicated itself in the form of suggestion to the boys, and there were times
when I stated my belief openly. If it is ever legitimate to use suggestion (and, in
fact, it is often not only legitimate but unavoidable) it can surely be used rightly in
helping boys to form habits of sane criticism, habits, in fact, which are likely to be
of special use in curing those who are too suggestible.
And yet, after all, I am not sure that the best thing about this form of cooperation is
not just this-that it forces the master who is responsible
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to go through, over and over again, a searching process of self-examination. I, at
any rate, found this work a constant corrective of all the tendencies in myself
which I dislike most in a schoolmaster. The man who is directing this kind of
school society will spoil everything if he is dominating, or sentimental, or uses the
"to please me" argument, or in any way ministers to his sense of his own
importance. He must try all the time to be humble, in the sense in which humility
must always be the first virtue of those who have to educate the young.

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CHAPTER III
FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE
In the last chapter I described what people usually I call the self-government side
of our work, though for reasons which I have stated I do not care for the term. That
was certainly one interesting part of the school life. Upon that, and upon what I
have called the social mixture, the gradually growing reputation of the school
rested. But it was not the only interesting or effective part of our work, and, as time
went on, I came to regard it as less important than I had done at first, and to think
of it as only one method of carrying out the various aims which I had in view. It
certainly did not cover the whole of school life. There were a great many things
with which the General Meeting had nothing whatever to do. Among them were
the ordinary school work inside the hours of lessons, and all that I dealt with
myself as headmaster, either directly, or through staff and prefects.
Here, however, I should like to emphasise one point. Though the self-government
was only one part of a whole, it was part of a homogeneous whole. There was
nothing discordant between it and the
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general life of the place. The general aims were the same. I had had some
experience elsewhere of a very limited amount of group responsibility in
conditions decidedly inimical to it, and had learnt some useful lessons as to what
could, and what could not, be done in those circumstances. Anything which was
achieved at Churnside by this means was achieved because the framework, inside
which the boys' own organisation acted, was constructed by people who believed
in it and in them. I hope that what I have to say in this chapter about the general
life and discipline of the school will make this point clear.
But, first, I ought to say something about a criticism which was sometimes brought
against us. I was told that by excluding all school lessons from the sphere which
was controlled by the boys, and by allowing them little choice, if any, in the
subjects of their curriculum, I was creating an unnatural dualism, and restricting
their liberty just where it was most necessary. This was the criticism of some of my
left-wing friends and visitors, and it requires an answer.
In the first place, I am not at all sure that there is not a perfectly natural dualism, or,
at all events, that there are not two different but complementary processes existing
in the mind of the growing boy, to which our divisions between freely chosen and
prescribed activities did roughly correspond. I do not pretend to be able to explain
this dualism. For
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that my readers must go to the professed psychologist. I can only speak tentatively,
and say that the longer I worked with adolescent boys the more I felt conscious that
there were these two separate processes, which at a rather later stage merged more
nearly into one. I am not quite sure how far the distinction of which I am thinking
is similar to that drawn by Dr. David in his Life and the Public Schools. "There are
two lines", he writes, "which must be followed concurrently in the education of
human beings at all stages and for all purposes of life. The one is deductive. It
proceeds by the recognition of external authority, expressed in terms of law. But
nature adds to the process of education an inductive element, bidding us learn by
our own experience, grow by adventurous exercise of our own growing powers,
and advance by our discoveries.” Probably I am thinking of the second process less
as "advance" than (in military jargon) as the "consolidation" of ground to which
advance has been already made under skilled leadership. Or, to change the
metaphor, it is more like the digestion of food. The food has been prepared and is
offered by others, but the body has to work on it with active forces of its own
before it appropriates all that it is capable of usefully absorbing in the new matter.
Neither metaphor quite expresses my conviction that there must inevitably be these
two sides to education. Boys need to be presented with new ideas which they could
not develop from their own
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consciousness, and to be confronted with experiences which will make demands on
their intellect and emotions. These it is the schoolmaster's function to provide in
the appropriate form. They also need time to assimilate all this, to make it their
own, and to work it into the texture of their own life, which, particularly during
adolescence, is so largely a corporate life.
The wise schoolmaster will, no doubt, encourage and use the second process inside
the classroom. But, for the most part, it will take place outside the classroom, and
will be carried out most satisfactorily in the least restricted conditions.
Secondly, is it not at any rate one part of education to prepare the boy for life as he
will find it? In the life of most people social or economic compulsion is powerful,
and they have to do a great many things which are distasteful, if they are to adapt
themselves at all to society. Most people, in fact, have a very limited choice as to
what they will do to earn their living. I may be told that in insisting upon the
necessity of compulsory work I am going against all the teaching of modern
psychology, which demands freedom of growth, and the absence of restraint,
compulsion, and fear. My answer is that in school work the schoolmaster, acting
for society, introduces the boy gently and by degrees to the reality of adult life. The
more interest and pleasure he can by skilful teaching be led to find in that work, the
better. It is certainly no part
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of the teaching of the sanest psychology to-day that the boy must not learn to face
reality. What that psychology does teach is that the boy should be so far freed from
fear, and dependence, and memories of previous frustration, that he will face each
situation as it arrives objectively, and on its merits, and not bring to new situations
an accumulation of fear, or any other emotion, which belongs properly to the past.
False education consists not in allowing the boy to face necessities and obligations,
but in teaching him that life is easier than he will afterwards find it to be. We all
recognise that the community can justifiably impose obligations upon the adult,
which, if he is fortunate, he faces with equanimity. Is not a great deal of school
work an anticipation of, as well as a preparation for, these obligations, and should
it not be one function of "free" education to enable the boy to answer these
demands cheerfully and with confidence?
Again, in dealing with boys at the beginning of adolescence, who have had already
several years of regular work at school, how can we in general, with any show of
kindness or common sense, allow them to discontinue subjects because they are
distasteful to them? Occasionally a boy's attitude to a subject may be so unhappy
that for his general health of mind it had better for a time be dropped. But, when
boys have worked hard at the early stages of a subject for some years, and are just
on the verge of fields of fresh interest, to allow them to throw away
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the fruits of their labours, before they can estimate their value, seems to me both
unwise and unkind. I confess that such so-called choices seem to me to be merely
subtle ways of lying to children, making them believe that they possess a
knowledge and judgment which cannot yet be theirs. I do not, of course, want to
argue against encouraging a boy to develop his individual tastes and capacities. We
are bound to do that, both for the sake of the boy himself, and in order that our
community may learn to value variety of talent in its service. Let us, therefore,
make as much time as we can for such individual work, and cut down the number
of compulsory subjects to the minimum. I am only pleading against the unwisdom
of allowing a mere child, who has only mastered the rudiments of a hitherto
compulsory subject, to decide whether it is, or is not, worth while pursuing further,
Finally there was the simple fact that all these boys would have to earn their living,
and, for better or for worse, that meant that most of them would have to obtain a
school certificate.
We adopted, therefore, the curriculum of a normal secondary school, with certain
modifications to which I will return in the proper place. That did not mean,
however, that we necessarily adopted all the conventional methods and machinery
of the classroom. In particular, we managed to banish almost entirely that
extraordinary apparatus of marks, orders, prizes and penalties which have
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played in the past so large and absurd a part in school life. I permitted masters to
use marks, so long as they did not add them up. That is to say that I regarded marks
as a legitimate means of showing a boy the standard of his work in a particular
lesson or examination, or of enabling him to compare one piece of work with
another. But we dispensed altogether with weekly or terminal orders. Short
fortnightly reports told me all that I needed to know about a boy's progress, and
promotion from one form to another was the result of consultation with the masters
concerned. I had always resented the amount of time and energy which I had been
compelled, as a form master, to give to compiling those ridiculous lists and
schedules, which, at the end of it all, only told me something which I knew already,
or something that was not worth knowing. I had seen too many examples of how
the cult of marks can demoralise a teacher, and continually distract him from the
end to the means. I had long felt, too, that competitive and individualistic methods
of marking are completely unsuited to boys over the age of twelve or thirteen. At
the earlier, and in some ways more independent and selfassertive, age of the
preparatory school, individual competition may be a legitimate stimulus, and
probably I could have used it in our lowest form without doing any harm, though I
doubt whether it would have done any positive good. But in the middle and later
years of school life healthy boys do not want,
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except quite incidentally, to compete against each other in their school work, and
all the exaggerated interest which many masters take in marks and orders is for
them only a traditional and rather silly game. They would much rather cooperate
than compete in any kind of creative work, and (this is what the old-fashioned
schoolmaster finds it so difficult to believe) most of them work much harder when
cooperating than when competing, provided that the work is properly organised.*
It was one of the absurdities of the old methods that the team spirit, about which
we hear so much in every other aspect of education at this stage, was almost
ignored in the class-room. It is not, in fact, absolutely necessary for systems of
marks to be wholly competitive. Once, years ago, I tried, with rather interesting
results, a system that I called collective marking and collective reward. It was a
system of marking by which it could be seen whether the work of the form as a
whole had, or had not, reached a certain standard. If the standard had been reached,
the form as a whole received some kind of recognition. Each boy's contribution to
the total was shown as a percentage of his possible maximum mark. No doubt
others have gone further on similar lines.
We lightened ourselves, therefore, of nearly all this lumber, and I think that the
advantage was two-
* Apart from work which is cooperative, various modern plans by which children
follow their own courses of study at their own pace seem to show that competition
is not necessary as a stimulus.
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fold. In the first place, to have emphasised competition would have been quite out
of keeping with the ideas underlying the kind of organisation which I described in
the last chapter. The boys might not, probably would not have realised this, but it
would have been so. Secondly, I believe that the boys
continually of this supposed incentive to work. After all, a fairly adequate
guarantee that they would work reasonably hard lay in the fact that for nearly all of
them it was necessary to pass the usual examinations in order to obtain a
livelihood. It was not difficult, as a rule, to get even a boy who was
temperamentally lazy to see the force of this practical argument. But, granted all
that, the most effective motive for working hard is interest in the work itself, and
the urge to be creative in terms of that work, and it is just that interest which is, I
believe, constantly deadened by the traditional system of marks, orders, prizes and
penalties. Surely what happens in many lessons, and courses of lessons, of the
traditional type is that we distract the boy from his work by reminding him at every
moment of the results of his work. If it is true, as I have heard it said, that the
master of the old school thought first of the subject, and the master of the new will
think first of the pupil, is it not equally true that the pupil of the new will think first
of the subject, unlike the pupil of the old, who was made to think constantly of
himself? To turn to those parts of the school life, outside
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the classroom, which were affected only indirectly by the General Meeting—what
was there which seemed unfamiliar to an intelligent public school man visiting
Churnside, or to an intelligent boy transferred from another school? What
impression, first of all, did he have of the boys themselves?
Visitors, when asked that question, nearly always used the same words. The boys
seemed to them to be remarkably free, happy, and friendly with older people, and,
they often added, friendly without appearing to be too pleased with themselves.
The word which they emphasised was free, a word which is best not used in
education, unless we specify at the same time either what powers children are free
to develop, or from what kind of obstruction or constraint they are emancipated. In
this case I believe that there was a real freedom, both positive and negative, and
that the two aspects were interdependent. It was in fact the union of the two which
made the boys happy.
There was real freedom, for instance, behind the obvious friendliness of the boys
with older people, a freedom from any artificial barriers placed between the older
and the younger members of the community. This did not imply that we ignored
the perfectly natural barriers of age, of which all healthy young people are
instinctively aware. But I have already said enough about the family life of the
place to show how valuable it was, particularly in early days, in letting the boys
learn how to talk to
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older people naturally and sensibly about things which genuinely interested them.
In my own school days there was very little of this. Conversation at the dining
table of one's housemaster or tutor was commonly confined to school topics, and
there was a flavour of unreality in the discussion even of these. There have been
great changes, I know, in this respect at the public schools since those days, but I
wonder whether, even now, boys have sufficient opportunities of talking when they
like it should not be forced on them) with masters, without being conscious of
having an official relation with them. And if boys need this kind of conversation
with men, how much more do some of them, towards the end of their time at
school, need it with women?
Similarly, though our range of age was wider than that of the public schools, there
were no rigid and suggestive barriers to prohibit boys of different ages from talking
to each other,and enjoying each other's company. Here, too, there are perfectly
natural differences of age which normally keep boys in their separate age groups.
But the fuss and trouble which occur at some boarding schools in order to keep
older and younger boys apart would be incredible to anyone who had not seen
them. Many years ago I remember hearing of a master at one such school, a
bachelor, who suffered acutely from suspicio sexualis. Observing two boys, a large
and a small, out for a walk on a hot Sunday afternoon in the summer term, and
thinking that something about them was
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somehow demonstrative of affection, he followed them at a discreet distance for
several miles (dressed, according to the custom of that school and period, in
morning coat and top hat) only to find at the end of his journey that the boys were
brothers. Of course, there are cases of emotional friendships between older and
younger boys in the one-sex boarding school. But they should be dealt with either
as individual problems by private advice, or as part of the general sex education
given at the school, certainly not by the kind of suggestive regulation that does so
much to stimulate the evil which it tries to suppress. I remember the astonishment
of one of my older boys, who on the first evening of one term had approached a
new boy, transferred to us from another boarding school, intending merely to make
him feel at home, and show him where things were to be found. "I say, ought we to
be seen speaking together?" was the new boy's response.
Even more important was the freedom which our boys seemed to enjoy from those
schoolboy customs and conventions which make parts of public school life futile
and oppressive. This may have been due in part to the size of the school ; but I
have already indicated that in my opinion the result was one, if not the greatest, of
the benefits arising from the method of group responsibility which I described in
the last chapter. But since freedom from something should mean also freedom for
something, the reader may well ask how positively the absence of
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the usual customs helped the boys to develop what was best in them.
I would answer, first, that they were less selfconscious than many public school
boys, and that they had none of that fear of "making a show" (i.e. appearing in
public different from other people), which was the curse of one school that I have
known. Morally, this meant, I think, that it was easier for them to do and say the
unpopular thing, if they thought that it was the right thing. But almost more
important I should count the freedom to show their natural feelings towards what
they liked. Some people seem to forget that there exist in adolescent boys a natural
tenderness towards the young and weak, and a natural sense of beauty. It has been
one bane of the traditional boarding school that boys have not been expected to
have, or to show, any of the finer feelings. Emotional has to a great many
schoolmasters of the past meant sentimental. A cultivated insensibility is even now
too often the code. There is not enough for boys to be fond of in the life of the
school. "A boys' boarding school", said a wise old schoolmaster once to me,
"should be as full as possible of babies and animals.” It may not be possible always
to ensure a continuous supply of the former, but everything possible should be
done to provide the latter. I count it among my more serious sins of omission that I
did so little to encourage boys to keep animals of their own, particularly as the
conditions for doing so were favourable.
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One sign of the lack of self-consciousness, and also of the fear of showing their
natural feelings, was that the boys seemed to be infinitely more natural than we
used to be at their age, both in talking about their homes, and in meeting their
parents and relatives in the presence of other boys. I can hardly imagine one of
them declining to kiss his mother when she came to see him at school, because
there were other boys present. I have known that at other schools.
The boys were free, too, from a kind of spurious earnestness-nothing whatever to
do with a sane and serious attention to the work in hand—which certainly
characterised many schools in the past, and characterises in an even more offensive
form some modern schools which suffer from an excess of “uplift". Whatever else
there was to be heard at Churnside, there was to be heard spontaneous laughter,
and laughter shared by older and younger. That is not quite so common as it might
be. I remember once, when I was a master at another school, taking two boys away
with me in the holidays. They were boys whom I thought I knew well. They had
often had meals with me, and I had often talked with them in their studies. But at
the end of the first day of our holiday I was puzzled. I was conscious of some new
impression that I had caught from them, and I could not at first make out what it
was. Then suddenly I realised the truth. That day for the first time I had heard them
laugh naturally
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and without restraint. Well, at Churnside we laughed together about a great many
things, and perhaps more openly than is sometimes done about examinations, and
athleticism, and social pretensions, and empty school traditions, and religiosity,
and many other things which contain humbug. I do not for a moment regret that
laughter. I believe that it was healthy, and that it induced in older boys the right
kind of scepticism about a great many contemporary "slogans”.
It was not, therefore, an atmosphere in which we were likely to take too seriously
the ordinary ritual and duties of school life, nor to think that the fate of the world
depended upon their observance. But that there is a place for ritual in the life of
any boys' school I am convinced, and had I remained headmaster, and had the
school continued to grow in size, I should have made that side more prominent,
Only, the ritual must not be empty, nor the symbolism too obscure.
Of much greater importance was the fact that, to a greater extent than I had known
at any other school, the boys were not hampered and restricted by prohibitions, and
for unusually long periods were not tied down to school engagements, but were, to
put it bluntly, let alone. It was fortunate that our rural surroundings made it easy for
us to do without “bounds”, though I have always believed that even in towns there
is commonly a quite needless degree of restriction. Younger boys (that is
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boys who were not members of the General Meeting) had to obtain permission to
visit the two neighbouring towns, but for older boys the only rule was that if
cycling far afield they should write in a book the general direction in which they
were going. This, as they very well knew, was a precaution against accident, and
not intended as a check on their movements. Another precaution, hardly a
restriction, was that nobody was allowed to cycle outside the grounds till he had
passed a reasonably severe cycling test.
The amount of real spare time which is allowed to boys at many boarding schools
is absurdly small. Between the old schoolmaster, who thinks that Satan is waiting
to provide for his idle hands, and the young schoolmaster, who wants him always
to be doing something that is obviously "creative", the boy has scarcely time to call
his soul his own. At Churnside there were at least two, sometimes three, afternoons
each week (apart from the halfholidays when the General Meeting prescribed
compulsory games) on which for two or three hours the boys were unregulated.
There was some free time every evening after the first preparation. There was the
whole of Sunday, except for morning service. I attached great value to the free
period in the evening immediately before the younger boys went to bed. At this
time all alike were at liberty to find their own occupations, and it was the great
opportunity for the Entertainments Committee to show
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their ability to invent and organise amusements. To send young boys to bed
immediately after the strain of work is, surely, to flout both psychology and
common sense.
I referred in the last paragraph to the service on Sunday morning. In the first two
years I allowed attendance at this to be voluntary, but I came to the conclusion that
this was wrong. It is by no means easy to make the choice, whether to go or stay
away, a real choice, without some suggestion entering in on one side or the other.
And if it is not a real choice, it is better for it not to be left to the boy at all.
Moreover, whether it is, or is not, desirable for a boy to attend service on Sunday
morning, it is hardly desirable that he should decide by the same kind of
momentary whim that makes him take or decline a second helping of pudding. And
that is what it comes to in many cases, if there is no guidance either way. There are
people who object to any kind of compulsory religious service. But should they not
logically raise their objection at an earlier stage to the boy being obliged to receive
any kind of religious instruction, or hear any conversation into which religion
enters? If religion is recognised at all in a boarding school, I do not believe that
boys ever resent the mere fact of obligatory attendance at services. Nor do I believe
that in itself it gives them a distaste for religious obseryance in later life. There is a
good deal of humbug and rationalisation talked on the point. What does
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do harm is compulsory attendance at too many services, and at services of the
wrong kind.
I feel confident that the boys in their middle and later years benefited from having
so much time in which they could choose how to occupy themselves. Possibly, if I
had my time over again, I should not give the boys in their first two years quite so
much spare time, or, rather, I should see that in their spare time there was friendly
guidance more constantly at hand. It was the "preparatory school " stage that was
always the least complete, no doubt because it was the stage in which personally I
was least interested. In the case of boys over thirteen there never seemed to me to
be any danger of boredom. Reading, music, manual work, cycling, games of all
kinds, which (apart from team games organised by the General Meeting) I
permitted on Sunday afternoons, the usual school hobbies, endless roaming in the
park, unrestricted walks–all these helped to fill the day. And a number of boys at
various seasons did a surprising amount of school work outside the prescribed
hours.
It is worth mentioning that the boys were certainly not unduly discouraged from
making a noise. For the incessant and aimless ragging which prevails in some
places where boys are herded together, destroying all peace and seclusion, I have
no use whatever. But I believe that it is desirable to have in every school some
place where boys can go at their own choice, and play the violent and
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noisy games which many of them love. It is a perfectly healthy, and for some boys
an indispensable, outlet. I mistrust the school or house where it is a boast that there
is never any noise. I mistrust it almost as much as I mistrust the housemaster who
tells you that he knows everything that is going on in his house. We were fortunate
in having a large winter garden, which we converted into a most useful, if rather
unorthodox, gymnasium, and thither boys could resort in their spare time.
Elsewhere ragging indoors was generally forbidden. But there were many
evenings, when in the free time before the younger boys' bedtime I allowed noisy
games all over the house. In the great, echoing, uncarpeted house they made an
infernal din, and my study, while they lasted, was unendurable. But they evidently
supplied a need, and my personal convenience could well for the time take second
place.
To all this must be added, I think, a kind of general sense among the boys that we
genuinely wanted to make them happy. That is quite different, as they soon came to
know, from wanting to make them soft, or easygoing, or unable to face difficulties
and problems. But they knew quite well that I would always rather encourage than
discourage any suggestion that they made, or even any unauthorised venture,
provided that it did not actually contravene any rule. I am sometimes told that it is
the first duty of a headmaster to be able to say No. Of course he must be able to
say No, and often, having
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said it, he will find that sound principles oblige him to continue to say it. But in
dealing with youth the generous-minded and understanding man, even when he is
obliged to say No, will commonly regret that he is unable to say Yes. There are too
many headmasters who enjoy saying No, and think they are strong, when they are
only indulging their sense of power and importance. It is easy to rationalise as
sound discipline a man's disinclination to take risks or to disturb a comfortable
inertia. And I believe that there is no headmaster whom intelligent boys more
heartily despise, than the man who having hastily made a decision will not depart
from it in the light of fresh knowledge, because he fears to admit his mistake.
It would have been surprising if boys who came to this life from more restricted
conditions, where a different conception of discipline prevailed, did not sometimes
at first kick up their heels, so to speak, and behave in ways which would not
always have commended themselves to disciplinarians of a former school. I can
remember several boys who, when they came, appeared to be good little boys of
what was formerly thought of as the best Sunday School brand, and who went
through a period when they appeared superficially to be mischievous little
barbarians. For that matter, there were some boys, from unwise and unnecessarily
restrictive homes, who remained partially in this stage almost till the end of their
school life, and attained a satisfactory poise
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and power of adaptation only in their last year. That did not seem to me to be a
matter about which to worry. We must remember that schools for adolescent boys
are places in which there is much to work off and get rid of, as well as much to
acquire and assimilate. Until in the education of infancy and early childhood there
is less unnecessary frustration, more wise suggestion, and more making a child
understand both himself and his environment, schools for older boys will contain
many who are unequally developed, and partly retarded. Only gradually, and with
constant help, will such a boy fit into the society of his coevals and elders. That is
where the schoolmaster needs patience and faithpatience in watching the boy make
an ass of himself, and faith in the power of the boy's social impulses and a healthy
environment to pull him through. He must think how he can help, and there are
many times when the best help will take the negative form of letting the boy alone.
The test of whether a school is doing this part of its work well is, not so much what
the boys are like when they leave, as how quickly and easily they adapt themselves
to their new surroundings, and how they develop within the next few years. There
is no greater compliment that you can pay to his education than to say in the case
of such a boy “how much he has improved since he left school".
I wonder if I have given the impression that there were no restrictions at all, and
that life was an
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unregulated chaos. If so, it is quite false. Quite apart from the normal lessons of a
school, and the time-table to be observed, there were rules which had to be kept,
and duties to be performed. Nor would I have had it otherwise. Outer freedom is of
no use in education unless it promotes an inner freedom, and, as Lane once said to
me, "Your inner freedom is of no moral value, unless it enables you to face
compulsion". There were rules, and important ones, just because they were
comparatively few. I think I can honestly say that I never made a rule without
explaining fully to the boys why I made it, and this was easy, because the rules
were commonly made necessary by the nature of the house and grounds, or in
order to promote health and the general convenience of the whole community. This
is, I think, important. I did not regard them as having any "right" to know why
rules were made but it seemed to me to be common sense and educationally sound
to assume that they would be interested in my reasons, and sufficiently intelligent
to understand them. There is no doubt that by explaining your rules you avoid a
great deal of contrasuggestion which makes for lawbreaking. Our rules ensured
discipline, in the sense that they promoted the conditions in which the work of the
school could be best carried on. That, surely, should be the primary meaning of
school discipline, so long as it is thought of as something imposed from without.
But they were not made for the sake
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of discipline, in the sense that we believed that it was necessarily good for people
to be prevented from doing what they wanted to do. I think, too, that I have said
enough to show that we avoided the fatal danger of thinking, or letting the boys
think, that school rules comprise the whole of morality,
Rules are generally taken to imply officers to enforce them and punishments for
those who break them. In talking in public about Churnside I have usually found
that the first question asked by administrators is what did the whole scheme cost;
and that schoolmasters ask immediately whether we had marks, prefects and
punishments particularly corporal punishment. It is, indeed, rather amazing that
punishment bulks so big in the common notions of English education. It did not
play a very large part in our lives, but at various times I thought about it, and
discussed it with boys, with the result that certain impressions were left in my
mind.
I believe, in the first place, that it is sound for the schoolmaster to make a
distinction between moral offences—lying, stealing, selfishness, unkindness and
the like and school offences—the breach of rules, disorderliness, unpunctuality and
persistent laziness. I am quite aware that the distinction can be pressed too far. But
I believe that in practice it works. And with regard to the first set of offences—
which I have called moral I agree with those who hold that there is no place for
punishment in a school where the general atmo-
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sphere and the personal relationship between boy and housemaster, or headmaster,
are as they should be. Psychology teaches us that in many such cases these are best
thought of not as offences at all, but rather as diseases, often of a purely temporary
nature. This is particularly true of stealing at the age of puberty and adolescence.
Stealing occurs intermittently at all schools. It has very little to do with whether the
boys are poor or the reverse. I have known plenty of it in houses at public schools.
Some masters are thrown into a panic by it, but I remember the remark of one wise
schoolmaster who said to me years ago, "Never worry about stealing. It is almost
the only thing in school life that is not infectious." It is almost invariably a
symptom of something deeper, and in my own experience, whenever I have been in
a position to ascertain the facts, I have found that the boy who steals at that age is
suffering from some fear, or repressed curiosity, or uneven development, in his
sexual life. Stealing can be a considerable nuisance in a school, and can cause most
unjust suspicion to rest upon the innocent, but if the master is completely frank
with his boys about his own attitude to it, he can make theft an opportunity for
some most useful moral education.
But even when the idea of disease is not tenable, and we must clearly hold the boy
morally responsible for what he has done, or failed to do, I cannot believe that for
this kind of offence there is any need for a penalty, but only for explanation,
disapproval,
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and encouragement. Suffering there may have to be apart from the sense of guilt,
and in some cases the pain and the relief-of confession. Or there may have to be
apology and restitution to the wronged person. And in some cases the real
punishment as well as the final clearing up of the whole affair consists in publicity,
when the master has his chance of teaching the crowd to hate the sin while still
loving the sinner. And let it be said without cant—if we are to speak of suffering,
the suffering (and the boy will know this, if the relationship is right) will
necessarily be shared. The disappointment of the master will be part of the
punishment of the boy. It is, surely, one of the universal laws that we cannot help
others in their need without some gift or sacrifice of ourselves.
School offences may be taken to include breaches of rules, ill discipline, and the
laziness or slackness which is nothing but a disinclination to make an effort. And
here, at any rate until the earlier education which the boy has received is very
much improved, I am not prepared to say that there is no place for punishment in
the secondary school, though stupidity and ignorance often make it unnecessarily
frequent. Unless there is to be complete licence, the alternative to punishment is a
moral disapproval, which has to be based on some kind of abstract morality. But
that, surely, is to bring altogether too heavy artillery to bear on the kind of
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offence that we are considering. It is dangerous, first, because it runs the risk of
increasing a boy's sense of inferiority by making him too dependent on an older
person; and secondly, because it implies a relation between morality and school
discipline which the boy will sooner or later discover to be false. “Why not be
honest about it," say some of the left-wing educators, and punish the boy when he
is a nuisance to you, just because he is a nuisance?" "Better personal annoyance
than abstract morality as a basis for punishment." But I have never been able to
feel that personal caprice is a sufficient basis. Human temper is too uncertain even
in the teaching profession. Unless it can rest on some social sanction we must rule
out punishment altogether.
Even less do I like the kind of semi-jocular, selfsatisfied, pseudo-virile attitude to
punishment, which even to-day is to be heard in many commonrooms. “I gave it
him good and proper,” or “That'll learn him not to do it again." What master in a
conventional school has not heard that kind of thing ad nauseam? The plain fact is
that these people take an ill-concealed pleasure in inflicting punishment-
particularly, as a rule, when it is corporal punishment. Some of them, challenged
on this point, might reply that they do take pleasure, and rightly, in seeing it
established that a rule cannot be broken with impunity, that they are, in fact, as it
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has been well expressed, not vindictive but vindicative. That is reasonable enough
for the philosopher dealing with the adult world. But in the case of most
schoolmasters it is pure rationalisation. Or they might answer that they believe it is
good for boys to learn to endure pain. So for that matter do I, and in some respects
I should like to see school life provide more opportunities for courting pain and
danger. But there is no reason that their training in endurance should have anything
penal about it. When one thinks of all the masters who clearly enjoy inflicting
corporal punishment, and all the boys who look forward to inflicting it when they
are prefects, and all those who look back on having endured it pluckily, it is almost
surprising that no supporter has pleaded for its retention on the ground that its
abolition would destroy so much pleasure.
To come to my own viewshould not the essential element in all punishments for
school offences be that it should be absolutely impersonal? I cannot see that there
should be any moral fuss made about it. It is questionable whether any boy should
ever be punished for breaking a rule of which he does not understand the object.
He should already feel that the school rules are a kind of framework of the school
society, which holds it together, and that inevitably society (in this case represented
by the master) cannot allow its security
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and well-being to be endangered. Indeed the sanction behind school rules, and the
demand that a boy should work reasonably hard, seem to me to be an anticipation
of the social and economic consequences which do fall in later life upon anyone
who is antisocial or hopelessly indolent—unless, in the last case, he enjoys a
private income. The master, then, in such cases is the representative of society-not
necessarily approving or disapproving –who carries out its demands.
The fear to which this kind of punishment will appeal–for I suppose all
punishments appeal to fear-will be not the cramping timidity which aggravates any
already existing sense of inferiority or weakness, but the precautionary fear, which
seeks to avoid danger, in this case the danger of being at odds with what society
requires.
One story will show, among other things, that I did sometimes succeed in keeping
punishment impersonal. We were unable to give the boys separate studies, as the
house did not provide for this, but a few of the older boys used one or two small
rooms on the top floor. One of them, a highspirited and particularly likable person,
who was going through a rebellious phase, on one occasion threw a loudly
explosive firework from his window on to the asphalt below. It was not a great
crime, but it made a deafening noise outside the window of a room where boys
were working, created some
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alarm, and interrupted preparation. The penalty that I inflicted was to exclude him
for a period from his room upstairs, and to make him use the ordinary classrooms
and the library. I knew that this was a rather annoying and uncomfortable penalty,
but I did not at the moment realise what was the chief pleasure of which I was
depriving him. The larger rooms were heated by radiators, but in the room upstairs
which he shared with two others they enjoyed a fire. The next evening in the free
period there came a knock at my study door, and when he entered, and I asked him
what he wanted, he asked whether he might spend the evening beside my fire, as
he was not able to enjoy his own. And, of course, I welcomed him.*
Objectivity, therefore, does not imply a lack of sympathy. On the contrary, the
master will be saved from pomposity, and humbug, and any kind of spurious
righteousness, if he remains young enough in mind to see the boy's point of view,
to recognise that his mistaken or forbidden actions are due in all probability to
earlier frustrations, and to appreciate and admire the spirit and energy without
approving the course which they have followed. If he can do that, if that is to say in
that particular department of life his love is stronger than his selflove, the exact
measure of the punishment is of secondary importance.
* I know that this is in one sense a story against myself. But not, I venture to think,
a story against Churnside.
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I have said, perhaps, enough about punishment, and I hope I have not given the
impression that in fact we very much bothered about it. I have not, however,
answered one question which I have so often had put to me. My own attitude to
corporal punishment was frankly experimental. In certain terms I used it, and then
for a number of terms I did without it, and my conclusion is that no school ought to
feel that it is necessary, and that every school might well dispense with it. The
argument that it is quickly over does not impress me. In practice it means that it is
the quickest way out of a difficulty for both sides, and the quickest way—the one
that demands least hard thought-is commonly the worst. Where, as in some
schools, it is the almost universal punishment, its effect is gradually brutalising.
For no punishment does the appetite so grow with what it feeds on, which is not
surprising when we remember that it is not infrequently an unconscious
homosexual gesture, or a piece of mild sadism. Because the infliction of pain and
the desire for it are so often connected with sexuality, a man takes a grave
responsibility who allows adolescent boys to beat each other. I do not say that it
should never in any circumstances be done; but to allow it without knowledge and
discrimination is unpardonable.
The only good that I think it ever did at Churnside which could not have been
obtained by other means was that it did allow certain boys to be quite
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sure that they could bear pain with fortitude, and thereby give them an inner
confidence. “I am glad that Mr. Simpson beat me yesterday”, said one boy to my
wife in our second year. “Why?” she asked. "Didn't he hurt you?" "Yes," he
answered; "but I was always afraid that if I were beaten I should be a coward. And
now I know that I am not.” So far, so good, but that, after all, was not the object of
the punishment. A more interesting case was that of a boy who had proved a
coward in that respect, though I had never noticed that he showed physical
cowardice on the playing field. Once, when he came to see us after he left at the
age of about sixteen, he told me that he had always hated himself for the way he
had behaved, and felt that I had looked down on him for it. He wanted to have my
good opinion, and he felt that this somehow came between us. So would I beat him
there and then, for he was sure that now he could take it all right? Endurance of
pain is good, but, as I said before, there should be other ways of teaching it.
Rules would seem to demand officials to see that they are kept, and that leads me
to prefects. I have remarked before that had we admitted no boys under the age of
thirteen, or thirteen and a half, the common age of entrance to the public schools, I
should probably have had no prefects, and thrown far more responsibility upon the
General Meeting. Incidentally, that might have told against some boys when they
were applying for posts, for appointing
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bodies often enquire whether or not a boy has been a prefect, and they might not
have understood the special circumstances. In the earliest years, when all the boys
were young and the General Meeting was still growing, I had no prefects, but gave
to each boy some job to perform, or room to look after, and in connection with
those special duties (and in that connection only) he might have some mild
disciplinary powers. For example, he might be able to exclude a boy from a
particular room, if he misbehaved there, or from the use of certain games materials.
This, I am sure, is a far sounder plan for younger boys than to make a separate
class of prefects, if only because it spreads the jobs among many, and ensures the
direct relation between master and boy which at that age is desirable. Some
headmasters of preparatory schools, in their eagerness to show that they are part of
the public school system, and because the public school is the boundary of their
thoughts, ridiculously overdo the prefect system, and throw responsibility
prematurely upon mere children, whom they sometimes turn into prigs or worse. I
started prefects, not that they should be "policemen", but that they should generally
look after the little boys, who were more or less outside the scope of the General
Meeting, and that they should be leaders of the groups (at first four and then three)
into which the school was divided for the purpose of games, household duties, and
other general purposes. Their duties developed as
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the years went on, but I think that till the end of my time at Churnside they were
primarily leaders and directors inside their respective groups, and not oppresively
or unnecessarily"official”. I chose them when possible from the highest form, two
or three, as a rule, for each group. They formed a kind of cabinet whom I talked to
frankly and consulted about every side of school life, and they were, for the most
part, extraordinarily loyal and understanding. But they were never a separate caste,
as they are at many schools. The General Meeting, among other things, made that
impossible. Their privileges were few, and their power of punishment necessarily
limited. Looking back I think that what made their position so indefinably different
from that of other prefects whom I have known was that they were not associated
with anything like the traditional fagging, but that they were associated with the
group duties which I will describe.
Fagging is a feature of traditional boarding school life, which is, as a rule, either
ignorantly condemned or sentimentally–even neurotically-defended. It is just one
of those things that a certain kind of Old Boy, who has never quite succeeded in
growing up, will make the excuse for the most arrant sentimentality and humbug.
His enthusiasm, however, is likely to leave unconvinced a good many people who
have had personal experience of the fagging system, and have come to look at it
dispassionately. For it is a quite common conclusion that the whole
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thing is rather silly and antiquated, and which is. more serious—that it actually
stands in the way of those who would like to give boys a more genuine education
in service, and to make them less dependent on the labours of others in the
practical things of life. That is not in the least to say that fagging is commonly
barbarous or cruel. But it can certainly be extremely onerous, and abuses of the
system, except the gravest, are not in all cases easily disclosed and redressed.
Everyone knows that in some schools and houses it would be as much as the life,
or at any rate the happiness, of a fag were worth for him to appeal against an
injustice. He would be up against the whole weight of a tradition represented by
prefects, old boys, and masters, all of them professedly believing in the virtues of
the system, and intending, if only for their own peace of mind, to make it work.
For it is not so much other boys, as older people, who are really responsible.
Fagging is not (I am not saying that it should be the system of the boys themselves.
It is the result of compulsion (commonly, though not always, in the last resort the
prefect's cane) and mass suggestion. Service in itself, no doubt, appeals to the
social impulses of adolescence, but by no means necessarily this particular form of
it. We sometimes hear about the delightful tie between fag and fag-master, but the
relations between older and younger boys are likely to be healthiest when they can
think of themselves as partners in a common task, each contributing
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according to his age and strength, and when there is no question on either side of
purely personal services, or favours to be given or withheld.
It can scarcely be denied that such personal service does often form a large
proportion of a fag's duties, and that the fag in his spare time may be quite
needlessly at the beck and call of a rather capricious overlord. Take the quite
common system of "fag-calls”, where on the call of "fag" all the available small
boys must leave their occupations and rush to answer the call, the last arrival being
sent on the prefect's errand. It would be difficult to devise a method that
necessitated greater bother and inconvenience in producing the desired result. The
younger boy, who is called from what may be a quite intelligent occupation, to go
on what may be a quite trivial errand, does not feel that he is doing a public
service. If he thinks about the matter at all, he feels, and quite rightly, that he is
obeying another boy who has the privilege of using him as a private servant. Yet,
surely, the ideal of service that we want to inculcate is that of public service, and,
further, that of service performed by all in the measure of their ability to serve, and
held by all to be honourable.
For even if it were true that the fag performed only necessary tasks, it might well
be asked whether fagging can encourage the right attitude to such service, so long
as fagging is recognised as something from which you try to escape as soon as
your
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age and the vagaries of promotion permit. For it is not, as a rule, all boys who are
not prefects who have to perform these tasks, but everyone below a certain age or a
certain form, and there may be considerable inequality as to the number of terms of
fagdom. If the service is honourable and educative, it should be shared by all for an
equal time. The fact is that you fag because you are, for the time, counted an
inferior creature, and if, fortunately, the system does not often produce a sense of
humiliation, it probably breeds, more often than we like to think, in boys of certain
temperament, a feeling of resentment, or a mixture of cynicism and indifference
which have nothing whatever to do with public spirit.
It is sometimes said for fagging, and it is the best that can be said for it, that many
public school boys come from homes, even in these days, where they are far too
dependent upon servants, and have little chance of learning to do simple household
duties for themselves; and that fagging gives to boys an opportunity of learning
how to do these domestic tasks, and also, perhaps, a greater respect for manual
work and manual workers in general. So far, so good. But all these results could be
obtained, more efficiently and without the disadvantages of the fagging system, by
other means. I believe that our organisation at Churnside did obtain them, and
others as well, I have said already that every boy made his own
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bed and cleaned his boots. Those were his private concerns. But the school was
divided into three groups, each under its own prefects, and each group, while in
turn it was taking its week of duty, was responsible for a considerable amount of
work for the school. In the first place, from the group on duty were taken boys to
perform certain daily duties, such as messengers and bellringers. But, more
important, a visitor to the College, if he rose early, would find the group on duty
awake and downstairs at least half an hour before the rest, engaged in cleaning a
number of classrooms and other rooms before the general day's work began.
Incidentally, I should like to point out that the plan did actually save the wages and
maintenance of two or three servants. At the midday meal the same group provided
servers in the dining hall, and to some extent they were also on duty at breakfast
and tea. The plan was well worth a certain amount of broken crockery. Throughout
the week the group as a whole were performing duties which affected the comfort
and convenience of everyone, and the tasks performed, unlike the fag's tasks, were
genuinely public work.
It is worth noticing that, though organised by the prefects, all this work had to be
done well enough to satisfy standards set by older people. One of the masters
inspected the rooms cleaned, and reported any shortcomings to me. The turn of
duty started on Monday morning and on Sunday evening

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I used to comment on the work of the outgoing group. It was quite easy to make a
group collectively proud of a good week, or ashamed of a bad one. But there were
extraordinarily few bad ones. Only once or twice did I have to adopt the drastic
measure of putting a group on duty for a second week on end.
This seemed to me to give the group leaders and the prefects exactly the right kind
of experience and opportunity. They were genuine leaders and organisers, and had
to learn how to manage and help younger boys, but they were also essentially
partners with the rest in a common effort, differing from them only in that they
served in a different way. It was they who had the chief bother, and it was they who
were most immediately in trouble when things, as occasionally happened, went
wrong.
So much for the rules, and punishments, and prefects. But the real basis of the sane
and orderly (though not goody-goody) happiness of the place was that the boys
were trusted. I had better say what I mean by that, for the word trust is on every
schoolmaster's lips, and it has become almost devoid of meaning. I do not mean
relying upon a minority of boys, vested with authority, to prevent the rest from
breaking rules, or to catch them if they do. Nor do I mean a kind of personal
compact between myself and every boy, a system of every boy being on his
honour. I have seen that system work. But I think that the danger is too great (save
in quite
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exceptional circumstances), that the weakest link of the chain may snap, and that
then there will be organised hypocrisy on one side, and a fool's paradise on the
other. I mean that I tried always to appeal in public and private to their good sense
and fairness, and self-respect, and the need to do the best for other people, and I
believed that in far more cases than not the boys would respond. I knew, of course,
that confidence of this kind was sometimes abused. I neither expected, nor wanted,
to know everything that happened. But, provided that there is a general atmosphere
of good feeling and sympathy, and provided that a master can move freely among
his boys and they have ready access to him, I believe it is far better to risk a few
boys doing weak or foolish things than to try to maintain a "safer" atmosphere of
regulation and precaution. Neither masters nor prefects were encouraged to overdo
supervision. This is better in the long run even for the weak and foolish, who over
and over again are helped more by the example and influence of other boys, whom
trust has strengthened, than they would be by adult direction. I hope it will not
sound high falutin, if I say that to keep these conditions a rather delicate balance of
desires and impulses and loyalties—did require a good deal of both patience and
faith. There was no room for the rigid disciplinarian of the old school who wanted
to work by fixed rules of conduct; nor for the suspicious person who is delightedly
sure that some harm is
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going on round the corner; nor for that kind of brisk efficiency, which looks for
immediate and measurable results.
Looking back, I think that in the soil thus cultivated we did see some rather
remarkable growth. Though we did not specially profess to take “difficult" boys,
we had our fair share of them among our fee-payers, and often it was gratifying to
see how boys who had been unhappy in other conditions gained in courage and
confidence, and how the more intricate knots seemed almost automatically to
become unravelled. But I am thinking more of the majority of boys who came to
us, with all their varieties of capacity and temperament. They were, after all, when
they came, part of the ordinary material which fills the secondary schools of rural
areas, and I believe that in comparison with most boys of similar origin, or, for that
matter, with the boys of many boarding schools, they went far and rapidly ahead.
I do not mean in academic progress and success. There was plenty of that, for what
it was worth. Sometimes, no doubt, it was worth much. What I have in mind was
rather what appeared to my, no doubt prejudiced, eyes, to be a very remarkable
development in sensitiveness, and a certain poise of character, which marked many
boys after they had been for a few years in the school. I find it difficult to describe
the latter quality. It was something more than confidence, and more positive than
disinter-
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estedness. More than boys I have been with at other schools, each boy seemed to
be himself and no one else, not a type, nor a product, nor a bundle of tendencies
and possibilities. Perhaps the best word for it is individuality.

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INDIVIDUALITY IN THE BOARDING SCHOOL

I have no positive definition of individuality. It is not the same as eccentricity, of
which I imagine English boarding schools have produced their due share. It is not,
as some young novelists seem to think, a consciousness of being different from
other people, or a neurotic compulsion to march out of step. It has nothing
whatever to do with individualism, nor does it imply any antithesis to social
conduct. On the contrary, "the best kind of social conduct", to quote Sir Percy
Nunn, "implies a strong self behind it”. Whatever else individuality means, it does
not mean the negation of service, though it may imply a service of variety, rather
than a service of uniformity.
Without accepting the whole theory of natural goodness, and without denying the
need for control as well as for release, must we not admit that individuality means
not only the difference of one personality from another, but also some kind of
completeness of growth, and that it must, in part at least, result from the freedom
of development for
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certain innate tendencies? If so, the question arises which of those tendencies are
strongest at the successive stages of boyhood, and how far at each stage they are
commonly encouraged, or obstructed, by the normal conditions of school life. At
Churnside we had boys in three distinct stages of growth, and when I now look
back and recall the successive entries of boys, and what they were like, and how
they behaved as they passed through the school, I find that the distinctive
characteristics of these three stages stand out with remarkable clearness. There was
first what may be called the preparatory stage, including our youngest boys, most
of them county scholars, who came at the age of eleven, or even occasionally ten.
Then, at the age of about thirteen or thirteen and a half, there seemed almost
invariably to come a marked change of mind as well as of body. It is tempting to
give to the period which began then the name of adolescence, but that word is used
to cover so many different ranges of years that I will call this stage simply the
middle period, and regard it as ending somewhere between sixteen and seventeen.
Finally, there was what may be called the upper fifth and sixth form stage, when a
normal healthy boy, whether he is or is not still nominally a schoolboy, is in fact
reaching forward to the wider life and aspirations of early manhood.
All my own experience, and much of my rather fragmentary reading of educational
theory, have left me with the conviction that a great many of our
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more serious errors of teaching and organisation come from ignoring or
underestimating the differences between these three stages of growth. There is
danger in a too rigid classification. Boys are a great deal more than specimens of
their respective age groups. They do not all fit with equal neatness into the
categories of the psychologist, and show at the same time, and to the same extent,
the qualities which are expected of them. Education would be a great deal less
interesting than it is if nobody were precocious and nobody retarded. But there is
less danger-even to individuality itself-in recognising that boys share the
characteristics of successive stages of growth, than in ignoring the contributions
made by those phases to the continuous development and integration of character.
Quite apart from his relations with individual boys, each of these different ages
makes its own collective demand on the schoolmaster. This naturally applies to the
class teacher, who adapts his methods to the age of his pupils. But it applies at least
equally to the master in a boarding school who has to organise the school life
outside the class-room, and who is in direct intimate contact with boys, like the
housemaster in a public school, or the headmaster of a preparatory school. The
latter has to deal with one of the age groups which I have mentioned, the former
with two. I had all three, and in a small school my position was in many ways more
that of a housemaster than a head-
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master. I see now, more clearly perhaps than I did at the time, that I had three
distinct parts to play, and was provided with an opportunity of learning where at
each stage the schoolmaster commonly does most to promote or retard growth.
It scarcely needs the professional psychologist to tell us the principal
characteristics of what I have called the preparatory age. They are fairly obvious.
The boy is essentially self-assertive–seeking to establish his own position and
make his presence felt as regards both other boys and adults. This does not mean in
the least that he is necessarily bumptious or aggressive, though he can easily be
made so by “spoiling" or by unnecessary frustration. Nor, certainly, does it mean
that he dislikes or resents sensible discipline. It does mean that he likes older
people to be aware of him, and to appreciate his growing powers, and that the boys
with whom he works and plays are less a group, with which he likes to identify
himself, than a collection of individuals among whom he wants in one way or
another, and not necessarily in any selfish sense, to excel.
It is, secondly, the age of independent and adventurous mastery of difficulties in
the quest for information and power. The boy's mind seems to be tougher than it is
for some years afterwards, and it is astonishing how much he will learn and
remember with the right, and sometimes with the wrong, kind of stimulus. It is at
this age that much
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of the formal work in the various subjects, which is now so often not done at all,
can be undertaken with the least loss of interest; for a boy of this age will often
find a certain satisfaction merely in learning something new, or something that he
thinks that other boys of his age do not know.
It is, finally, the age of hero-worship and imitation of the older person, both
conscious and unconscious. Not only does the boy readily accept ideas from an
adult, if the personality of the latter is attractive to him, but to an almost absurd
extent, and far beyond his own knowledge of what he is doing, he will imitate
personal characteristics of behaviour. He may be, and usually is, a poor judge of
adult character, but he is amazingly quick to notice and copy the externals. For that
reason personal appearance, in no narrow sense, ought to be an important
qualification in teachers of boys of this age. The man who teaches them must
reconcile himself to the fact that he is, whether he likes it or not, a substitute for the
father. For this is the age when the father has his great opportunity for helping his
sons, an opportunity which in the case of his daughters comes four or five years
later. However much or little else the boy may learn from him, he will take away a
thousand impressions of his master's speech and actions, which will all go to form
his picture of what a man ought to be. Clearly the headmaster of the preparatory
boarding school has at once a far greater opportunity and
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responsibility than the head of the elementary day school. Nobody who has ever
reaped the fruits of their labour can deny the immense care which preparatory
school headmasters commonly give to their work. But it can scarcely be said that,
judged by the test of individuality, the products of that work are entirely
satisfactory; and this, in my opinion, is because they ignore or mishandle the three
chief tendencies which I have mentioned. It would be surprising if the faculty of
hero-worship were not sometimes, no doubt unconsciously, exploited. A
distinguished writer has brought the criticism that the headmaster sometimes tries
to make his pupils too like himself; and if the man himself, as is not infrequently
the case, is a rather conventional person, with not very wide interests, and rather
frightened by any quality in other people which he cannot immediately understand,
his influence, however sound in other respects, is not likely to make for
individuality.
I believe that an even more serious criticism which can be brought against many
preparatory schools is that they often unnecessarily infringe the most healthy desire
of a boy of that age to be let alone, and to be, if only for an odd hour, independent.
They try to make him show a corporate spirit, and live up to an ideal of
responsibility, for which he is by no means ready. There is scarcely a moment
when he can feel that he is not one of a herd. Need bounds be so narrow? Does
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all this emphasis on being like everyone else come entirely from other boys, or
does it partly represent the attitude of mind of his seniors? And, as I said before, I
believe that the idea of a prefect system, which has been borrowed from the public
schools, is at this stage wholly premature.
We are bound to ask whether we give the preparatory boy anything like sufficient
scope for his natural enterprise and spirit of enquiry. The number of authorised
interests both inside and outside the classroom is very small. Two boys to whom I
was recently talking illustrate my meaning. One of them had been compelled to
give up English when he was ten, in order to begin Greek. No doubt his
headmaster saw in him a future open entrance scholar at one of the big schools,
and saw, too, all the kudos that he would bring to the school. The other, who was
beginning to take an interest in botany owing to encouragement at home, told me
that at one time gardening had been encouraged at his school, but latterly the
younger masters had stopped it "as it interfered with cricket". The curriculum may
be laid down by the requirements of the public schools, but need the so-called
recreation of these children be so stereotyped? It is the tragedy of the preparatory
headmaster that he is always tempted to think of his boys not so much as so many
individuals, each with a developing personality of his own, but rather as candidates
for a coming test. In a short time they will have to be
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made acceptable, for the sake of his credit and theirs, to a society which will apply
its standards in some respects very rigid and narrow standards not only to the boy's
academic and athletic attainments, but to every detail of his daily life.
As I implied in the last chapter, I feel that the preparatory stage was the least
satisfactory part of our work. There were not, in the first place, enough of these
younger boys to allow them to be organised in a semi-separate group, with their
own discipline and interests. It was my hope that, as numbers increased, it would
be possible to have a junior house in charge of a master specially qualified for
dealing with boys of that age. To have done quite full justice to their needs inside
the one community would have meant more supervision on the part of masters. Not
that masters were needed to restrict them, but they would have had to be more in
evidence, and available to help when required. But that would have endangered the
spontaneity and genuine self-direction of the General Meeting and its various
committees, and perhaps spoiled a form of organisation which I believed to be
specially suited to the needs of boys of the middle stage. And perhaps I was
influenced by the conviction, which grew stronger as the years passed, that in fact
these boys at the preparatory stage, whether they came from richer or poorer
homes, ought not really to be at a boarding school at all, certainly not at a one-sex
boarding school, but that they ought
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to be at home learning the lessons which can only be taught in the life of a family.
All the same, I hope that the general nature of the school life may have led us to
avoid some not uncommon mistakes in connection with these younger boys. They
were neither coddled nor bullied. Bullying of the old-fashioned physical kind is, to
judge from what I have seen and heard, far commoner in preparatory than in public
schools. They were certainly not unduly restricted. They could really be alone if
they felt the need. They were encouraged to be enterprising, and at the same time
things were not made too soft for them. I am probably the last person to say
whether there was any abuse of their faculty for imitation. So far as one can
estimate a process so subtle and unconscious, my impression is that one result of
their being in a school which included boys of eighteen was that this faculty was
exercised to a large extent on the older boys, and, therefore, less than at
preparatory schools on the masters. I have an idea, too, that this was less true of the
boys who had been for a time at a preparatory school than of the county scholars:
and, if that was the case, it is a point of some interest.
It was in dealing, almost for the first time in my life, with boys of this age that I
first realised fully how tempting, and how infinitely dangerous, it is for the
schoolmaster to pass premature judgments, especially of an unfavourable kind,
upon his pupils.
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I am not sure that it is not one of the worst offences of which a schoolmaster can be
guilty. The clever young man, who likes to entertain the commonroom with his
epigrams, is not the only offender. His more experienced and disillusioned
colleagues have not always learnt how one episode or action may give a boy a bad
name, and how once given, sometimes on quite insufficient evidence, it may cling
to him and injure him throughout his whole time at school. It is not only that the
superficial remarks of one master may predispose his colleagues to do less than
justice to whatever good qualities a boy may possess. There is also the immense
and subtle power of suggestion. People, in their outward seeming, are very much
what we make them, and our pupils, to an extent which we hardly dare to
contemplate, show us those facets of their character which we expect them to
show. I remember the bitter words of a former pupil who had come to me in the
extremity of poverty, after being reduced to selling toys on a London pavement.
“When I first went to X”, he said, "my father told my housemaster that I had once
stolen. So, from that time I was a thief in his eyes, and I was never allowed to be
anything else". The plea, no doubt, of a weak character. But how had he been
helped in his weakness?
If superficial adverse criticism and glib judgments are peculiarly evil in connection
with younger boys, it is not only at this stage that they
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are harmful. They are a danger at all ages, and especially in residential
communities, where suggestion and disapproval can bear with such tremendous
force upon the individual. I have long thought that the schoolmaster's first prayer
should be for help to remember that many of his pupils will be his superiors in
intellect, and all of them may be his superiors in goodness. Should not his second
prayer be to be delivered from the fault of passing hasty judgments on those
younger than himself?
The main problem at Churnside, however, lay with boys in what I have called the
middle stage. It represents roughly the first three years that a boy spends at a public
school. This was a stage through which all our boys passed, both those fair
percentage–who left at or before seventeen to enter employment, and those sons of
fee-paying parents who came to us from preparatory schools a year or more later
than the county scholars. Of the characteristics which are prominent at this age I
believe that the schoolmaster must place first in order of importance the gregarious
tendency, creative of, and loyal to, the group. Only through a keen sense of
membership of a group can the deeper impulses of a normal boy of this age be
satisfied, and, from the point of view of the practising schoolmaster, I do not
believe that it matters whether, with some psychologists, we think of a separate
gregarious instinct or group of impulses, or whether, with others,
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we think of those impulses as an extension or development of primitive relations
existing within the family.
That such a tendency does exist and attain its maximum force between these years
can hardly be doubted by any schoolmaster who has watched closely any
collection of boys, particularly in a boarding school, pass through the successive
phases. It became a regularly recurring experience for me to see each entry of
eleven-year-olds develop in due course this extreme group consciousness. It was
quite distinct from anything that was encouraged by adults, and it was quite
different from any kind of pride or loyalty as regards the school as a whole. They
soon acquired the latter sentiment to a reasonable degree, and it was largely bound
up with the example set them by the older boys. But after a year or two their first
interest (though that word makes it almost too conscious a quality) was clearly the
life of that part of the school which consisted of boys of their own, or nearly their
own, age. In the collective life of that smaller unit within the larger, in practice a
form or one or two middle forms, they found a kind of satisfaction which would
have been quite impossible a year or two earlier or later. It was not, of course, that
they were any less individuals, or less different one from another. A close observer
could see that they were more so. But the differences appeared less in their
relations with older people, and more in their relations with
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each other inside their particular group. I became convinced that the only kind of
"freedom" for which we ought to ask at this age is freedom of the group and within
the group. The group, that is to say, whether we call it school, house, form, or
something else, should be conscious of its own existence, able to assert itself in
contrast with other groups, and, if possible, responsible for collective activities
which will lead to joint failure or joint success. Freedom for the healthy individual
at this stage means freedom not so much to distinguish or separate himself from
the group, as to promote its interests to the limit of his own capacity.
Indeed it is surely quite natural and healthy for the interests of boys of this age to
be centred largely in the life of their own adolescent community, and to be
withdrawn to a marked degree from the world of parents and older relations and
friends. Parents, mothers in particular, are usually more than half aware that this
does happen, but they often resent it, and think that there must be something
somehow wrong with either themselves or their boys. They do not realise that their
son needs for the time being more than anything else membership of a boy society.
Naturally the length of that time varies with the individual. But I believe, in spite
of the persuasive pleas of those co-educators who think that their methods apply
equally at all stages, that we must not be surprised if during these years boys are
emotionally content with the
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activities of a society of their own age and sex, particularly, I would add, if they
have experienced some form of co-education, or been members of a family of
brothers and sisters, in earlier years.
I feel inclined to go further, and to say that for some time during these years boys
will be emotionally satisfied not only with the activities of their own society, so far
as practical matters are concerned, but, in a far more general sense, with what lies
in the immediate present, and in the foreground of the picture of life which is
gradually being unfolded before their eyes. Novelists of school life and the more
exhibitionist kind of autobiographers are misleading guides. They represent these
years as a time of mental and spiritual groaning, and striving, and agonising. But
they are not the most normal, nor always the healthiest, of human beings, and from
my own limited experience I should say that often enough for part of this time in a
boy's life the exact opposite is true. I am assuming that his external surroundings
are reasonably healthy, that he suffers from no unnecessary frustration, that he is a
member of a society of boys of about his own age, and that the work and duties
with which he is faced are not beyond his powers. No doubt beneath the surface
nature is preparing his mind and body for new tasks and adaptations. But on the
level of consciousness there is a real, if comparatively short-lived, stability and
satisfaction with immediate ends-success in work, and play, and the
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common interests of school. It is the least “ideal" of ages, looking neither forward
nor backward, and thinking least of the unknown, the mysterious, the unseen.
Therefore to most adults, and, in particular, to nearly all women, it is the "difficult”
age.
It has not always been thought fantastic to try to discover some kind of analogy
between the stages of growth in the individual and the successive civilisations, or
cultures, in the development of the human race. If there is anything in this way of
thinking then what I have called the middle stage must surely be compared, with
however many qualifications and reserves, to that classical civilisation, of which
Hellenism was the centre and the compelling force. There was real truth, I think, in
a remark made to me by one of the wisest inspectors whom I have known, when I
told him that our boys were learning Greek instead of Latin. Possibly there was
even more truth than he himself realised. "After all," he said, "there is something
adolescent in Greek." I admit that the analogy must not be pressed too far. But is it
not true that Hellenic culture was, alike in its art and in its conscious thought,
centred round what Walter Pater calls "here and now"? That its conception of the
virtues was rather passive than active, its courage, for example, an enduring
courage rather than an adventurous courage? That, differently from any other
culture, it conceived of a complete emotional satisfaction in male comradeship? I
know very well
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that some who have infinitely more authority than I have to speak of classical
culture will, if they read these words, challenge both my statements and their
implications. All the same, I believe that it may be interesting and not unprofitable
sometimes to think of the English public schools in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries as little islands, as it were, of classical culture (classical not
merely in the language of the curriculum), existing in a modern or Western world.
It will be more easy then to understand why some of the die-hards thirty or forty
years ago were so perturbed by talk of educational reform, their horror at the first
suggestion of co-education in the boarding school, and their foaming fury at the
idea of the abolition of compulsory Greek. It was not a curriculum that was in
danger, but a whole way of life, a way to which not a few of them were attached,
not merely by habit or association, but by the emotional ties of an adolescence
from which they had never escaped.
From what I have said generally about the characteristics of this age one
conclusion at least seems to emerge. But before I deal with that, there is a question
of rather more than minor importance which seems to me to require an answer.
Have we ever really investigated at all objectively the size of the group with which
the normal boy of this age can successfully identify himself? I do not mean the size
of classes for teaching. That should be determined by principles and methods of
teach-
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ing,* and in these days, when so much stress is laid upon individual work and
time-tables, there is wide difference in opinion upon how large a class should be.
For my own part, I believe that for boys of this age there is something lost, from
the point of view of class teaching of the traditional kind, when the number rises
much beyond twenty, or falls below fifteen. But what is far more important, at any
rate in the boarding school, is the size of the house and the school. How often are
these determined on educational grounds? The success of a headmaster is often
judged quantitatively by the number of boys he has added to the school, quite
irrespective of whether the aggregate is, in fact, the number of boys whom he can
best educate. In practice it is commonly a matter of finance, and houses at public
schools are usually of their present size because, under a system which is slowly
changing, that was the number which was found to provide the housemaster with
what was considered a reasonable profit. From what I have seen at several schools,
I believe that about forty is the best number to constitute the group in which the
boy lives.
* For far and away the greater number of children it is, of course, determined by
nothing of the kind, and to most members of the possessing classes the suggestion
would appear monstrous that the children of the poor should be taught in classes of
the same size as their own. Yet, until the size of classes in the elementary schools is
drastically reduced, the waste of time, and money, and energy will remain
incalculable.
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Such an opinion, however, is purely empirical, and it seems to me that there is need
for further enquiry into the gregarious tendency or instinct, in relation to the
practical question of the size of the group in which, at different ages, it finds
satisfaction. At any rate, I am sure that it is useless to expect a boy of this age to
have anything like the same intensity of feeling for his school of several hundred
boys as he has for his house of forty or fifty. Years ago, when I was a young master
at a public school, some of us—perhaps because we were not ourselves
housemasters—used to decry house feeling as being inimical to the very superior
schoolfeeling. No doubt an unimaginative housemaster can make house feeling
into something extremely silly. But to expect a boy of fourteen or fifteen
consistently to put school before house was absurd.
To return to my main argument–I suggest that (whatever some of the left wing may
say) there is nothing necessarily antagonistic to the growth of true individuality at
this age in the life of the English boarding school. On the contrary, at their best the
English public schools have probably appealed to, and expressed, some of the
deeper elements in the nature of boys of this age more successfully than any other
schools in the modern world. Does not, in fact, their chief strength lie precisely in
what they do for boys while they are in this stage, and is not their chief weakness
that they make it difficult for boys to grow out of it? I have never been able to
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subscribe to the common idea that the two last years that a boy spends at a public
school are the most valuable. I believe that it is in the first two or three years, when
he is often a quite insignificant person in the eyes of masters and the oldest boys,
that he acquires the most valuable of those qualities which the public schools may
quite justly claim to have developed in him. For it is at that age, I think, that the
boy in the boarding school has the best chance of growing up healthily in relation
to his parents, and his family, and all that is meant by home. He loses then all
dependence on his home, in any adverse sense, and he gains, if he is fortunate, a
real independence with regard to his parents and those who are, in psychological
language, substitutes for them. That is when he can win this freedom without any
permanent loss of affection or respect for those who may, for a time, find him
distant and indifferent to old associations. It is those years, I believe, and not the
year or two when he is a prefect, that really produce the boy who is ready, if
necessary, to go to any part of the world because it is all in the day's work, and lead
his own life independent, but not in the least forgetful, of home, and parents, and
early ties. I have sometimes heard comparisons between the English and French
boy of sixteen or seventeen, not always to the advantage of the former. The French
boy, I have been told, is better informed, he has wider interests, he can talk better
about politics, art, affairs. He is more
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grown up. But my informants have usually admitted that in one important respect,
his relations with his parents, and particularly with his mother, the English boy is
more independent and more mature. Those who have had experience of both public
school life and the life of residential communities of young men who have not
been away from home before the age of eighteen or nineteen may have noticed
something of the same kind. The latter are certainly in this respect younger than
public school men of the same age. It would be absurd to say that they are more
attached to their homes and their families, but they feel their absence more acutely,
and are far more apt to "regress" in times of trouble or illness when they are with
strangers. It seems that the boarding school, for what I have called the middle
stage, is outstandingly successful in producing an attitude towards home and
parents which is one of independence, without being in the least one of revolt.
But if the life of the English boarding school has, on the whole, responded to the
needs of the boy of this age, including his strong gregarious impulses, those
schools have in practice often failed to make the best and most creative use of
those impulses, and have thereby raised obstacles to the growth of individuality
which, though not in the least necessitated by the boarding school system, are
extremely formidable. I have already said something about the conven-
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tional competitive element which is often dragged in quite unnecessarily, and clean
contrary to what boys of this age really require. But, far more important, it has
been too often forgotten that to quote Professor Nunn)"the tendency towards social
behaviour in adolescence is not necessarily 'social? in the eulogistic sense of the
word". The group feeling and group action are not necessarily "good". They are
what we make them, or, rather, what we allow the boys to make them, by granting
or denying them the right opportunities for directing themselves creatively, and by
giving or withholding our confidence. When those opportunities are given by
people who believe in their capacity to use them, boys do, in fact, hold and express
remarkably clearcut notions of right and wrong inside their own group. Further, as
I often noticed, they are capable of keeping up standards of courtesy among each
other, without being in the least soft or mawkish, which were a complete surprise
to me after my experience of other schools. Finally, in these conditions they can be
wonderfully tolerant, and sympathetic, if only their organisation gives them a real
sense of responsibility, and permits variety of interest and service within the group.
Unfortunately in the past it has too often been the case that no real responsibility
has been given to the group as a whole. There has been too much discipline for the
sake of discipline, and not for some further end. In these conditions public
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opinion, thwarted of any kind of creative expression, produces nothing more
valuable than the familiar school customs and conventions. It becomes that highly
artificial sentiment schoolboy conservatism, clinging jealously to whatever small
powers it possesses. Always on the defensive, it becomes intolerant of unorthodoxy
within itself. Unorthodoxy in fact becomes in the worst schools the unforgivable
sin, and good form the means of salvation.
It is only those who have experienced the life of both the traditional public schools
and other schools of adolescent boys who can realise what a menace those
tyrannical customs and conventions can be to independent thought and genuine
feeling. The danger is, no doubt, sometimes exaggerated. But not long ago it would
have been true to say that at many schools and in many houses a boy's mind was
made up for him about how hard he should work, what games he should play, what
it was respectable to like or dislike in the way of books, dress, art and politics, and
how he should behave to other social classes, the other sex, and even, to some
extent, to his family. On all these subjects, and others as well, he was in the grip of
convention, and to violate this was to risk making himself unpopular and
ridiculous.
Is it not also the fact that the principal difficulty in religious education at this age is
the wrong kind of group feeling, when unfavourable conditions have made it
intractable, and defensive, and impervious to ideas? For religious education, like
all other
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education, has to realise that the boy of this age is profoundly sensitive to the
conventions and opinion of his group, and preoccupied with the immediate
interests of his boy society. It is not, I think, an age when the intellectual or the
more truly spiritual aspects of religion are likely to make their strongest appeal to
him. It is an age when the teacher of the New Testament will do well to stress the
human rather than the divine nature of the Master. It is an age, too, when many
boys find it extraordinarily difficult to find any reality or meaning in prayer, But I
believe that it is also an age when the ethical aspect of Christianity can mean far
more to a boy in the ordinary things of life than ever before, and it is the
schoolmaster's opportunity, by direct teaching and by suggestion, to see that
Christian standards of conduct are recognised in his school society.
In this work he too often encounters two obstacles. First, the boys themselves are
provided with no outlet to relieve them from the pressure of childish or
mischievous conventions. And secondly, there are ethical standards held or
tolerated by authority which do not seem altogether to fit in with the ethics taught
in the name of religion. It is no use to expect Christian values to determine the
conduct of boys to one another in a school where the official gospel is the gospel of
getting on in the world, or where academic and athletic success are put before
everything, or where punishment and superannuation appear to be administered
with a view rather
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to saving the schoolmaster trouble than to helping the boy.
As a profession we schoolmasters have been inclined to look rather indulgently
upon schoolboy customs, calling them "natural" and "inevitable", though uneasily
aware that they tend to stifle individuality. But in this matter we are not quite
unprejudiced. The fact is that we are commonly rather conventional people
ourselves, and feelquite erroneously–that in this matter we share and understand
the boy's point of view. In reality age and youth have two quite distinct reasons for
holding to the familiar and the customary. Age, it has been well said, clings to it
“because it has no longer the energy needed to open out new paths of thought and
action", youth, because, if other opportunities are denied, it can only assert itself by
repetition of what it has already made its own. And secondly, we make use of these
customs to preserve order and stability, and to keep the fabric of school life intact.
The traditional discipline of the English boarding school rests upon a delicate
balance or compromise between boy-made customs and man-made rules, a balance
which may easily be upset by a well-intentioned but ill-timed effort to help the
individual. “One conscientious house tutor", wrote an able and experienced
schoolmaster some twenty-five years ago, "will spoil the discipline of a house in
no time.”
I cannot help thinking, too, that the popular, and to some extent the professional,
idea of the kind of
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man who makes the best schoolmaster for boys of this age has sometimes been
faulty. It has been too often assumed that what is wanted above all is a "strong"
man. Of real strength, which may assume many different forms, the more the
better. But this is the worst possible time for boys to be constantly in immediate
contact with that dominating kind of schoolmaster, who does find a certain
pleasure merely in making people do what he wants them to do. There are plenty of
schoolmasters of this kind to be found. They are often men who at first sight seem
capable of leading and directing people of their own age; but some point of
weakness in their character, of which they are vaguely but resentfully aware,
makes them incapable of exercising power among men, and they are compelled to
lord it in the world of boys. Both at the earlier and the later stage a man of this kind
will very likely do no harm. The boys will then quite possibly appreciate all that is
best in him, and as individuals accept the best of what he has to give. But in charge
of a group of boys of this age he will, by constantly imposing, or appearing to
impose, his will upon them, turn the feeling of the group in upon itself, and tighten
its pressure upon the individuals that compose it. He will, therefore, be indirectly
the worst foe to the growth of individuality. The qualifications which above all are
necessary in the man who is to direct a community of boys at this particular stage
are the capacity to understand them, a feeling of happiness
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in living and working with them, and the power to represent to them, in a way that
they can comprehend, the best that they think and desire.
I hope that previous chapters have indicated some of the ways in which at
Churnside we tried to meet the needs of boys while they were passing through this
middle stage. It was for these boys that I specially valued the General Meeting, and
all the activities associated with it, though, for them to feel its full effect, the
meeting should not, I think, have included the oldest boys in the school. That, in
the circumstances, was unavoidable. Even so, the meeting seemed to me to be
wonderfully successful both in creating a sense of responsibility, and in directing
public opinion into more useful forms than tyrannical rules and taboos, which
interfere needlessly with private affairs. I have never known a society of boys more
tolerant of individual differences. Any infringements of what Nicias called της
ανεπιτάκτου Trãow és röv díaitav čovolas were far more likely to come from me
than from the boys. As to the sense of responsibility, it certainly seemed to me that,
more than in any other school where I had been, the ordinary boy could feel that he
was an active, and not a passive, member of society. In practice he had open to him
a very large number of ways of serving the community, far larger than in those
many schools where “doing something for one's house" means nothing more than
representing it at one of the traditional games.
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For these reasons, then, an organisation like the General Meeting was valuable at
this stage. It showed that authority, as represented by their headmaster, trusted and
respected the group by handing over to them duties and opportunities for service,
and by letting them to a considerable extent manage their own affairs. But I felt
that there wereother means as well of dissipating the defensive element in group
feeling, and obtaining a sense of mutual confidence. I used to take every
opportunity that offered (without seeming to force the pace) to talk to these middle
forms as frankly and intimately as possible about a great many subjects connected
with their school, other schools, and the world at large, in which older people are
often far too ready to assume that boys are not likely to be interested. It did not
worry me in the least that these topics, personal and impersonal, were often right
outside the range of the conversation which was usual between boys and masters
when I was myself at school. It is characteristic of many boys of this age, in
contrast to those of an earlier and later stage, that they will be indifferent, or bored,
or embarrassed in private conversation by a subject in which as members of a
group, if the subject is properly presented to them, they will show a lively interest.
Most useful of all were such talks, whether serious or light, when circumstances
allowed one to seem, as it were, on their side in face of the demands of authority. I
can remember such talks in dormitories, particularly on
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Saturday nights, when the rule that talking should cease at a certain hour was
suspended. An even better time was when one of the middle forms was in its own
room in the evening engaged in preparation—a time when, strictly speaking, they
should not have been talking at all. The conversation of boys is seldom more lively
and interesting than when they should be doing something else, and they seldom
listen with more attention. I felt that occasional interruptions to the business of
preparation were not of tremendous importance, when the boys were reasonably
hard-working. When, as sometimes happened, the conversation was brought to an
end with the request, “Sir, do stop talking now. I must get on with my work”, I felt,
not only that the work itself would probably not suffer greatly, but that we had
reached the degree of informality which I wanted.
Not having, so far as I am aware, any of the outward characteristics which are
commonly associated with strength, and believing that personal dignity is only safe
when it is forgotten, I do not think that personally I cramped the collective
activities by appearing to wish to dominate them. I soon learnt that any man who is
directing boys of this age, and really wants them to organise for themselves and
learn from their experience, must be ready to leave the centre of the stage, a
position which some even among "new" schoolmasters like to occupy, and take a
less conspicuous place, or even retire to the
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wings. That was exactly what I most enjoyed. There are many moments in the life
of a schoolmaster which have their own peculiar happiness. There are the times
when you know that you have done something towards lifting from some
bewildered mind a burden of fear or unhappiness. There are those lessons in the
classroom, when for some unaccountable reason everything seems to go exactly
right, and you leave at the end feeling that you and the class have shared an
experience of real meaning. There are the afternoons when your boys, playing at
their very best, win some match against all expectation, and only if you are a
hypocrite will you say that you care whether the match has been won by the better
side. And there are others innumerable. But nothing gave me deeper satisfaction
than the knowledge that boys were planning, organising, and carrying things out on
their own resources, without my aid or presence, and with no thought of winning
my approval.
Never did I feel this satisfaction more keenly than on the last night of the
Christmas term. On that evening there was a kind of comprehensive party, which
not only afforded a tremendous amount of pleasure, but always seemed to me to
express in its own way some of the leading ideas on which the school was based.
Tea, games, acting, fancy dress
it all lasted a great many hours. Everyone took part in it, masters and their wives,
boys, the domestic and outdoor staff, with complete informality and
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great enjoyment. I think that almost everyone who was present on those evenings
will agree that they had an atmosphere of their own. The proceedings were entirely
organised by the entertainments committee, whose officer acted as director of the
ceremonies, and, apart from formally approving the programme, I was in no way
responsible. Like everyone else I enjoyed it all. But I confess that what I liked best
was not so much the jollity, and the good cheer, and the sense of the coming
Christmas holidays. It was to retire for part of the evening to my study, and to start
writing my Christmas letters, knowing quite well that all that they had planned was
going happily without my guidance, and that, until the time came for me to read
prayers at the end of the evening, it did not matter in the least whether I was
present or absent.
I am afraid that I have dwelt at inordinate length on those things which seem to me
to hinder and to promote the growth of individuality at the middle stage. I repeat
that I believe that the public schools do their best work at this stage, because they
then give boys something that they need more than anything else. When we come
to the next stagesixteen or sixteen and a half and over-I believe that those schools
have in the past been far less successful in satisfying new demands, which now
play a leading part in a boy's life.
I suggest that it is not very difficult to discern what those new demands are. A boy
will no longer
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be satisfied emotionally by life in a group of his own age and sex. He will be vastly
more interested in the other sex. He will look for new sources of romance and
adventure, physical, intellectual, spiritual, Dissatisfied with what is here and now,
he will reach out to the infinite. It is now that, as Bacon says, "imaginations stream
into their minds better and, as it were, more divinely”. Is it not true, too, that
apparently quite unimaginative boys often feel, when they have reached this stage,
an impatience with the standards and limitations of school, which it is highly unfair
to describe merely as a desire to be free from discipline? They want to get to grips
with the outside world, and to mix more with grown-up people other than
schoolmasters, people who are engaged in the world's ordinary work and play,
which will soon be their own work and play. They are ready again to admire
wholeheartedly the man who is, as it were, the master craftsman, whether in the
sphere of the professions, business or the arts. It is an inestimable advantage to a
boy in these years, if he can enjoy the friendship and companionship of a man to
whom he looks up, not because the latter is in authority over him, but because he
does well, and with pride in his work, something which the boy believes to be
worth doing. It is a further advantage, if he feels that his daily work is connected
not necessarily in any merely bread and butter sense–with the life to which he is
looking forward.
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I am inclined to think, then, that the public schools in the past have been open to
serious criticism in two respects in their education of their oldest boys. They have
separated school life too sharply from the outside world, and inside school life they
have kept the boy too young, keeping him, in fact, a retarded adolescent, when his
deeper impulses ought to make him want to go forward to something larger than
merely to be a great help to his housemaster, or even to play for the school.
Many factors, by no means all of them parts of a deliberate policy, have
contributed to these closely related results. The older boys have been subjected to
rules and restrictions which may, or may not be necessary at an earlier age, but are
entirely ridiculous when applied to boys of eighteen or nineteen. Compared with
the sons of normally intelligent, not necessarily indulgent, homes, who attend
wisely managed day schools, they live in conditions which are curiously narrow
and remote from the outside world. They think too much in terms of compulsory
games and keen house spirit. A prefect system which has transferred to them from
the masters the burden of maintaining discipline, and has identified virtue with
efficiency in maintaining it, does not allow them to perceive how babyish a great
deal of it is when applied to themselves.
Further, have not the men who have been in immediate charge of older boys been
too often men who have never themselves quite outgrown the
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ideals and standards of the adolescent boy? Masters of that kind may be the right
men to deal with boys a few years younger, but they are the last people in the
world to help a boy to a smooth passage from boyhood to manhood. That may be
true, even if they are not men of the kind who by a selfish or unwise use of their
personality keep boys emotionally dependent upon themselves. For it is too often
true that a master at a public school belongs to a small society, which is, in more
than the ordinary sense of the word, exclusive. He not only works with other
schoolmasters, but for the most part he plays and spends his spare time with them.
There may be equally intelligent and well-educated men in considerable numbers
living all round him, but it is surprising how easy it is for him to see little of them.
His hours of work and play are different from theirs. His longer holidays take him
away from local interests. Unless he is alive to the danger, the conditions in which
he lives will shut out healthy criticism, and keep him complacently secure from
what he does not want to see and hear. Yet it is for that outside world, from which
he tends to be increasingly separated, that he is presumably training his pupils,
especially in their last years at school. Intelligent people are beginning to wonder
whether that last year at school, which used to be valued so highly, does not, in
fact, often prevent the boy from maturing, and help to keep him in a kind of
petrified adolescence. There are men who from the first are
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quite happy, and others who in time become happy, in this society, which is
dominated by adolescent standards and ideals (corporate spirit, good form,
physical fitness, and the rest), and is always in danger of thinking that they are the
only standards and ideals. It is the cumulative effect of this atmosphere upon the
master, particularly upon the unmarried master, even more than the differences
which I have mentioned above, which have often given him the reputation of being
a bad "mixer" with men outside his profession. The work and play which make up
school life are apt to engross him to such an extent that he is partly lost to other
human interests. This is true, no doubt, particularly of the unmarried man, but we
have many of us known married masters who have put the school a good long way
in front of their family and their home.
The fact is that there are aspects of these communities which, in the case of some
temperaments, undoubtedly appeal more to weakness than to strength. In these
days, whether or not we know more, we certainly talk more than of old about our
unconscious motives; and we are probably inclined to look with a less respectful
and more questioning eye upon the man who, after passing through school and
college, prefers to return immediately to the residential life of one of these
segregated communities, rather than to live, as the day school master can more
easily, in the world of ordinary men and women. The earnest young man who was
once
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quite sure that he had a vocation is now not always certain that he has more than an
inhibition. On the other hand, his sense of vocation may be perfectly genuine. Or,
again, he may merely desire to go on playing games.
There is so much written and said which quite falsely idealises the age and outlook
of sixteen, and almost suggests that further growth of the mind and spirit are
superfluous. In this respect Speech Days have a great deal to answer for. Our great
men are strangely seldom at their best when they address an audience of boys.
They are too often "hearty" and condescending; they sentimentalise over their own
schooldays, and glorify them, and draw pictures of their youth–the favourite
suggestion is that of the idle and attractive scapegrace in which nobody is
interested, and which nobody believes. I have before me the report of a speech,
widely quoted and admired, made not long ago by one of our most famous men of
letters to an audience of schoolboys, which well illustrates my meaning. "I am sure
you have been told many times", the great man was reported to have said, "that
your school gives you in advance and in miniature almost every problem and
situation that you may be called upon to meet later. Strange as it may seem, it is
true." But it is possible to hold emphatically that this is not at all true, and to hope
that the boys have not heard it many times, or, if they have, that they have not
believed it. Many quite ordinary men and women,
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who are not specially interested in education, but have arrived at middle age after a
normal human experience of joy and sorrow will feel that these remarks, like the
silly old tag that "your schooldays are the happiest time of your life", are
fundamentally false, and express a view of school life and adolescence which is
crude, sentimental and misleading. After all, marriage and fatherhood may be
considered to be "problems" or at least "situations”; so may a man's efforts
(successful or the reverse) to earn his living, and to fulfil the duties of a citizen in a
democratic state. How far are any of any of these anticipated in ordinary school
life? Or take the word love, as it is understood by, and applies to, the normal adult
man. Is it in the least true to say that the vague stirrings of later adolescence
(deserving, as they do, the most sympathetic treatment) anticipate "in miniature",
particularly in the life of a boys' boarding school, his later experience? A famous
headmaster–famous, perhaps, more for what he attempted than for what he
achieved—used to say that a school should be a microcosm– a world in miniature.
A specious saying, and more inspiriting than many educational tags, but not to be
taken literally. What kind of world can it be from which the whole of one sex and
all economic factors (not to mention many other things) are eliminated? One can
hardly do a boy a worse disservice, when he is on the threshold of manhood than to
make him believe that his school
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experiences provide him with a ready-made key to all the problems which will
later confront him.
It is also, surely, a disservice to him, if we really care about individuality, to let him
know that we think and talk much in terms of the type. I fancy that there is now
more talk about the Public School Type than there used to be. If so, it is, no doubt,
natural enough. Pressure or challenge from outside always makes a threatened
class or caste draw closer together, and idealise its own distinctive qualities, and
the growth of secondary education has called into existence certain competing
standards. But I cannot believe that this idealising of the type makes anyone a
better schoolmaster. It is sometimes said, I know, that it is just as natural to have a
type of boys from one school, or one class of schools, as it is to have a military, or
racing, or artistic, or clerical type. A common way of life must, obviously, produce
some common habits. But apart from that, is there any real analogy in this respect
between schools and other institutions, or, for that matter, the professions? The
army and the turf, medicine and the law attract to themselves people who from
taste, temperament, or tradition are already of a somewhat similar way of thinking.
The type is more than half made in most cases, before they get to work on it with
all the forces of habit, and routine, and mutual imitation. Those who enter them do
so voluntarily, with some maturity of character. We do not find masses of boys of
every kind being sent
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to take compulsory courses at Newmarket, or even to schools of art and theological
colleges. Compulsory military service, whatever it does besides, soon destroys any
notion of one single military type. And there are sets of people of whom, though
outwardly they may seem to conform to a type, if anything is typical it is that they
respect each other's individuality. The students of a school of art, or the artists of a
particular quarter may seem outwardly to be of a type, but they do not all paint the
same kind of picture. * But schools of the ordinary kind take boys of all
conceivable shades of character and temperament. To emphasise the type, to which
it is supposed that they will conform at the end of their education, is to represent
that education as being something in the nature of a machine. There is the further
danger, that boys who have been led to admire unthinkingly the picture of the
complete and typical product of their own class of school will be disposed to deny
the possession of its moral qualities to those people who are not so fortunate as to
conform to its outward characteristics.
I seem to have wandered far from Churnside, and I will not pretend that we did
anything particularly original there with regard to the last stage of school
education. In one respect our problem with the oldest boys was exceptionally
difficult; in another it was exceptionally easy. It was difficult because the
* Or possibly they do. I am not quite sure about this. But it does not affect my main
argument.
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small numbers prohibited a sixth form of the size and intellectual calibre which
makes it in itself a stimulus to thought, irrespective of what is contributed by
masters. A good sixth form can do an immense amount outside the classroom to
sharpen wits by private discussion and speculation, but it must be large enough to
provide variety of outlook. Again the staff was small, and had to be selected partly
with a view to the needs of younger boys. It was difficult, therefore, to provide in
as many directions as I should have like men who could be master craftsmen in the
eyes of the ablest boys. These were difficulties which could scarcely be overcome,
with any regard to reasonable economy, in a school of less than a hundred or a
hundred and twenty boys.
On the other hand, we had certain advantages, Smaller numbers made it easier for
the work of the older boys to be genuinely independent and individual, and those
preparing for higher certificates were spared that unedifying process of spoon-
feeding which has so deadening an effect upon the minds of those who have been
subjected to it. The informal nature of the school life also made it easier for
masters to contribute ideas by means of ordinary conversation, as well as by
discussion inside the study and the classroom. Friendship between older boys and
masters helped repeatedly to bridge part of the gulf between school and the world
of adults. Best of all, it was made easier for me to establish
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an entirely non-school relationship with old boys, and to pass imperceptibly from
the role of headmaster to that of friend. All this, I believe, helped our senior boys to
leave adolescence behind them, and there was certainly too much humour and
sanity in the place to allow them to attach to school discipline and school problems
more importance than they deserved.
I want to end this chapter with two suggestions. To many they will seem fantastic,
but I believe that they are entirely practicable, and, for all I know, there may be
places where they have already been put into practice. As I have said, I believe that
the boarding school, criticise it as we may, does provide for boys at a certain stage
something for which they crave, something which is an invaluable contribution to
their healthy growth to manhood. I believe that it does this better than any other
kind of school that we have yet devised, and that it does it in a very much shorter
time than the normal span of boarding school life. A question must occur to anyone
who cares at all about the secondary education of the nation as a whole, and not
only about the education of one section of the population. Must this educational
advantage be always the monopoly of the boarding school, or how, if at all, can the
day secondary school be so adapted that it can share it? For, after all, the day
school must always be the secondary school of the many. It is difficult to foretell
what will become of our exclusive boarding
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schools if the nation ever takes seriously the problem of providing secondary
education, of one kind or another, for a substantial part of its population, and at the
same time realises how effectively, as well as expensively, in present conditions we
educate the different classes to misunderstand each other. It may be that there will
always be a place for the boarding school in a country where many parents live
overseas, where there are extensive rural areas, and where there are many
dissolved marriages, and disrupted homes. But the day school is the school of first
importance, and if it can learn and practise something of the boarding school's
peculiar virtue, the gain will be enormous. The day schools have already gone
some way in this direction, not so much by their prefect and house systems (which
are not infrequently a rather unreal imitation, by no means well adapted to their
own conditions), as by their admirable holiday camps. In fact it might be said that
the non-military, well-organised school camp is almost the most interesting and
important contribution which the secondary schools have made to education. My
suggestion is that these camping conditions should be extended from holidays to
term. That a certain number of secondary schools (preferably, in the first instance,
urban schools) should as an experiment have a permanent camp in a suitable place
in the country. No great capital expenditure need be incurred in providing three or
four large wooden huts as permanent nucleus. At
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a certain stage in the school course the headmaster would send two forms with
three masters into camp for the whole summer term and possibly for part of the
following holidays. They would have to be as regards certain subjects a complete
teaching unit, and they would carry on their lessons in such time as the duties of
camp life and the necessary recreation permitted. Innumerable difficulties of
organisation will at once occur to objectors, but I believe that particularly in a large
school, where there are parallel forms, these would be overcome easily, as soon as
the arrangement was regarded as part of the annual routine. The masters would
have to be men specially selected for the work. Certain subjects would have partly
to be dropped for the term and dealt with more intensively later, and others would
receive more than their normal share of time. No subject need be dropped entirely,
for something could be done through occasional visits from a specialist teacher,
and also by correspondence. It is not at all certain that the relative concentration on
certain subjects for one term would be necessarily a disadvantage. The scheme
would give plenty of scope for intelligent cooperation between colleagues, and
might help to break down some of the rigid bars between subjects. I admit that the
sum total of hours given to academic work during a boy's course would be
diminished, but, even from the point of view of his final academic objective, that
does not alarm me. One of the deepest convictions
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which I have brought from schoolmastering is that there is a time soon after
puberty when nearly every boy would be the better for several months spent
mainly out of doors, and almost entirely without books, in physical exercise and
various forms of creative manual work. I can give no logical or scientific basis for
this belief, and it will be abhorrent to many schoolmasters; but I hold it strongly
and though the plan which I have been suggesting involves no such radical
departure from the ordinary course, I feel that some of the objections which may be
raised on the score of loss of working hours are illusory.
There would be financial problems, of course, as there are in connection with all
educational advance. The capital expenditure would not, I think, be too formidable,
but the plan might mean the addition of one master to the staff of every school
which adopted it. If parents contributed the cost of keeping their boy at home for
three or four months, it would go a long way towards meeting the cost of his
maintenance in the simple conditions of camp life. The biggest difficulty would be
to obtain the consent of parents who have no tradition of the boarding school to
permit so long an absence of their son from home. But that difficulty would not
defeat every headmaster or every local authority.*
* If for any reason it should ever come about that a number of the existing
boarding schools came under the control of Public Authorities, the scheme which I
have outlined, or something like it,
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My other suggestion concerns the boarding school. Throughout this chapter I have
tried to stress my belief that boys at different stages require more differentiated
treatment than can be provided in the ordinary house of boys, ranging from thirteen
or less to over eighteen. Could not some school try the experiment of dividing its
house by horizontal, instead of by vertical, lines? To some extent this is done
already, for it is not uncommon to find in a public school junior or "waiting"
houses for the youngest boys. But why not do it at the other end as well? When I
have sometimes had fantasiesand whatschoolmaster has not?-of the perfect public
school, I have thought of a school where the oldest boys (over seventeen, perhaps)
will be concentrated in a house or houses of their own. The housemaster will be a
kind of liaison officer between school and the outside world, and he must have
time, and energy, and interest to keep in touch with many people of different kinds.
The discipline and domestic arrangements of his house will be designed for boys
who are young men rather than children. Their life outside the classroom will not
be wholly confined to school activities, and part of his work will be to give them
opportunities of meeting socially people of both sexes and different ages.
Incidentally, in such conditions friendship and companionship between master and
boy, which in would be grcatly facilitated. The premises could be used in turn by
relays of boys from different day schools.
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normal school life is made more difficult by the presence of boys of the middle
stage, would be easy and natural. Above all, I have pictured the housemaster and
his wife (for I confess that I cannot see him a bachelor) receiving a constant
succession of visitors, men and women who will talk about the work they are doing
in the world, and the conditions and possibilities of different careers. In this way
the boys will meet the practising artist and craftsman, the professional man, and the
man of business and affairs. I am not sure that ideally there should not be a certain
number of young men already engaged in earning their living in various ways
residing in the same house.
Among the numerous ways in which the older boy would be affected by this
enlargement of school life there might well be his religious observances. He might
be allowed sometimes, if he wished, to worship elsewhere than in the School
Chapel. The latter is all very well as "the centre of school life", but should it not
also provide the stimulus to adventure outside the boundary of that life? We might
then meet fewer of those old boys who are rather fond of saying that, though they
never otherwise attend a place of worship, they always attend Chapel when they
visit the old school-thereby paying one of the poorest of compliments to their
religious education.
I know very well that a suggestion that boarding schools should be organised in
this horizontal way
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will provoke loud objection. It will be said that to withdraw from the other houses
all boys of the age from which prefects are usually taken will be to abandon the
traditional methods of discipline. That is quite true. The question is whether such a
change would be regrettable. On the other hand, it is quite untrue to suggest that
boys under seventeen cannot exercise responsibility, or that you cannot have a
sound and happy group of some forty boys under seventeen in one house. Anyone
who has had the experience of directing such a group will know that it is easy to
exaggerate the value, even from the purely disciplinary point of view, of the
presence of older boys. There will be other objections to making this experiment,
arising from fear, prejudice, and natural conservatism. I have not been impressed
by those which I have heard so far–not even by the deadly suggestion that it would
spoil house matches,
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I am sometimes told that, however justifiable it I may have been formerly to bring
the charge of excessive athleticism against the public schools, it is so no longer. It
may be true. Economic stress, a more enlightened policy inside the best schools,
together with increased interest in motoring and flying, may have led to less
devotion being paid to games. But I am a little sceptical as to whether there has
been any really considerable change in this matter in the bulk of boarding schools
during the past fifteen years. A great many people still seem to think of the public
schools, when they think of them at all, as primarily places where boys learn to
play games. No doubt they are in some degree unjust in holding this view, but the
reasons why they do so are quite intelligible. The popular press, in so far as it ever
notices the public schools, confines its attention almost wholly to athletics. The
conversation of many old boys is nearly as limited. The novelists of public school
life (not always quite impartial witnesses) point the same moral.
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At the public school where I had been both boy and master the worst evils of
athleticism had always been avoided. The tradition of seriousness and a high
standard of work made them impossible. The danger of athletocracy was almost
nullified by the salutary tradition which made prefects of all members of the sixth
form, to which they were not admitted below the age of sixteen. A very small
number of other boys might be given "sixth power”, but the established tradition
made it comparatively easy for even the weakest housemaster to resist the
temptation to call in the barbarians to save the empire. But it was impossible to live
for any length of time in the public school world, with many of one's friends
teaching in different schools, and not to recognise that the cult of games and
athletic success was one of the strongest forces in public school life, and that it
definitely blocked many desirable lines of advance. When it became my business
to start a new school, I had to make up my mind as to what I really thought about
school games. Naturally I tried to assess what my experience at other schools had
taught me, both what to imitate, and what to avoid; and I found that three aspects
of the cult of games prevailing in the public schools had particularly impressed me.
First, what, for want of a better word, I will call its irrationality; second, the extent
to which it rested upon the support not of boys themselves, but of masters, parents,
and other adults; and third, the futility of most of
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the protests which were continually being made against it.
When I use the word irrationality, I think first of a fact which is bound to strike
anyone who tries to see public school education comprehensively, and at the same
time to justify each aspect or department of it as the complementary parts of a
consistent whole. I mean the fact that, although it is usually possible to discuss any
other side of school life coolly and with at least a show of reason, on the subject of
school games intelligent men often talk with amazing folly and sentimentality,
while those of less intelligence will, resent any proposal to interfere with the
traditional school games, with all the temper that a man brings to the defence of a
cause which he has not the ability to justify. Ask the headmaster of a big school
whether he would rather propose the abolition of music or the abolition of cricket
to a staff meeting, or a mass meeting of old boys. Some years ago an Australian
was telling me the story of the failure of an English headmaster, who was put in
charge of a school on the other side of the world. He recounted the innovator's
other misdeeds without emotion. "But at last", he added, dropping his voice; "he
interfered with their games." After that, what could you expect?
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the attitude of many Englishmen to
games is neurotic. They cling to the obsessional idea of their games for reasons of
which they are only dimly
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aware, and in defiance of facts which they will not consent to examine. The
healthy, physically strong man likes to think of the games of his youth as alike the
cause and the happiest expression of the power within him. The invalid or
weakling, whose school career was undistinguished or unhappy, by a well-known
law of psychological compensation, sometimes attaches an intense and fictitious
importance to powers which he has never possessed. It is astonishing, too, how
many men, if they are honest, will admit that their daydreams take the forms of
imaginary athletic success. “Yes, I still make my centuries at Lord's", was said to
me by a schoolmaster, who had never as a boy climbed beyond the middle of his
house eleven. And I have known grave scholars and efficient civil servants carry
into advanced years a habit of imaginary "team building", which they contracted in
the days when games were the most pressing business of life.
The quality which I have called irrationality showed itself, first of all, in jealousy
of criticism, stronger, of course, in some schools than in others. It was quite usual
to find the management of everything that had to do with games vested either in a
games master, or a games committee, consisting of masters who had themselves
been successful athletes, and that it was considered to be outside the province of
their colleagues, or even the headmaster himself, to enquire too closely into their
special department. So far as purely technical details are
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concerned this might be reasonable. But these specialists often claimed to decide
questions which were by no means technical and involved far-reaching educational
principles; such, for example, as the time to be given to games, the particular
games to be played, what distinctions of dress were to be worn, whether matches
were to be played with other schools, and to what extent games should be in fact or
theory (for the two can be widely different) compulsory. It might help a man in
deciding these questions that he should have played games himself, but it was not
in the least necessary that he should have played them especially well, or even that
he should have particularly enjoyed them. In some ways he represented a larger
constituency if he had been an only moderately successful player. In any case they
were questions which concerned us because we were schoolmasters, not because
we were athletes. It was a weakness in the position of the athletocrat that, though
he believed or assumed games to be one of the most valuable elements of school
training, yet he often disliked and opposed any attempt to treat them as one part of
a general educational scheme.
It was this dislike of criticism, even constructive criticism, which was responsible
for the second example of what I have called irrationality—I mean the inability of
the athletocrat to tell us at any given moment precisely what he was after. Games
had been encouraged at different times by all manner of
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different people, few of whom had any definite notion of what they wanted, or why
they wanted it. They had been developed unsystematically, and without plan or
forethought. And that is why you would hear the same game justified for entirely
different and contradictory reasons even by the same people. "Training of the Will”
(whatever that may mean), physical development, and recreation were all given as
the object of an identical form of bodily exertion. Yet sometimes, at any rate, they
were incompatibles. I do not mean that a compulsory game could not produce
enjoyment. Of course it could. But we ought to have had some idea of what we
were doing. Take, for example, a scene fresh in my memory. A small nervous
preparatory school boy batting at a net; a genial bully of a master shouting at him
to "keep that right foot still", another and larger master taking healthy exercise by
bowling at him with considerable speed and inaccuracy. What exactly was the boy
doing beyond providing the two men with amusement and exercise? The
distinction between work and play is subtle, to be sure. And there is a school of
educational thought which for all practical purposes denies its validity. But that is
not the school to which the ordinary games master belonged. On the contrary he
was usually the type of man whose chief objection to "these modern methods”
inside the classroom was "that they seem to turn work into a kind of game". I am
not saying that it was neces-
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sarily bad for the boy. At the right age and time, such an experience might be quite
useful. Only, however much physical exercise he may have had, and however
much it may have helped to form his character, I hope his headmaster did not count
it as recreation.
Another example occurs to me in a custom which prevailed a few years ago at a
famous school, and, for all I know, prevails there to-day. In that school a boy had
every week to earn a certain fixed total of "points" in what was mistakenly
regarded as his spare time. A different number of points was awarded for playing
cricket or football, for playing fives, for playing in a house match, for watching a
house match, for playing in or watching a school match, and so on. If a boy's
weekly total was deficient he was flogged by the captain of games in his house. Let
us recognise that quite a number of people-stout fellows and others—may regard it
as desirable for a boy to be beaten on his buttocks with a toasting-fork because he
indulges in interests other than games. Only, for the sake of clear thinking we
should be told by those who favour the practice exactly what emotions the process
is supposed to stimulate, and whether incidentally it gives the boy a greater liking
for games.
In regard to the most elementary questions of policy as to games there was the
same confusion, and not a little hypocrisy. The public schools had never really
made up their minds whether they
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aimed at letting a boy play as many games as possible with reasonable skill, or
making him a specialist in one or two games only. The former plan would have
been preferable from the point of view of allround bodily training, and gives a boy
the best chance of obtaining exercises and amusement after he leaves school. But
though there was a certain amount of lip-service paid to this ideal, it was, in
practice, the other plan which prevailed. The demands of inter-school competition
severely limited the number of games played at each school. And yet it was really
rather absurd when schools were so elaborately organised for games, and so much
time and money were already spent upon them, that any boy at a large school
should not have had the chance of learning to play at least football, cricket, hockey,
and lawn tennis, if he wanted to do so.
There was the greatest possible vagueness, too, about the relative value of games
as physical training. It has been assumed far too readily at the public schools that
the best athlete is physically the fittest man. He is the fittest–for athletics, but not
necessarily for life. He may become so dependent upon an extravagant amount of
physical exertion that without it his health will suffer. Even while he is still able to
play games his development may be narrow or uneven. A brilliant cricketer may be
unable to walk at a decent pace for ten miles. A dashing footballer may be a poor
hand on a mountain side. There is no more severe condemnation
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of a certain kind of games master than the suspicion he shows towards the more
modern forms of physical training, which aim at a more complete bodily
development than games alone can supply. When we have given them all the praise
that is their due for what they have done for athletics, we must admit that by
connecting physical training too closely with games on the one hand, and the
Officers' Training Corps on the other, the public schools have missed a wonderful
chance of giving a lead to the nation in physical education in its wider aspects.
There was, in fact, till lately a kind of sacred triad of games sanctified by tradition
—cricket, football, and "sports" (the last to be interpreted in one particular sense).
In a few schools rowing was also hallowed. To question the omnivalence of these
was blasphemy. Lately there have been additions to their numbers. Hockey, tennis,
and swimming have earned and are slowly winning their places in the hierarchy,
and the far more dubious claims of golf may yet have to be considered, though not,
I hope, admitted. But even now there remains a good deal of humbug in our
estimate of games, and we too seldom examine each on its merits, realising that its
value may vary enormously with differing conditions, and that a game which is
suitable for one age or generation is wholly unsuited to others.
Take, for example, cricket, which some still call our national game, though so far
as popular interest is concerned that title might now be transferred to
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association football. School cricket can be splendid fun and fine exercise, so long
as everyone is playing because he wants to, and the conditions of playing are not
too elaborate. But as soon as we have elaborately prepared grounds, scientific
coaching, and the professional atmosphere which turns a pastime into a business—
as soon, in fact, as organisation and compulsion take the place of spontaneity~ the
essential weaknesses of the game are exaggerated and its real merits are obscured.
I cannot see how an honest observer of school games can refuse to admit both that
compulsory cricket is often a bad school game, and that a great many boys are
thoroughly aware of the fact. It is not only bookish or unmanly boys who find
cricket intolerable; plenty of footballers, boxers, and cross-country runners, who
cannot be accused of softness, regard it in the same light. I am not thinking of
house matches, which, just because everybody or nearly everybody is playing for
something bigger than himself, represent public school sport at its best. We can
many of us recall house matches that still live before us intense and dramatic,
unforgettable moments when on a crumbling wicket, or in the bad light after tea
our heroes met their fate. But "the breathless hush in the Close" is not to be felt
every night. Else life would be altogether too tense. I am rather thinking of the
usual school games, particularly those of the less skilful, on an ordinary summer
half-holiday. What will an intelligent and enquiring stranger see
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if he is present? He will find a few boys who, through specially careful training,
are able to enjoy the exercise of an expert skill. For them the game may be
recreation, and perhaps something more.
The rest find in the game no particular pleasure or outlet for energy, physical or
mental. It is not even compulsory playing—it is compulsory loafing-a time
compulsorily allotted to physical inertia and mental vacuity. And it would be hard
to think of a fallacy more dangerous for a public school master to entertain than to
confuse loafing with recreation.
Another example of what I have called theirrationality of athleticism was the
peculiar conception of the relation between moral goodness and devotion to games,
which the Muscular Christianity movement bequeathed to the public schools.
There is no need to describe the breezy athletic cant which was so often heard from
the pulpits of school chapels. So common was it to preach the athletic gospel, that
some preachers in addressing boys thought it necessary to drag in a reference to
games in defiance of both reverence and humour. The clergyman whom I once
heard tell a congregation of schoolboys that they should take Jesus with them
wherever they went, "into the classroom, into the dormitory, into the scrimmage”,
was doubtless an extreme instance of this error. But the silliness of men of his type
was derived from the traditional cant.
It might be argued, perhaps cynically, that this pietistic sentimental stuff did not in
fact do great
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harm. For who took it seriously? However that may be, the fact remains that some
schoolmasters did in practice place their faith in the supposed coincidence of
enthusiasm for games and what they were pleased to call morality. And they
applied this theory not only to individual boys, but to houses or schools. Here,
indeed, was ground for an immense amount of self-deception and rationalisation.
The theory, so far from being true, was full of fallacies. At any rate, boys
themselves, if they kept their eyes open to what went on about them, usually
believed quite otherwise. They suspected that, if there was any connection between
athleticism and morality, it was often of a kind exactly opposite to what was
supposed by their elders. For in many schools and houses the worship of games
was so intense that the "blood" was allowed a licence of speech and action which
public opinion would deny to the undistinguished.
It would scarcely be straining the term irrationality, if I applied it to that curious
tendency to transfer the idioms of the playing fields to the less simple issues of the
outside world. "It isn't cricket”, “to play the game" and all the other familiar
phrases represented something which was essentially fine, so far as it went. But it
did not go far enough. There is no harm perhaps in merely talking about politics,
economics and the sciences in metaphors derived from athletics. But language of
this kind may easily lead to confused thought and ill-con-
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sidered action. A very cursory survey of contemporary events will suggest that a
code which is good enough for the playing fields is tragically inadequate as a guide
to the moral and political mazes of our bewildered age.
But when all is said, the most surprising and the most annoying example of his
irrationality was the inability of the athleticist to see the strength of his own case;
he did not realise, and he refused when the fact was put to him to admit, one reason
why games made their particular appeal. It was just because they expressed certain
basic tendencies of boyhood, upon which should be built the whole fabric of
adolescent education, and not one department alone. And it would have seemed
natural that the enthusiastic athlete should recognise the virtue of his own work,
and point out for the profit of other teachers the principles which it illustrated. But
in practice his attitude to other educational questions was often purely negative.
Provided that his games were not interfered with, he was in other respects as good
an obstructionist as the best.
There are, as a matter of fact, a great many lessons which all schoolmasters can
learn from games, if they will take the trouble to observe them carefully. I will
mention two. First, they will find that many boys who appear to have no power of
continuous effort or attention in the classroom will show astonishing perseverance
in trying to improve themselves in skill at some game. They will find among
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those boys some who do not expect ever to reach any remarkable level of skill, and
who have no particular ambition to win applause or prominence. And it may occur
to them that this perseverance and self-disciplined practice are possible partly
because games, unlike much classroom work, allow a boy to feel as well as to see
where he is wrong, and to measure his own progress. Here are a real ethical value
and discipline in games. We can apply this thought in school hours to our choice
both of methods and subjects, and we shall find in it one justification for paying
increased attention to all forms of manual training.
And, again, how often we forget that the deepest difference between work and
organised games is not that one is compulsory and the other voluntary (for both are
compulsory), or that one is interesting and the other dull (for both are sometimes
wildly interesting and sometimes infernally dull), but that one is essentially
competitive and the other essentially cooperative. One, at its worst, is organised
selfishness, the other, at its best, is collective unselfishness. In games almost alone
is there an open experience, however imperfect, of that collective spirit to which I
have referred so often.
If only, therefore, the games master had tried to understand the meaning of his own
work, he could have taken his place in the front rank. But that was just what he
usually declined to do: Backed up, as a rule, by the influence of Old Boys' clubs,
he took
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refuge in a hardshell conservatism and, instead of trying to extend to other sides of
school life the best elements in his own work, confined himself to that little
province of his own, and too often made boys believe that it was the province that
mattered most.
That in regard to all questions which concerned games–what games should be
played, when they should be played, how important they should be, and to what
extent they should be compulsory.com masters were at least as conservative as
boys, would have been admitted, I believe, by any impartial ob server. And in nine
cases out of ten the influence of Old Boys' clubs or associations was also active on
the conservative side. It was boys, for example, far more than masters who
demanded alternatives to cricket, and less compulsion. And it was the attitude of
adults which in the last resort made reform so difficult. It was always possible that
from the time when a boy entered a preparatory school to the time when he left a
public school, the masters with whom he was thrown closely in contact might be
men who thought of education, and other things as well, primarily in terms of
games. He might pass from the preparatory schoolmaster, who thought of him as a
"ripping little bat", to the house tutor, who discouraged a dramatic society because
it took away interest from football. And his housemaster might be one of those
retired gladiators who sometimes had considerable influence even in schools
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which boasted a tradition of culture. They were strange figures, these ex-
internationals or exchampions, half ludicrous, half pathetic, living on their
legendary triumphs, the heroes of pavilion gossip, high priests of athletic snobbery
and obstructionism.
I remember the contribution of one such man to a conversation at which I was
present many years ago. One of the great dignitaries of the Church had died, and
we were discussing his probable successor, Somebody suggested a name. "What!
The Bishop of X,' exclaimed our athlete in horror; "he can't even catch a ball! He
was down in camp with our boys' club last summer, and he threw like a girl!" Poor
Bishop! I could not help being glad later on that the then Prime Minister, or his
advisers, found themselves able to overlook that particular disqualification.
The kind of man we have been considering was almost certain to ruin a good deal
of what was really admirable in school games. He destroyed, for example, any
possibilities of "self-government". For it always mattered more to him that games
should be efficient, and the school teams successful in their important matches,
than that their organisation should be the genuine work of the boys. Similarly he
gradually diminished the recreative element. Games were not so much to be
enjoyed, as to be learnt like work—in fact, he made them into work for the boys.
He could enjoy them himself,
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for he enjoyed ordering boys about and telling them what rotters they were if they
didn't take the thing as seriously as he did. But what they had to do was to play in
the way they were told. “So we'll jolly well have an extra practice every day, until
you slackers wake up." And he went home feeling full of virtue. He would even lie
awake at night, wondering why young So-and-so, who might if he liked be quite a
decent three-quarter, couldn't be made to buck up.
So much for the games master, whose worst offence was that he did not know what
he was doing. But there was a phrase used by other masters which conveyed a
deliberate policy. "After all," they said, "compulsory games do keep the boys out
of mischief. So long as they are playing cricket or football, we do at least know
what they are doing." The final defence of cricket, therefore, turned out to be just
the fact which seemed to many of us to damn it, that it went on for so long a time.
The words are important, because they express so shortly a whole theory of human
nature, and also show at the same time why the athletic cult proved to be so
acceptable to educational orthodoxy. But what a withering criticism of the usual
early training of boys, and particularly of the preparatory schools! For if what the
words implied was true, it meant that boys by the age at which they entered the
public schools had had so little training in how to use their leisure, had acquired so
few healthy interests, and
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enjoyed so little freedom, that unless their so-called recreation was regulated and
stereotyped they would resort to mischief, whatever that might mean, and it usually
bore on the lips of the masters who used · it the same nasty meaning. And behind
all such remarks there lay that distrust of human nature, upon which traditional
education has so largely been built.
Against the extreme athleticist position there was from time to time protest—in
newspapers, novels, treatises on education, and even sermons And individual
masters up and down the land refused to bow the knee with their colleagues. But
sympathise as we might with the authors of these protests, it was impossible
honestly to congratulate them on their success.
The reason why their criticism of the athletic cult failed was that it was almost
always negative. The critics sneered, or denounced, and did nothing more. It was
no use to laugh at the athlete for his blindness to other sides of life, if you could not
suggest other and better ways of using the energy for which he did, at any rate,
provide one form of expression. Such criticism, working by contra-suggestion,
only strengthened what it sought to destroy.
No doubt there are many aspects of athleticism which even to-day may rightly
make us indignant. Take, for example, the way in which games are exploited by the
press, and an absurd publicity given to the achievements of mere children. Or we
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may detest the endless "distinctions" of dress which many schools jealously
preserve. A taste for athletic millinery often lasts beyond youth when, as things are,
it is excusable, to middle age, when it is ludicrous. Again, we may regret that it is
next to impossible to find a competition which is not degraded by the addition of
some cup or shield. And the costliness of the whole system may strike us as rather
appalling. There is, to be sure, plenty to provoke the anger of anyone who stops to
think. And yet these are only, as it were, the accidental features of the system. It is
the system itself which we should examine, and, if the process is to lead to
anything useful, we must try to see what there is good in it, and be ready if
necessary to make admissions which may seem at first to be unfavourable to our
cause.
As I said before, I believe that the athleticist has a much better case educationally
than he usually knows. And there is another kind of appeal which games make to a
large class of boys, many of whom do not themselves play with any particular skill
or enjoyment. The appeal in this case is not physical or moral, but—perhaps quite
unconsciously æsthetic. If games help to supply a need in this field of education,
which has hitherto been badly neglected, they should receive the credit due to
them. There is commonly a vast amount of ugliness in the life of our boarding
schools. Old buildings are not always venerable or beautiful. New
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buildings are not necessarily any better. It is almost an article of the orthodox faith
that classrooms must be bare and unattractive. Dingy stairs and iron bars are quite
usual features of the ordinary boarding house, and there is apt to be a touch of
squalor in the familiar study passage. It is not surprising if a boy turns gladly from
all this to the sight of a cricket match in June, the ordered ritual of movement on
the clean turf, the grace and dexterity of the skilled players. We do not, after all, in
the course of his education, show him many things more beautiful than the bodies
of his friends at play. Not that I want to advocate a deliberate cult of games for
their aesthetic value, a conscious connoisseurship of athletic beauty. "In the
gymnasia of Lacedaemon", so Pater tells us, “no idle bystanders no-well, Platonic
loungers after truth or what not –-were permitted." Schoolmasters do not want to
encourage loungers, Platonic or otherwise, about the cricket nets on summer
evenings. The aesthetic pleasure of which I have spoken is for the most part
unconscious. Not till long afterwards, as a rule, is its keenness realised. But do not
let us on that account leave it altogether out of the reckoning, when we are trying
to discover why memories of games win their way so subtly into the affections.
The schoolmaster, then, who thinks that the value at present assigned to games is
essentially false, must yet admit that they make a many-sided appeal to boyish
nature. And, if he is intellectually honest,
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he will not feel quite comfortable till he has faced two other not wholly welcome
thoughts which are certain to come to him in the course of his workthat the athlete
is, on the whole, more public-spirited and unselfish than the non-athletic boy; and
further, that the former is surprisingly often the more agreeable, interesting, and
socially adaptable. Not only is the athlete the more capable leader and prefect, but
he is the pleasanter companion at the tea table.
The first of these two facts is a favourite claim of those who support the athletic
tradition. The athlete, they contend, not only makes the more efficient leader both
as a boy and in later life, but he thinks and acts less for himself and more for the
community. Only the other day I heard a comparison drawn between A and B, two
former members of a famous college, each extraordinarily successful in his own
line. A, the scholar, and in no narrow sense the intellectual, had “done nothing for
his college" (except gain his brilliant academic honours); B, the athlete, had been
the leading figure of his year, had been captain of the boats, and had brought fresh
honour to his college by giving it the leadership of the river and the advertisement
of a success at Henley. The latter, so I was told, was the model public school man,
full of public spirit and always ready to serve the community; the former with all
his ability had been of no use to anyone except himself. It is tempting to reply that
brains come into their
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own later in life than muscle and heartiness; that in twenty years' time A will very
likely be making some valued contribution to the thought of his age, while B,
sitting in his club, will be telling not wholly accurate stories of his former feats
with the oar. But the true, and sufficient, reason why the athlete is at school
commonly the best servant of the public is that at present athletics are almost the
only recognised form of service. There are not, after all, so many things that the
boy can do for his school outside the sphere of athletics; there is nothing else
which he can do so conspiculousy, nothing in which success when it comes is so
unmistakable. The most conscientious prefect may sometimes feel that, if he is a
servant of the public, it is in the same sense in which a policeman is the servant of
the citizenslaw-abiding or otherwise–who live along his beat. He is not chosen by
the people among whom he works, nor is he responsible to them. He is not their
leader in any enterprise which excites their enthusiasm. The best prefect may be
eclipsed temporarily from public view by any nincompoop who puts up a good
game of cricket or football in an exciting house match.
Until, then, we provide other forms both of service and of leadership, we must not
be surprised if boys think of public service largely in terms of games; so long, too,
I must add, as rivalry between schools and houses is almost confined to games, and
only to a few of these. There are, we must remem-
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ber, no other forms of rivalry between the best-known schools; no rivalry in
writing, acting or producing plays; there are no musical contests, and few joint
exhibitions of art, or handicraft, or scientific experiments. Or, if there are, the
public has never heard of them. There are Lord's, Henley, and—longo intervallo—
Bisley, and their equivalents. The world and the newspapers concentrate their
attention on these and a few corresponding events in the winter. They may for a
short time be beguiled or startled into taking notice of other aspects of education;
but they will not feel for them any sustained enthusiasm.
Such being the scale of values in the outside world, many boys, finding that
athletics provide almost the only opportunity for appearing as the representatives
of their schools, naturally enough come to believe that athletic success is the one
kind of success which their elders really appreciate. It is easy then to understand
why among schoolboys the athlete, even if he is not particularly intelligent, is often
the better companion and further advanced in his social education than the others.
He has more assurance because he is good at things at which his world thinks it
worth while to be good. He has more to say for himself, because he is accustomed
to talk to older people about the only subject in which they are at the same time
interested themselves, and ready to listen to him as something of an expert. The
approval of his elders give him self-
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respect; he brings more confidence to his social life, and therefore gets more out of
it. And boys are quick to observe all this, and to draw their own conclusions. The
successful athlete becomes enviable not only for his games but for what his games
lead to. And so we find one more reason why a boy, even though he may not
particularly like games, nor be one of those who want to play them well from a
sense of duty, may yet feel that while he is at school games are more worth caring
for than anything else.
All this will show some of the thoughts that were in my mind concerning games
when I went to Churnside. The principal, and obvious, conclusion which emerged
was that athleticism ought not to be regarded as something separate, but as one part
of a closely connected system. If it was something which ought to be checked, that
could only be done properly by modelling the life of the school in such a way as to
use more fruitfully the energy which lay behind it. Earlier chapters have explained
generally how this was done, and in particular how we tried to enlarge the meaning
of public service. But I must say something more specific about our treatment of
games.
Bearing in mind what I have said about irrationality, I meant, if I could, at least to
know what I was doing, and not to allow organised games to do duty for something
quite different. They certainly did not affect the regular physical training which
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was given inside the time-table. Of this I shall have something to say in a later
chapter. Nor, on the other hand, did the organised games infringe the time for
genuine recreation, and in the latter I include all those enjoyable and informal
games which grow up under local, and more or less fluctuating, rules, and can be
begun and ended more or less according to the whim of the moment. I have often
thought that it was really an advantage that at the very beginning we had no regular
playing fields, in the ordinary sense of the word, and had to make the best use that
our ingenuity could find of the park and a space, later on asphalted, where the drive
widened out in front of the house. On the latter and in the gymnasium some
admirable "rag" games were invented, and I believe that in many ways they were
as useful as they were enjoyable.
Believing, as I did, that athleticism at its worst was the creation less of boys than of
adults, I handed over the games to the General Meeting. I was not disappointed. To
put it in one sentence, athleticism did not exist. Games were regarded with sanity
and a sense of proportion. There were other causes at work, no doubt. The life of
the school was, as I have said before, more cooperative and less competitive than
in many schools, and the social side of a boy's nature could be shown creatively
elsewhere than in games. The bulk of the boys were poorer, too, than those at most
boarding schools, and they had been brought up to think of games as being
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quite secondary in importance to work. But the result was primarily due, I am sure,
to the General Meeting and all that centred round it. My only direct interference
was to forbid the wearing of any kind of colours. This at first caused some surprise
to boys who had been at preparatory or other secondary schools, but was soon
accepted as part of the tradition, and was felt to be in harmony with the general
outlook.
The General Meeting helped first and most simply by acting as a re-director of
superfluous energy and emotion from games to other things. It provided alternative
and competing kinds of leadership and service. It is quite untrue to say that boys
will always prefer the muscular leader, if you give them freedom of choice in those
activities where muscle, or its absence, is irrelevant. Further, by its open discussion
the Meeting showed up the person of much muscle and little brains, and prevented
him from attracting too much hero-worship. It also prevented games from
becoming a kind of sacred subject outside all criticism, On the contrary, there was
always an anti-cricket party, and often a good deal of strong but good-tempered
criticism of the games committee. In some respects the boys were more
conservative in regard to games than I had expected, but this was certainly not due
to any lack of freedom of speech. There was never the slightest danger of games
becoming an unassailable imperium in imperio.
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Some readers will, perhaps, want to ask whether under this management, and so
freely exposed to criticism, the games were in fact as keen and efficient as they
would have been under a more orthodox kind of direction. The answer is that, like
all the activities controlled by the Meeting, the games went, as I expected them to
do, through relative ups and downs. The desire to hold their own with other schools
was sufficiently strong to ensure a fair level. On the whole, and for several years
on end, the boys did extraordinarily well, and beat with an almost absurd
confidence older and heavier teams from very much larger schools. There were
also, though infrequently, times of relative depression, when the standard of
keenness and skill was more mediocre. At such times some of my colleagues, and
the unregenerate part of myself, would urge me to start a campaign for more
enthusiasm. Nothing would have been easier. And nothing would have been more
foolish from the point of view of giving boys real collective responsibility. In this
matter, as in others, they had to learn from their errors. Once he has accepted that
idea, the master's part in such a case is to point out the errors at the right time—and
not before—and to await, with a patience which will not be unrewarded, for them
to be corrected.
And yet-after saying all this—I feel almost ready for a palinode. It is all very well
to write in this way about games, impersonally, and as some
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readers, no doubt, will say, priggishly. But for my own part I find games
extraordinarily interesting in themselves, and it is not simply because they write so
well that I turn first to the Golf Correspondent in The Times and to Cricketer in the
Manchester Guardian. About cricket I believe that what I have said is true, but it is
very far from being the whole truth. I have never been the slightest good at the
game, but oh, how much at various stages of my life I should have liked to be!
Cricket is a mysterious affair. Whether you regard it as a game, or an obsession, it
strikes pretty deep. We know as yet very little of the symbolism of games, why, for
instance, some games are narrowly limited in their appeal and others, such as golf,
seem to have a kind of primary attraction for people of both sexes and all ages. A
good deal has been written about the function of play in human and animal life, but
not much about the meaning of individual games. A brilliant American, who was
something more than an amateur of modern psychology, used to say half
humorously that the Englishman's love of cricket was founded on his Puritanism
and his theology. To the batsman, planted firmly in defence of his triune wicket, the
wily bowler (like Eve with the apple) tosses the symbol of temptation. The
batsman hits the horrid thing away, and flees to where the umpire, clad in the white
robe of purity, assures him of salvation. We need not go so far as that; but there is
nothing
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fantastic in the notion that cricket does express and dramatise one quality which
Englishmen like to think that they possess—a finely tempered restraint. The whole
duty of the batsman is a restrained observance of the mean between two conflicting
ideas. He must be neither wholly the attacking run-getter, nor wholly the passive
defender; for if he is altogether either of them, and nothing more, his value, save in
the rarest circumstances, disappears. All bowling implies restraint—restraint of the
ordinary human impulse to hurl anything with the bent arm. Style in batsmanship
is the restrained and economical discipline of wasteful effort.
If, as I have said, cricket is an artificial game, in the sense that natural movements
have to be tutored by constant practice, yet the temperamental or physical
differences between the cricketer and the non-cricketer appear amazingly early. I
remember on one of those first bright days of spring, which cause a premature
appearance of bat and ball, watching two new boys make their first attempt at our
particular form of rag cricket on the asphalted playground. Both were physically
alert and well grown for their age. Neither had come from the kind of home and
school where cricket is taught seriously. But what a difference, almost from the
first ball! One handled the bat as Wart did his caliver. “Put me a caliver into Wart's
hand, Bardolph,” cries Falstaff, and the poor fellow cannot traverse for the life
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of him. "He is not his craft's master", says Shallow, before bursting into the
reminiscences of a former expert. But the other, equally untutored, appeared to take
easily and at once a stance that marked him as a potential cricketer, squaring
himself at the bowler with the authentic provocative cock of the right elbow that
seemed to place him already, in his own infinitesimally shall way, in the tradition
of aggressive left-handers, bringing what thoughts of heroes of the past of Roy
Kilner, and E. W. Dillon, when he was the best public school batsman of his year,
and J. Darling driving the English bowlers through the covers in the eighteen-
nineties.
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CHAPTER VI

THE CURRICULUM
I suppose that it is only a commonplace to say of any I boarding school that it is
outside the classroom, and not inside, that boys receive the most valuable part of
their education. Except for a small minority of the more academically minded, I
certainly feel that this was true of Churnside, and in saying that I am bearing in
mind the fact that, on the whole, our county scholars were in intelligence above the
average of those who pass from primary to secondary schools. The keen
competition for entry from the whole county gave us an unusually wide field of
choice, though we by no means always selected on academic promise alone. Still,
the average was fairly high. Had it been lower, I should feel this even more
strongly than I do, particularly with regard to those who left at fifteen or sixteen.
What helped these boys most, apart from the selfdirected activities which I have....
described, were the friendly companionship with older educated people, and the
social life of an adolescent community where certain values were taken for
granted, and from which various uneducative influences, for
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example the popular cinema, were absent. If secondary education is to do for the
community as a whole all that it ought to do, those who attend day schools must be
given, as nearly as possible, equal opportunities for receiving this less formal kind
of education. It is in these matters that the school has often to give a lead to the
home. There is a limit to the distance which schools, or a system of education, can
be ahead of the public opinion of the community which supports them, but that
limit is reached more quickly in matters of belief than in matters of taste. In a
society which really took seriously the education of all its children to the age of
sixteen, and thought of that education less in terms of information, and more in
terms of feeling and taste, the secondary schoolmaster would be given a fair
chance. Whatever might be the means of testing the general work of the schools–
examination, or inspection, or both—it would be ensured that in the secondary
schools there would be some time not spent on prescribed "subjects". The
headmaster would be able to count upon a certain number of hours when he could
give a boy what he thought he needed most at the moment, without any thought of
a future test or further objective. Very often he would find that what the boy needed
most was simply a little intelligent and sympathetic conversation with an older
person. “Oxford doesn't give Scholarships in History," once remarked to me an
extraordinarily successful teacher of that subject.
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"Oxford only gives Scholarships in papa's conversation.” I am not thinking now of
conversation on that exalted level, but of something which, short of that, is yet
more varied and stimulating than the boy always hears in his own home.
But granted that in a boarding school (which is a kind of combination of home and
school) his hours in the classroom are not the most important part of the life of a
boy under sixteen, might they not mean a great deal more to him than they
commonly do, and might they not be a far more powerful stimulus to further
growth of mind and spirit after he leaves school? For my own part, I do not feel
happy about this side of my work as a headmaster; and that, no doubt, is why I
approach the subject of the curriculum with some uneasiness. All through those
twelve years I was haunted, as I am still, by a dimly conceived idea of the
possibility of a national-but not in the least nationalist-culture, which might have
been, and may yet be, based on a quite different conception of popular secondary
education, a culture to which I have to confess that the kind of teaching in which I
have been engaged for a good many years seems to me to contribute very little. I
mean a culture rooted in the literature, and craftsmanship, and industry, and
countryside of England, together with hardness and poise of body, and the sense of
spiritual reality. I am very sceptical of the possibility of any deep and enduring
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popular culture which is not close to the daily work of the people.
That is a far cry, and it is not the purpose of this book to suggest how it is to be
attained. But I am sure that in the ordinary "general" education of the secondary
school there is a great deal of wasted and misdirected effort. I accepted the
ordinary curriculum, with certain minor modifications, and also the school
certificate examination, which is at present bound up with it. But I did so, not
because I believed for a moment that the former was the result of any scientific
educational thought, for it is clearly nothing of the kind, but for the severely
practical reason that my boys for the most part had to pass the examination in order
to obtain employment. The principal weakness of the secondary curriculum, taken
as a whole, is, surely, that too often it is not centred round any core, or related to
any one main stem of learning or way of looking at life. With all its many defects,
the classical curriculum, to which so many of my generation were subjected, had a
kind of unity of its own, and was capable of producing, even by the age of sixteen,
a system of more or less coordinated, if rather futile, knowledge. At present there
are too many loose ends of subjects, which mean a waste of time, and give an
entirely false sense of culture, particularly in the case of boys who leave school
soon, or immediately, after taking their school certificate examination. Lessons
may be well
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planned, and well given, but the ideal of "a good general education" means too
often in practice the acquisition of a number of disconnected fragments of
information, with such power of observation, clear thought and expression as may
have been picked up by the way. It is these loose ends which lie rather heavy on
my conscience when I recall my work as a headmaster. I think of courses of
Mathematics, and Latin, and Physics, ended at no particular place when the boy
left school, and boys with no gift for languages hauled through an examination in a
modern language in order to obtain a certificate, when there was little chance of
their ever subsequently reading a book or speak a word in that language. No doubt
the time was not all wasted. Application can be learnt in studying any subject, and
logical thinking in many. But it is a poor compliment to a course of study to say
that the time spent upon it was not all wasted. What worries me is whether the time
could not have been better spent in other ways. And in saying this I am not
speaking with any unnecessary modesty about our actual teaching, which I believe
to have been as good as that in most secondary schools, and better than that in
many. I am thinking of the content of what we taught, not of the manner in which
we presented it.
There are really two aspects of one weakness. We have too many subjects, and that
is largely our own fault, for by thinking of them and examin-
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ing them separately we create unnecessary divisions, and make it more difficult to
correlate and unify. And secondly, we too often find that there is not time for them
to mean anything to a boy who leaves school at the age of sixteen or earlier, At any
rate they have no meaning which he himself can recognise, and therefore he is not
likely to make them the starting point for further reading. The familiar charge (with
which, on the whole, I agree) that the secondary curriculum is too "academic" for
most boys seems to me to have the more point, in that it is brought against a
system not of subjects but of half-subjects. I have become more and more sceptical
of the ability of most people to judge the value of a subject, if it is discontinued at a
comparatively early age, when they themselves have carried it a good deal further.
Especially difficult is it for those who commonly think of the subject in terms of
advanced examinations, and are themselves persons of academic distinction, to
remember how much, or how little, they knew when they were fourteen or fifteen.
The more they knew of the subject, the more they tend to give to its earlier stages a
meaning which really came from what they learnt later. Yet it is people of this kind
who, to a rather alarming extent, have decided in the past what shall be taught in
the lower forms of secondary schools. The best, or perhaps the only, way to know
what a subject means to a boy who leaves school at sixteen is to be in close contact
with him
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both before he leaves and during the following three or four years.
A great deal can be said against the effect of the present school certificate
examination upon the work of lower forms, and I have done my share in
bemoaning the restrictions which the examination imposes. But I have to admit
that, like many headmasters, I did not always take advantage of what liberty there
was. Most examining bodies allow alternative syllabuses, and are prepared to
consider reasonable suggestions. For some kind of examination test (provided that
it does not come too early) there is a good deal to be said, and that not merely
because it maintains intellectual standards. It is of some moral value to the
individual to have to face a test so objective and impersonal as that provided by an
external written examination. In fact, it should be one result of any "freedom" in
education worth the name that any such compulsory test can be faced with greater
equanimity. For the same reason it is a more useful test of a school as a whole than
is sometimes recognised. It shows whether the staff are able to present their pupils
for the test without any excess of emotion and excitement. Jaded and harassed
teachers and nervous workedup pupils betray a wrong scale of values somewhere.
Unfortunately, though the examination can show a close observer that there is
something badly wrong in this respect, it cannot show exactly where the fault lies.
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The real harm lies not so much in the fact that the boy will have to face an
examination, as in the fact that he will be examined in all, or nearly all, the subjects
which he takes from the time when he enters his secondary school. If the actual
written examination tested only one part of his work in the classroom, and if there
were no compulsory subjects (except English and Arithmetic—without some
knowledge of which a man may be regarded as almost a public danger), a
headmaster would be far more free than he is at present to permit boys to
discontinue subjects from which they derive no profit, and generally in the early
stages to study and supply the needs of any particular individual and group.
Whether we like them or not, there is little prospect of these examinations being
totally abolished. In the first place, the whole system has become a kind of vested
interest. There are a great many people to whom the abolition of these tests would
be in one way or another a serious misfortune. Employers are not likely for a long
time to believe that any other kind of test will give them at least that minimum of
information which they feel they must have about those whom they take into their
service. Parents, ratepayers, and the state, all claim the right to be assured that a
certain modicum of knowledge and training are the result of secondary education.
The problem is to devise a system of examination which will satisfy all these three,
will tell the
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employer all that he really needs to know (but not necessarily more), and will give
the schoolmaster the freedom which will minister both to the education of his
pupils and to his own self-respect. *
So I, for one, have become a little tired and suspicious of the "good all-round
education", which, whatever it may mean in theory for the boy who leaves school
at fifteen or sixteen, too often means in practice the acquisition of a number of
disconnected and ill-digested oddments. In place of it I have tried to find some
other tests to apply both to my own work, when I ask where it was right and where
wrong, and to the work of others. It must be understood that I am thinking of
secondary education which is, as ours was at Churnside, avowedly "general", that
is to say definitely not vocational, nor related in any special way to any one aspect
of industry, or commerce, or social life. I do not pretend that these tests are
exhaustive or scientific; but they are a convenient basis for criticism and self-
criticism.
First. Do the subjects which a boy studies in school hours help his spiritual
growth?
Second. Do they assist in promoting a many-sided physical growth towards bodily
health and effectiveness?
Third. Do they foster and enrich his emotional life? Do they make him more aware
of beauty, and
* See page 291.
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make more sensitive his power of vision, and hearing, and touch?
Fourth. Do they include such information, and lead to such knowledge, as will help
him to understand himself and the age or civilisation in which he lives?
Fifth. Do they do all this in such a way that he wants to continue his education
after he leaves school, not necessarily, of course, by studying exactly the same
subjects, but by reading and enquiring on his own account? This is, in a sense, the
most important test of all, perhaps the final test of a good school, though it often
counts for far less than other more superficial tests of supposed efficiency. For all
but a small minority of boys, it is by no means only a matter of intellectual
stimulus or the technique of teaching. It is related to the boy's emotional attitude to
those who teach him and the subjects which they teach, an attitude which may be
bound up with the traditions and conventions of his particular school. It is the old
question of how he regards authority, but with another question added to it-how far
has he learnt that there are things worth learning and being interested in for their
own sake, and not because they lead to some advantage beyond? Sometimes when
I am dealing with young men who have just finished their secondary education I
am tempted to think that the principal lesson which they have learnt is just the
opposite of this—that nothing is worth
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doing, unless its achievement leads to the passing of some examination or to some
measurable "success". It would be difficult to imagine a more damnable error,
As to the first of my questions, we have to recognise that religious instruction can
never be more than one part of religious education. By that I mean something more
than the fact that if religious instruction is to have its full effect it must have some
relation both to corporate worship and to the standards and ideals of the school
society as a whole. The human influences which incline a growing boy towards a
religious or a non-religious way of looking at life are many and subtle. There are
the words and example of parents and friends, habit and suggestion, the emotional
appeal of public worship, books, pictures and many others. We must not expect the
scripture lesson as such to play too large a part in the boy's religious growth. Nor
must we expect it to play a part of relatively equal importance at every stage of his
education. I believe it is a great deal more likely to have a real meaning in the
preparatory and later years than in what I have called the middle stage. How many
boys ought in present conditions to stay at school beyond the age of seventeen and
a half or eighteen is a vexed question. But for those who stay to that age or beyond
it, the scripture lesson should fulfil at least two functions in any school which
professes to give a Christian education.
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In the first place, the boy of that age is beginning to reach out intellectually, as well
as emotionally, beyond the limits of the narrow world which has hitherto satisfied
him. He is ready to grasp some of the intellectual content of his religion, and to
learn, at the very least, that he need not be ashamed intellectually of Christianity
when he is in the company of people whom he regards as clever. If the teacher can
do nothing else at this age, he can, at any rate, put a boy in the way of reading
some of the right books, and let him know that there are people of first-rate
intellect who are writing about religion in an interesting, and even exciting way. It
is now, too, that many boys will be taking for the first time an interest in the social
and economic problems of the world about them. They will be wanting "to put the
world right". Now is the time for the schoolmaster who believes that the
application of Christian principles can lead to the solution of those problems to say
so, and to discuss with his class the Christian attitude to the immediately pressing
difficulties which have to be faced in politics, business, and social life. Obviously
such teaching or discussion will often have a personal as well as a general
application.
This will seem very platitudinous to some readers, and the teaching in the upper
forms of many public schools covers all that I have said, and far more besides. But
it is a fact not always recognised that in a large number of secondary schools for
boys
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religious instruction, which is given in the lower forms, is discontinued in the
forms which are taking, or have taken, the certificate examination. That is to say, it
is discontinued just when there is a real chance for a boy to feel that his religious
teaching is a definite and valuable part of his preparation for life. The suggestion
that religion is all very well for little boys, but that older boys have grown beyond
it, or that in the examination year religious instruction ought to give way to more
important subjects, is as foolish as it is offensive. It would be more logical and
honest to have an entirely secular curriculum throughout the school.
My second question covers all that is commonly thought of as physical education.
But it can, and should, include far more, for though the manual training given in
the workshop can be justified on practical and aesthetic grounds, it is also, in one
form or another, essential to the complete bodily development of the dexterous and
competent human being. I firmly believe that, after what we understand by the
spiritual side of school life, there is no side of secondary education to which at the
moment we need to pay more serious attention than to physical training. I mean by
that term systematic gymnastics and athletics, quite distinct from recreative
amusements and the traditional games of English schools. Indeed, the distinction
between moral and spiritual education must not be pressed too far. One cannot
watch the effect of regular
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physical training on boys without realising that balance and rhythm can be passed
on from body to mind, and that bodily well-being contributes powerfully to self-
respect. Well-planned physical training ought, too, to have one special advantage
as regards moral education over some other forms of school work. It ought to be
possible for a boy, at least in some of his exercises, to know how far he is below
the standard at which he aims and to measure and record his improvement. That I
did not do more to develop this side of our physical training is one of my sins of
omission.
I can claim at any rate that physical training at Churnside was not starved of time.
All the boys had five periods in the week, which corresponds to daily periods at a
day secondary school. Whether anything less than a daily period is of great value
seems to me extremely doubtful. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that a
daily period of half an hour in appropriate conditions under skilled supervision for
every boy receiving post-primary education would be of inestimable benefit to the
physique of our nation. There is no department of our education where reform is
more necessary and opposition to it less intelligent.
I do not write of physical education as an expert, merely as one who is deeply
interested, and believes profoundly in its possibilities. I have no qualifications for
criticising the apparently admirable developments which are to be found in the
more
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enlightened schools and colleges. Only, after watching boys at physical exercises
for many hours, I feel that as part, though only, it may be, a small part of their
physical education the boys of what I have called the middle period still need
something that we have not yet given them, something in which they can be
absorbed into the rhythmical, purposive, symbolic movement of the group. It is for
the experts to determine its exact nature. I have only a vague picture in my mind,
compounded of memories of platoon or company drill performed at the double,
imaginings of what may have been the nature of Greek military dancing, and the
idea of something akin to the morris dance, but with a new symbolism.
My third test seems to me to try the education of boys where at present it is
weakest—girls are, on the whole, more fortunate—and I cannot apply it to my own
work without grave misgivings. In the growth of taste and sensitiveness to beauty,
including beauty of language, we have to think (as in religious education) not only
of lessons and instruction, but of the values which are esteemed in the school, and
the continuous and unperceived suggestion of the boy's environment. As regards
our natural environment, we were unusually fortunate. Our man-made conditions
were less favourable; but a very modern educationist who deplored the fact that we
should never be able to do good work on account of the ugliness of the house
erred, I think, on the side of preciousness. Nevertheless, it is an
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immense gain if school buildings can be attractive. It is good for a boy to live in
surroundings which he knows to represent time and trouble spent by people who
have thought it worth while to spend them, in order that they might have pleasing
things about them. Negatively, it is good for him to know that people whom he
respects find certain kinds of ugliness repulsive or intolerable. I am not sure that
we teachers do not tell our pupils too many silent lies by acquiescing in ugly and
squalid surroundings. It may be necessary sometimes for a schoolmaster to teach in
a room which is no better than a dingy hole, and no doubt it is better for him to be
able to rise superior to outward circumstances, but he has no right to hide from his
pupils his belief that it is a dingy hole, just because he has to work in it. We do not
talk enough about the beauty and ugliness of common things, not least the
buildings and rooms in which we do our work. We take both the beauty and the
ugliness too much for granted. Yet in the war against materialism and vulgarity,
which is so big a part of education, it matters more in the long run that we should
help to create a desire for beauty in the things around us, and the articles of daily
use, than that we should lead boys to find pleasure in the pictures and statues of a
past age. What matters is that those enlisted for the contest should themselves care
deeply,
But, granted the importance of environment, it is obviously necessary also to have
definite lessons
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inside the time-table, of which the primary object is to give boys the opportunity
both to make and to admire things which contain some element of beauty. That is
another justification for the handicraft lesson, though the value of the lesson will
depend very largely upon how far boys are able to practise and continue in their
spare time what they have learnt from their instructor. Here the boarding school
has a distinct advantage. It is very much to be regretted that more boys of academic
ability do not continue this kind of work in or out of school hours till the end of
their time at school. In this respect, at least, I do not find much cause for
selfreproach. It is all to the good if the better craftsmen among the boys can make
articles of furniture of good design for use in the school, though there is some
danger in the desire-quite laudable in itself—to use the workshop for school
purposes. The result is sometimes that boys are kept at making small articles for
use in the laboratory or clsewhere which give no scope for real craftsmanship, and
represent just that kind of work in which mass production, so far from being
objectionable, is acceptable to common sense. Occasionally, too, boys are to be
found merely putting together furniture from material which has been prepared and
jointed by other hands, when they would be more profitably engaged on less
impressive articles which were wholly their own work. The visitor who, when
being shown round a school, is told airily that "all
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this has been made in the school workshop" must be quite sure that “made" does
mean more than "assembled".
I think it was as much the expressed wish of the founder, as my own desire that the
boys should not share my own ignorance of music, which made me from the first
arrange for regular periods of listening to music, with skilled explanation, inside
the timetable. Certainly the founder believed in it wholeheartedly, and in the first
years it was a special kindness of his which made it possible. I believe that
opportunities of this kind are more frequent in girls' schools, but I do not know
why boys should not have them to the same extent. I never had the slightest doubt
of their value, and though at a certain stage it was not uncommon for boys to
pretend to think that these periods were a waste of time, I have been told often by
old boys that they were glad afterwards that I had insisted that they should
continue them. This is, perhaps, a warning against the folly of allowing a boy to
discontinue a subject at his own caprice.
It is likely that schools will find, even more than they have done hitherto, that some
of the best opportunities for general aesthetic training are provided by dramatic
work. Here beauty of diction, and colour, and movement, and design, can be
achieved, not only separately but in concert. It calls for the best kind of team work,
to which the most varied gifts can contribute. The full value of school drama
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is only obtained when the boy feels that he is taking part not merely in an
entertainment", but in a work of art. I need hardly add that the acting of which I am
thinking has little, if anything, to do with the dramatic method of teaching
languages and history in the classroom. That, too, has its place in school life, but
its objective is quite different.
My fourth question-how far does what we teach boys help them to understand
themselves and the age or civilisation in which they live?—is the question which
occurs to me most forcibly, both when I think of what boys now learn in secondary
schools, and when I recall my own education at school and university.
I think it may be assumed it would not be difficult to prove that a satisfactory
answer to the second half of the question implies both that a boy has some
knowledge of English literature, and that he can express himself simply and
intelligibly in writing his own language. If that is so, I need say no more about
English as a subject in a secondary school. Its importance is now generally
recognised — at least in theory. In cold fact the number of boys who leave school
at sixteen, or even eighteen, with only the smallest power of expressing their
thoughts simply and sincerely is rather depressing,
In the rest of the curriculum there must, surely, be some unifying subject or core of
study to give place and direction to the other subjects, and I feel increasingly that
this must be history. Or, rather,
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since history in the school has so often been narrow, and futile, and unreal, it is
better to say that it must be some new, as yet unnamed, study, which includes
history and a great deal of what we now call geography. But it must not be the
traditional three-decker* history which prevailed in schools when I was a boy, and
has by no means been deposed even now. I mean a world history, which will treat
our present civilisation as but one in the sequence of great cultures, and will
attempt, however modestly, to give some meaning to the story of man. For that
reason it must be history with a religion, or philosophy, or way of looking at life
behind it, in fact the way which gives meaning and impetus to the education of
which it is a part. I do not see, for example, how Christian education can be content
with anything but an avowedly Christian interpretation of history, and the same
applies to an education inspired-or, rather, uninspired by materialism.
This does not seem to me in the least to rule out the humanist value of history. The
story of the past can still excite and enrich the imagination. Nor, obviously, does it
preclude the special study of a period to show, if the teacher believes in its value,
the detailed working of cause and effect. Or a special course can be designed with
some limited aim, for example to throw light on the meaning of democratic
citizenship. What is important is that
* i.e. classical ( – Greek and Roman), "middle ages" and modern.
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the general history teaching of the school should not be wrested to serve any
limited or temporary cause or interest. The final goal of man's ascent is not, after
all, the British Empire, nor even the League of Nations.
I speak with some feeling in the matter, for years ago I taught history to nearly the
whole of a school of some two hundred boys, and when I think about it now I am
not sure whether to be amused or ashamed by the narrowness of the standpoint
from which I pronounced my judgments. I was outwardly not unsuccessful. My
pupils gained university scholarships, the various forms appeared to be interested,
and they were for the most part extraordinarily hard-working. But I was preaching
all the time—though more than half unconsciouslythe nineteenth-century British
gospel of continuous material progress, a gospel for which I cannot now find any
authority. And to my more intelligent pupils the judgments that I passed on the
great men of history must almost have seemed to depend upon whether the latter, if
they had been given the opportunity, would have supported or opposed the Liberal
Government of 1906. By all means let us have the maximum of freedom for the
teacher. But the history teacher, more almost than any other, should be in line with
the main moral education which the school is trying to give.
Side by side with history there must be geography. I believe that it is all to the
good if in lower
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forms they can be taught by the same master, who has had some training in both.
Later will come more specialised work, but the two must never be far apart.
Geography as a bridge subject has never taken its rightful place in English
secondary education. One reason for this is that it inherits an unhappy tradition of
mechanically memorised topography. Another is that, if geography is to have any
real meaning, it demands at different stages a good deal of work out of doors.
Headmasters, wrestling with the elaborate time-tables which they devise to meet
the requirements of examinations, are apt to regard the geography master's demand
that he should have a class for a whole morning or afternoon for field work as an
infernal nuisance. But his cause is just, and I hope it will prevail. One who is no
expert should not be dogmatic about what the teaching of geography in a school
should accomplish. But, if only for the joy which it brings, I should like to think
that every secondary school turns out yearly some who have the real love of maps,
and of using them when they travel, especially when they walk. This is but a small
part of the geographer's work, but it is not to be despised.
If history must be the principal means of teaching us by comparison and contrast
with other civilisations the meaning of our own, this should also be at least one
reason, and perhaps the most important, why we study foreign languages. This is
particularly true in the case of the ancient languages.
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Like a great many of my contemporaries I received a predominantly classical
education from the age of ten to the age of twenty-two. That kind of education had
its merits, but it certainly had grave faults. An immense amount of time was spent
upon trivial grammatical technicalities. We were made to read a great deal of
second-rate or third-rate Latin literature, when we might have been reading first-
rate Greek literature. (Why, on earth, should anyone be made to read Ovid or, for
that matter, Livy?) The methods of teaching composition not only failed to get any
except the most gifted to write respectable Greek and Latin, but, I believe,
succeeded in making many of us write a kind of stilted and selfconscious bastard
Latin instead of our own language. Little was done to help us to place Hellenic,
Hellenistic and Roman life in their right relation to other civilisations; and our
whole conception of classical life and letters was arbitrarily narrowed to
comparatively short periods of that great culture; Latin literature, for all we knew
to the contrary, might have ended—except for Juvenal and Tacitus—with Virgil,
and Greek with Demosthenes. But my principal quarrel with my teachers is that
they did so little by contrast with classical and pagan civilisation to help us to
understand the Christian and Western civilisation in which we are living. There
was a kind of unconscious conspiracy to emphasise all our classical "heritage" and
"foundations" and similar metaphorical possessions, and to
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minimise or ignore what has come to us from other sources. There were many
ramifications of this tendency which it would be fascinating to explore, both
because it is itself psychologically revealing, and because it so deeply affected the
intellectual, ethical and religious teaching given in the public schools of that time.
When this bias is corrected by a reasonable historical perspective, it is folly to deny
that the study of classical life and literature can be a magnificent instrument of
humanist education in the hands of enlightened teachers. But is it likely that in
future many boys will be able to afford the time to study two classical languages,
especially boys who have no opportunity to begin any foreign language before the
age of eleven or twelve? And a second question in schools where a number of boys
are learning only one classical language, is it necessary that this language should
always be Latin?
For seven or eight years at Churnside I taught Greek to a number of boys who
learnt no Latin, and my experience makes me commend the practice to others. The
boys ranged from twelve to eighteen years. The majority of them had begun to
learn French at eleven, and before that age had learnt no foreign language. The
reasons why I preferred Greek to Latin were many. I believed, as I have implied
already, that there was truth in the words of a wise friend that “there is something
adolescent about Greek”. It opens to boys not only a great
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literature, but the primary and original literature of one of the world's great
cultures, and not a literature which is largely derivative. Moreover, in my
experience, as soon as a boy can understand the meaning of a simple sentence, he
can be introduced to original, and not "made up", Greek, which he will find
interesting. I have not found this to be the case in Latin. I felt, too, that the venture
might appeal to intelligent opinion outside the ranks of classical teachers. There
seems to be a growing body of opinion which appreciates the value of Greek more
keenly, perhaps, than at any time since the Renaissance. Finally, in learning
classical Greek boys learn something which enables them to read the New
Testament in the original.
I have no doubt that, like many schoolmasters, I made some boys take a classical
language whose time would have been better spent in other ways. But I believe the
experiment was well worth while. If I had to do it again, I should make some
changes in the actual course. I should make the older boys read more poetry of
other kinds and less drama. I am sufficient of a sceptic to wonder whether the
Greek drama was not so bound up with conventions and art forms of which even
the greatest scholars know comparatively little, that it can have little of its original
meaning for modern readers, who, in fact, read into it a great deal which belongs to
the quite different conceptions of Western tragedy, I discontinued the teaching of
Greek only because in
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a small school it was difficult to provide economically for the teaching of two
classical languages, and as time went on a number of boys wanted to enter careers
which, differing as widely as the parson's from the pharmaceutical chemist's, were
alike in that they all demanded a rather pitiful minimum of Latin. It is unfortunate
that in every public examination where a classical language is compulsory Greek is
not an alternative.
Contrary to what I had been told, the problem of candidates for history
scholarships at the older universities was scarcely affected by the substitution of
Greek for Latin. A boy who had the ability to win a scholarship, and had already
learnt French for seven and Greek for six years, was not likely to find much
difficulty in learning in a few months enough Latin to read his mediaeval texts.
Indeed, I can hardly imagine a history tutor who, if it came to a choice, would not
ceteris paribus prefer a pupil who had read some Heredotus, Thucydides, and Plato
to one who had read Livy, Caesar, and Cicero unless, perchance, the tutor had not
himself read the former in the original.
The teaching of at least one modern language is universal in secondary schools,
and many would regard it as a dangerous heresy to hold that any education which
did not include it could deserve the name of secondary. Fifteen years ago I should
have been as ready as anyone to send the heretics to the stake. Now I am not quite
so sure. I find it difficult
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to justify the very large amount of time given to teaching French to boys who will
leave school at fifteen or sixteen, at the end of what is avowedly a general or non-
vocational course, unless we can be quite sure that the teaching does satisfy, among
other tests, the one which I am now suggesting. Does it, in fact, give them any real
sense of a way of looking at life widely different from their own, and by contrast
help them better to understand the world in which they live? That claim is often put
forward by teachers of modern languages, but not always with strong conviction,
and I cannot help thinking that they have mainly in mind courses of study which
continue to eighteen or beyond. It may be right, probably it is, to allow every boy
who continues his education beyond fourteen to have the chance of learning a
foreign language, but expert teachers should be able to tell after a year at most
what is his capacity for doing so. If his capacity is very small, would not his time
till he is sixteen be spent better in other ways? At any rate, it seems to be waste of
time to make him continue forms of written composition in which he can never
attain to any respectable standard, or have the satisfaction of being able to measure
his own improvement.
Another question about the teaching of modern languages has often occurred to
me. Should we not experiment more with methods of what we may call greater and
less intensity? Are the best results
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obtained by periods spaced evenly throughout the week, and term, and year, or
might it not be better at certain stages in a boy's progress to have an intensive
week, or month, or even a relatively intensive half-term, with fewer periods
subsequently? Obviously this depends largely upon cooperation with other
subjects. It is easy to see a possible connection between this idea and my earlier
suggestion that one or more forms as a self-contained unit should be sent away
from school for a term into some form of camp.
In what is commonly called a scientific age the teaching of natural science (unless
it is quite extraordinarily unintelligent) can hardly fail to quicken a boy's interest in
both the human and the material world about him; and I believe that the science
teaching of any school should aim, in addition to its other results, at enlarging a
boy's understanding of the "drive" of the present age and, in conjunction with
history, at enabling him to contrast this with other ages less scientifically
enquiring, but not less sensitive to moral and spiritual values. In this province I
confess that I speak in the deepest ignorance, but there may be others who share
my doubts whether all the hours often spent in the laboratory before the school
certificate are really desirable at that stage of a general education, however
necessary they would be as part of a later and more specialised course. They may
wonder, too, how far the kind of half-baked materialism, which seems to be the
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philosophy of so many boys who now leave secondary schools at the age of
eighteen or nineteen, is due to unintelligent science teaching, combined with the
practice of having no religious instruction in the upper forms. Is it not also
sometimes assumed incorrectly–if I may express one more doubt—that there is a
kind of embryonic spirit of disinterested research latent in many boys whose desire
for knowledge is in fact limited to ends which are severely practical?
If, as I have suggested, the time which many boys at present give to languages and
science could be reduced, it would be possible to find time for some definite
teaching on the social, political and economic problems which confront a boy
when he leaves school, and, later on, becomes a self-supporting member of society.
That economics will have to take their place in the secondary curriculum, I am
convinced, and the sooner we take the preliminary steps to clear the ground of
prejudice and misunderstanding the better. Civics is a drab word, and I have known
it made the excuse for some exceedingly drab lessons. But is there any subject that
cannot be made dull by an unimaginative teacher? It seems logical that the system
of education in a democracy supporting a representative government should
include some direct teaching on the duties and rights of the citizen, and the ideas
which that form of organised society is meant to embody. I said earlier in this book
that the first
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and most important form of civic training must be the school life itself, and I
described one form of school society which seems to me to have its own merits as
a preparation for life in a democracy. But practice and teaching should supplement
each other. For older boys especially, there should be some clear and direct
instruction in the meaning and working of democracy. It is not sufficient to hope
that such teaching will be implicit in the teaching of other subjects. That does not
mean that the teaching of the school as a whole should represent the views of any
one political party. But the differences, as well as the resemblances between parties
should not be minimised or passed over. The wise teacher (assuming that he has a
headmaster of a reasonably high standard of courage and intelligence) will state
frankly his own position, while endeavouring to do full justice with the help of
colleagues and pupils to the position of others.
There is, after all, this difference between commending to the young the merits of
democratic representative government and those of any other forms of government.
The former, if it is at all worthy of the name, implies freedom of speech and
criticism, the freedom, in fact, of a citizen to advocate and compass the subversion
of the democratic regime itself, provided that he relies upon persuasion and not
upon force. To "teach democracy”, therefore, is to leave the way open to a better
form of polity, if such is to be found; only, it must be the
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way of reason, and not of violence. In speaking to our pupils of democratic
freedom as a means to enable man to live the good life, we shall do well to stress
this freedom of criticism, and also the respect paid by true democracy to
individuality. It is an interesting question how far the master who honestly and
wholeheartedly believes in these qualities of democracy will find his beliefs
affecting his methods of governing older boys.
There is not, I imagine, as yet any consensus of opinion as to what should be the
right approach to the teaching of economics before it is taught as a separate
subject. But I feel that for younger boys the boarding school should also give a
practical approach, both through their own organisation and through instruction
and practical work in connection with the domestic side of the household. I have
said something about the former, but the latter should have been easy to arrange,
and I regret that, though at one time I sketched out provisionally a course of
household economy for boys in their first and second years, I never put it into
practice.
The demand that education should help a boy to understand himself is becoming an
accepted test, though there is still some nervousness as to how it should be applied.
It certainly should mean that he must know far more than did the boy of my time
about his own body, both as an animal form and as the habitation of a human mind
and spirit. When I was a headmaster, I provided as soon as I was
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able that every boy, even if he learnt no other branch of natural science, should
take a course of biology. I had other reasons for doing this, which had nothing to
do with a boy's knowledge of the machinery of his own body. It seemed to me that
the lessons of biology would be more valuable to the older boy working at
humanist subjects, to the history specialist, for example, beginning the study of
politics, than the lessons of any other natural science. But apart from that I should
have encouraged biology as leading to a most valuable form of self-understanding,
and experience seemed to show that increasingly it produced an unemotional
attitude to bodily forms and functions which made for sanity and self-respect.
Still more should self-understanding imply that a boy should know something
about his own processes of thought, both as an individual and as a member of a
group. He should have some knowledge of the instincts emotions and sentiments
which actuate his mental life. Some people seem to be terrified by the idea of
teaching boys psychology on the double ground that there is as yet no stable and
undisputed body of doctrine, and that such teaching will encourage morbid
introspection. To which it may be replied, first, that introspection is by no means
the same as self-knowledge. On the contrary, "the introspective person (in the
popular sense of the phrase) is interested in himself, even passionately interested,
but he does not on that
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account know himself. Indeed, the more interested he is in himself the less likely
he is to know himself. In order to know ourselves we must look outwards as well
as inwards; we must, in fact, learn to view ourselves objectively, and to see
ourselves as others see us. The introspective, introverted, type of person, on the
contrary, stands in his own light”.* Secondly, there is no harm in teaching tentative
hypotheses, provided that one teaches them as such, and emphasises the fact that
there are rival theories in the field. Thirdly, whether we like it or not, older boys
will pick up a good deal of modern psychology—often in extremely dangerous and
misleading forms—in novels, plays and the press, and we have no right to withhold
from them any knowledge which may help to defeat the charlatan. I am not saying
that definite courses of psychology are necessary in the highest forms of schools.
But I believe that in religious instruction, in the study of literature, art and history,
and in talks about health and sex, we should do far more than has been done
hitherto to lead boys to understand the processes of the human mind. To these
opportunities I should add public and private discussions and explanations of
actual events and movements in the life of the school. This treatment can be
applied to rumours, punishments, sentiments of like and dislike of individuals and
subjects, and all those continual
* A Manual of Pastoral Psychology, by Dewar and Hudson (Philip Allan).
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incidents of school life which, in our own case, came before the general meeting. I
wish I had done more of such teaching. But I did enough to make me realise how
much more is necessary.
To other reasons for trying to impart this kind of self-understanding I shall recur.
But there is one which I will now mention, because it is connected with what I
have already said about preparation for life as a member of a democratic
community. It is surely our duty to try to give boys at least such knowledge of their
own minds, and of the minds of those who try to exploit them, as will protect them
against the many forms of mass-suggestion which are so powerful in the world to-
day. The politician, the journalist, the advertiser, all have their proper place and
function. But they most of them appeal at one time or another, unless we are
careful, to the frightened child, or the excitable savage, or the ignorant lout who is
latent in our minds, instead of to that which is mature, reasonable, and civilised.
About many things that they will find in the world, and many words that will be
addressed to them, we must not be frightened of making our boys sceptics;
provided always that the ideals and standards of the school community in which
they live are such as to render them incapable from their own experience of
becoming cynics.
One result, at least, of a better understanding of body and mind will not take long
to show itself. It will be seen in a higher standard of health.
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NOTE TO CHAPTER VI
It is rather futile to complain of the existing examination system without making
some positive suggestion for its improvement. Though the Higher School
Certificate determines the course of study of the greater number of the older boys
and girls, it is the School Certificate which is regarded at present as the goal and
the test of the education of the greater number of those who enter secondary
schools, and I will confine my suggestions to the requirements of the School
Certificate examination. Assuming that this Certificate is to be a test to be applied
at about the age of sixteen to education which is not definitely vocational, and that
it has nothing to do as it certainly should have nothing to do—with the
qualifications for admission to a university, I believe that the Certificate should
certify these facts :
(1) That an examination, roughly equivalent in standard to the existing
examinations, has been passed in the use of the English Language (not in English
Literature); and that an examination slightly easier than the present examination
has been passed in Arithmetic.
(2) That an examination has been passed in one of the following four alternatives :
A. History, Geography, and Economics. B. Two Foreign Languages.
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C. Mathematics and Natural Science (in this case the Arithmetic in (1) might be
omitted).
D. Art and Handwork (both to be interpreted as widely as possible).
The standard of these examinations should be based on the assumption that from
eight to ten periods per week have been allotted to A, B, C, or D during the four
years preceding the examination.
(3) That x number of hours have been spent in continuous and progressive
instruction or study not in direct preparation for (1) or (2), and including Religious
or Moral Instruction, Music, and Physical Training. (The number t should represent
a total, and not be divided as between different subjects.) The Certificate should
contain a statement to this effect signed by the headmaster of the school and two
colleagues, of a status to be defined, and there should be the counter-signature of
the Director of Education, or the Clerk of the Governing Body, to a statement that
to the best of his belief the information is correct. The Certificate should be
designated A, B, C or D, according to the alternative selected in (2).
This scheme is obviously a mere outline. In particular it leaves undecided what
number should be represented by *, which again depends partly upon how many
hours should be given to preparation for the examination in (1). The latter might be
approximately four hours per week for four years, Its merits appear to me to be the
following:—
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(1) It puts no temptation in the way of a headmaster to commit a boy to too many
subjects. If the curriculum is overcrowded in these conditions, the headmaster can
blame nobody but himself.
(2) An employer can see at once whether a boy has the particular qualifications
which he requires, without reference to other qualifications or attainments with
which qua employer he has really no concern. If he wants a boy with a foreign
language he takes one who has gained Certificate B; if he wants a boy with a more
practical training he takes one who has gained one or another variety of Certificate
D.
(3) The scheme is based on trust in the headmasters and their colleagues, and
therefore, I believe, makes for both greater responsibility and greater freedom to
experiment.
(4) At the same time it gives the schoolmaster more opportunity of consulting and
meeting the wishes of parents.
(5) Without encouraging premature specialisation, it allows a headmaster to plan
the work of an exceptionally able boy in the lower forms, so that it is continuous
with what he will be doing in his last years at school.
(6) It also gives him greater freedom to permit a boy to discontinue a subject for
which he shows no aptitude, if he thinks it wise to do so.
(7) To a far greater extent than in present conditions, it places the various subjects,
or branches of study, on an equality.
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(8) It gives a boy the experience of facing an objective test, and makes him
realise that society can legitimately demand that in certain directions he shall
have reached a certain stage in knowledge or attainment as a result of his
education at school. But, at the same time, it gives him no excuse (unless his
masters resolutely refuse to "play the game') for believing that no school
work is worth doing for its own sake, irrespective of whether it is to be
tested by a public examination.

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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

The duty of a schoolmaster with regard to health ¬ and this is particularly true of
the headmaster or housemaster in a boarding school is double. He has first to see
that, so far as he can secure it, his boys keep well, or, if illness cannot be
prevented, that they are restored to health as quickly as possible. Apart from the
other obvious reasons why parents want their children to be well, illness interrupts
the work, and games, and social life for which they are sent to school. In
performing this duty the schoolmaster relies partly upon his own knowledge of
what constitutes healthy conditions, but mainly upon the advice and professional
services of his medical officer. His own knowledge is likely to be empirical, for it
is rarely that he has made any systematic study of diet or hygiene. His medical
officer may be a man who has had special training and experience in connection
with the health of boys and girls, or he may be a local general practitioner who has
never had the time or the opportunity to make any particular study of the medical
problems of school life. Till comparatively lately it was taken for granted, at least
in the big
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

boarding schools, that if the schoolmaster, with the help of his medical officer,
could show that his school was not noticeably more afflicted by illness than other
schools, and that the arrangements for treatment and nursing were reasonably
efficient, he had done all that could be required of him.
But he has another duty with regard to health, which is scarcely less important. It is
a duty to which the elementary teacher has been alive for some time, though, not
surprisingly, some of his earlier efforts to fulfil it were rather crude. He ought to try
not only to keep his boys healthy while they are being educated, but also
deliberately and systematically to educate them for health. By that I mean not only
that they should have systematic teaching about the structure and functions of their
bodies, and the ordinary laws of health, but that they should be taught to have a
right mental attitude to health and disease (and, I might add, to medical science and
the medical profession) while they are at school. The teaching in this matter which
they receive at school should make an enlightened view of health and disease part
of their working plan of life. They should leave school with some knowledge of
how far their health in later life will depend upon themselves and their own self-
knowledge. They should take with them a positive love of health, and a hatred of
disease as an evil that has to be fought, and, if it may be, overcome, wherever it is
met. They will not be far astray if they believe
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

that, though it is not morally wrong to be ill, it is always morally wrong to be more
ill than need be.
Whether the first of these duties was carried out when I was a boy at school as well
as could reasonably be expected, I cannot say. I do not know enough about the
general medical opinion of that time to be able to judge whether the standards of
the medical officers of boarding schools were above or below those generally
current in the profession. But as to the second duty, I believe it was for the most
part neglected. Indeed I do not think that many schoolmasters recognised that it
existed.
I believe that my own case was fairly typical of that time, though I cannot say how
far parallel cases can be found to-day. From the time when I went to a preparatory
school at ten to the time when at nineteen I left a public school, I never heard,
either! alone or in class, a single word of useful advice about : health or any
explanation of the functions of the body from any master or medical officer. It
must! have been assumed, quite erroneously, that boys were told by their parents at
home all that was necessary to enable them to preserve their health. A very cursory
glance at many of them, particularly at their extreme and quite unnecessary
spottiness, should have been enough to prove that some quite simple information
was badly needed on the subject (to take one example) of constipation. Fresh air,
exercise, and the times for eating and drinking deserved more than the few hearty
platitudes which
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

were occasionally bestowed on them. Still less did one hear anything about the less
purely physical aspects of health. I never heard a suggestion that the mind can
influence the health of the body, though it is not difficult to illustrate this from
school life. We read the New Testament, and knew quite a lot about the stories of
the miracles of healing. But it was never hinted that the Christian message to man
had anything to do with health, and I think that the idea that religious faith might
be a force able to overcome disease would have been regarded as altogether
fantastic. We had heard of Lourdes, of course, but there was surely something
extremely queer and unEnglish about cures so dramatic and unconventional.
The attitude to illness of the authorities of boarding schools in those days was, in
fact, fatalistic and sentimental. Naturally it insensibly influenced the attitude of the
boys. It was fatalistic, in that they took it for granted that they would have their
annual total of days and weeks lost owing to infectious illness and minor sickness,
and for all practical purposes gave up hope that any effort on their own part could
decrease it. It was sentimental in two ways. First, although they so readily accepted
all this continual illness, they did not make it easy for boys to learn the
disagreeable but extremely important truth that illness, whatever opportunities it
may give for unselfishness and service, does always in fact mean loss of time, and
waste, and interruption of the world's work. I believe that the corporate
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

life of a school or house should be so organised that the temporary absence of a
boy through illness is felt as something of a burden, or, at least, as a definite
nuisance, to the rest. At Churnside, where, as I have explained, each group took its
turn of domestic duties, this was certainly the case, for the work had to be done,
whether or not the group was up to its full strength. Only on very rare occasions
did I permit help to be borrowed from another group. In my own schooldays this
was not brought home to us with sufficient sharpness. There was even a delightful
pretence that illness did not make any real difference to a boy's work in the
classroom, for by a system of "averaging" he was given marks for the period of his
absence. If it seemed right to promote a boy to a higher form, in spite of his being
low on the list owing to absence, why not say so openly? I always felt that I was
doing something rather worse than merely silly, when as a form master making up
my order at the end of term I carefully calculated how many marks had to be given
for work which had never been done.
Secondly, they were sentimental in that they did not themselves believe, or make
us believe, sufficiently strongly that the only true kindness to people who are
unwell is the kindness which helps to make them well as quickly as possible. A
great deal of so-called sympathy only stimulates a desire not for health but for
more sympathy. Interpreted in terms of school life that principle is more salutary
than popular.
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

It is a fairly good working rule, for instance, that some ninety per cent of the
ailments of boys are connected, directly or indirectly, with the stomach, and that
for an even larger number the best initial treatment will include complete rest for
the machine by depriving it of solid food for at least a day. In saying that I am not
thinking at all about boys who consciously pretend to be ill when they are not. For
a great many who are quite incapable of "shamming" a little starvation is the first
step to recovery.
When I became a master at one of the great public schools, after a period spent at a
school of rather different outlook and traditions, I was impressed at once both by
the amount of illness and by that queer fatalism in regard to it of which I have
spoken already. The spring term in particular seemed to be associated for most
people-masters and boys—with the fact and the fear of illness, and I soon began to
suspect that the fact and the fear were very closely connected. It was depressing to
hear from quite ordinary healthy little boys such remarks as "I wonder what we're
going to have this term". In fact they were all alike looking for trouble, and they
usually got what they expected. I began to wonder, as I have wondered still more
since, whether all the illness from which the boarding schools still seem to suffer is
really necessary, and whether parents are not in this matter too tolerant and
complacent. It is principally, but not solely, at the end of the Easter term that
parents
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

are accustomed to hear this doleful tale of sickness, and of consequent absence
from work, a tale that is borne out by the official school report, and not
infrequently by extra medical charges on the school account. This is not pleasant
from any point of view. There is the natural anxiety of parents for their children.
There is also a quite excusable, and disagreeable, consideration of a more material
kind. People pay for their boys and girls to go to school in order that the latter may
have, broadly speaking, opportunities for work and play. How much of the Easter
term, for which the fees have already been paid–not always without sacrifice-do
the children spend, secluded from work and play, in the sanatorium or the
sickroom?
Parents are, on the whole, extraordinarily patient and trustful, but it must surely
occur to some of them to ask themselves at times whether all this sickness is really
inevitable, and beyond the skill of doctors and schoolmasters to prevent; or
whether, on the other hand, in this, as in many other medical and educational
matters, there is a kind of lethargy, which acquiesces in the second best without
attempting to conceive, and to create, something better,
It is a good deal easier for the parent to ask this question than to obtain an answer.
Doctors will point to various factors that admittedly affect health
climate, diet, amount of sleep, and others and suggest that in these respects some
schools are preferable to others. The parent, however, should be
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

able to obtain some information more definite than this. It is possible to find out
with complete accurcy whether a school wins University Scholarships, or passes its
pupils through Certificate Examinations, or wins cricket matches, cups at Bisley,
and races at Henley. Accurate information should be available in the field of health.
I suggest that every school should possess, in a form readily available to parents,
statistics of "lost time" owing to illness, figures, that is to say, showing the average
number of days, or half-days, or even lessons, lost per boy over a period of several
preceding years.
I believe that such statistics, though by no means an exhaustive test, would be most
interesting and revealing, and I have not been weakened in that opinion by a
certain reluctance with which my suggestion, when thrown out casually, has
sometimes been received. The objection of one medical officer was particularly
interesting. Such statistics, he felt, were no true test of the health of the school,
because they included absence due to epidemic illness introduced from outside. As
if one mark of a healthy school were not precisely that epidemic illness does not
spread in it to the extent that it does in an unhealthy school! And it is possible that
the attitude of staff and boys to the duty of being healthy may affect even the
introduction of external illness. May not the attitude experienced in that criticism
be justly called fatalism? Until such figures as I have mentioned are gener-
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 EDUCATION FOR HEALTH
ally available, speculation can only be tentative. But it would be surprising if they
did not reveal great differences as between schools, differences partly arising from
variation in the factors which are generally admitted to affect health at all ages,
including medical skill and equipment. Particularly interesting, too, would be the
information supplied by schools that contain both boarders and day boys. Do the
latter miss more or fewer lessons than the former? Where the home is enlightened
there is probably no marked difference, but many homes are not noticeably wise as
regards simplicity of food, eating between meals, and regular bedtimes, and,
without excluding other factors, we should expect these differences to show a
definite result.
So much is, perhaps, fairly obvious. Speaking, however, from experience of
boarding schools of more than one kind, I do not believe that the differences in
health between schools (for, without waiting for statistics, we must admit that some
schools are a great deal healthier than others) are by any means wholly to be
ascribed to the factors that I have already mentioned. On the contrary, I suggest
that there may be other potent reasons why a school is unusually free from disease,
which teachers and medical officers far too commonly ignore. Further, I believe
that this view will be acceptable to a growing body of intelligent opinion that is
interested both in recent developments of education and in the health of body and
mind.
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

Setting aside for the moment some of the factors which we all admit affect health,
such as premises, food, ventilation, medical service and equipment, I believe that
we have in our power at least three ways of improving the health of children in
boarding schools, and in pointing to them I make no claim to originality. I am quite
sure that others must have reached similar conclusions.
First, I am confident that we do not sufficiently recognise the extreme
suggestibility of boys and girls with regard to good and bad health. In other words,
their minds can be predisposed to a condition favourable or unfavourable to the
development of physical illness. There is more than one kind of predisposing
cause. It may be the influence (conscious or unconscious) of a few older people,
the mass suggestion of their own number, or the working of hidden motives in their
own minds, of which they themselves are hardly, if at all, aware. Mass suggestion
is, of course, being used all the time throughout school life, by the captain of a
team, the c.o. of an O.T.C., and the headmaster in creating the "tone" of the school.
The curious thing is that it is so little used, or used so negatively or destructively,
in the matter of health and disease.
Whether suggestion is being used in the right or wrong direction as regards health
will depend upon several factors. Most important is the personal attitude to illness
of the school authorities, including not only headmasters and housemasters but
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

doctors, matrons and others who are brought into contact with the pupils during
sickness? That attitude may be defeatist or combative. They may hate disease
without immoderately fearing it. Or, on the other hand, the first whisper of
epidemic illness may create that kind of silly fatalism which says, “I suppose it will
go through the whole school", or "We can only leave it in the doctor's hands". Do
the “lay” (i.e. non-medical) authorities hold and encourage the belief that they
must not rely wholly upon the doctor, but must think and act for themselves? And
do the medical authorities and subordinates think of their function as primarily that
of promoting health, or of curing illness? The latter notion is far too common, and
where it exists it means suggestion of the wrong kind. Conscientious doctors and
matrons, who are genuinely devoted to the work of curing and nursing, but feel
that they have too much time on their hands when there is nobody to cure or to
nurse, may be, without being in the least aware of it, a considerable menace. I
could not have believed, if I had not observed them with my own eyes, the
different effects upon the health of the same body of boys produced by people who
loved health and by those who only feared disease. One of the healthiest boys'
schools I ever knew preserved many years ago a wonderful record of health with
no medical supervision beyond that of the local general practitioner. In an
unfortunate moment one of the governors, himself a doctor,
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EDUCATION FOR HEALTH

urged the appointment of a full-time medical officer. There followed a few mild
cases of an epidemic sickness, such as had previously given no trouble in a
community so healthy. This time, however, the medical officer laid himself out “to
cope with a big thing", and with the very best intentions he succeeded in creating
exactly what he quite unconsciously desired.
It is quite possible to create in a school a tradition of pride and responsibility in this
matter as in others. One of the most creative headmasters of this century used to
make his boys feel that to introduce illness into the school was one of the gravest
offences, and that nearly all sickness was avoidable. Perhaps he went rather far, but
his boys were wonderfully free from ill health. Here, if anywhere, suggestion is
legitimate, for if you can make boys believe that their good health lies largely in
their own hands you have done a great deal to protect them. At Churnside once,
when we had some forty boys, and the conscious pride in health was particularly
strong, I remember their going through a whole term without a single boy missing
one whole lesson.*
For making a tradition of that kind we had cer-
* I put it this way because I remember that one boy retired to bed one afternoon with the kind of
headache which comes from the prospect of an engagement with French irregular verbs. But
some hard-hearted friends, who did not want the record for the term to be lowered, pulled him
out, and he was able—though late and rather sheepish–to attend the lesson.
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tain advantages—the greatest being that some of us had a profound belief in the
value for health of positive thought for ourselves and for others. On the other hand,
it was not an advantage that so many of our boys were the sons of parents whose
resources and interests were limited by lack of means. Naturally enough it is those
people who have plenty of other interesting things to think about who, on the
whole, think least morbidly and sentimentally about illness. The false piety of
which the last word is "it was sent us for our good" is less common among them
than among those in poorer circumstances. The pleasure of believing oneself to be
an interesting case is not confined to any one section of society, and is certainly not
rare among those who are idle and not poor. But I think it is expressed with a
peculiar love of detail, and indifference to the age and suitability of the audience,
by some of those to whom illness does at least provide an interesting variety in a
life which is normally monotonous. It is to his poorer patients, too, and not to those
who have had some opportunity of realising the deficiencies of his professional
education, that the doctor, who desires nothing more than to be the man of science,
speaks with some of the mysterious authority of the mediaeval priest.
A child may pick up from older people a morbid way of thinking and talking about
his own health, and turn any supposed weakness into a means of protection against
the demands of ordinary life. I
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remember one little boy who was a good example of this, and who would probably
have set up a very efficient system of defence, if he had not been taken in time. He
looked healthy enough when he came to us, and as he had been passed by our
medical officer there was every reason to believe that there was nothing wrong
with him. But he had a wonderful tale of woe to tell us on the evening of his
arrival. He had been an exceptionally delicate baby. His mother, indeed, had been
extraordinarily lucky to rear him. More than one doctor had doubted the wisdom of
his leaving home. It was more than probable that the climate of Churnside would
not suit him. And so on. Next day he seemed to be happily enjoying the novelty of
his new surroundings till the time came for evening preparation. A few minutes
before it started, and soon after he realised that there was such a thing as
preparation and what it meant, he came to our sitting-room, and said that he felt
terribly queer. He couldn't quite describe how he felt, but he was quite sure that he
ought not to do any more work that day. We assured him that it was quite natural
for him to feel rather tired, and that it might be wise to rest for half an hour, so that
he would be ready for the second period of preparation, which was particularly
important. Evidently a little disappointed, he lay down on the sofa. Fifteen minutes
passed, and he said that he felt as if a great weight of lead was lying on what he
called impressively his abdomen.
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That, we assured him, was no doubt due to the slight novelty of the food he had
eaten that day. If he thought about other things, it would soon pass off, and it
would certainly be gone before the second period of preparation began. Another
ten or fifteen minutes passed, and he felt as if a band of iron were clamped round
his forehead. That, too, we told him, was a very common feeling when one was a
little tired, and if he made up his mind to be ready for that second period it would
go away very quickly. And so at last, surprised at the way in which his complaints
had been received, and, perhaps, still more surprised at his own apparent power to
get rid of these terrible pains, he went into second preparation, enjoyed the period
of free time that followed, went to bed happy, and, indeed, may be said to have
lived happily ever afterwards. For I cannot remember that this boy, who has often
since laughed over the incident which I have described, suffered from any illness
during the four or five years that he spent with us. I remember that a young
colleague, who came into the room when he was lying so pathetically on the sofa,
thought that my wife and I were rather heartless. But without some firmness on our
part at the critical moment, when he first bumped into a new and disagrecable side
of reality, the subsequent story might have been entirely different.
Important as may be suggestion and the attitude of older people, they are not
sufficient alone to
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create and preserve a sound tradition of health in a school. There must also be
some definite teaching, and that not only about the hygiene of the body. In the last
chapter I advocated that boys should be taught something about the working of
their own minds. If this is desirable for any reason, it is so for the sake of health. A
boy when he has reached the age of fourteen or fifteen can surely learn that illness
is often an obstacle which we set up in all ignorance to excuse us from doing
something which we do not like, or to obtain a protection and comfort which we
would hardly admit that we desire. There is no need for him to compare notes with
Oedipus. But, equally, there is no reason why he should not realise that he will be a
very enviable and uncommon person if he does not find himself retaining far
beyond infancy a certain amount of babyish dependence upon his mother or
someone who takes her place. It should not be difficult to show him that the mind
often uses bodily illness as a means of satisfying that feeling of dependence. It is
more questionable whether he should be told at this stage the complementary truth,
that there are parents of the possessive kind, who without knowing it keep their
children subjected to a constant suggestion of illhealth as a means of retaining their
dependence. The schoolmaster who is interested in health can hardly fail to come
across some parents of this kind. Most parents he will find warmly appreciative of
anything that he does to keep their boys well while
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they are at school. But there will be a few who will clearly, though tacitly, resent
the fact that their sons are healthier at school than at home, and will go to almost
any length of ingenuity to explain away what is so distasteful to them.
The children of these parents will be not the least difficult section of those who
come from unhealthily minded homes, where the doctor is always in the house, and
illness is a constant preoccupation. For such the best-intentioned medical
precautions often defeat their own ends. The only sound policy in these cases is to
keep the doctor away as long as possible, and to have minor ailments treated by
people who meet the children habitually in relations that are not wholly medical.
Prevention, of course, is better than cure. But prevention has sometimes to start not
in the body but in the mind.
Many even of those who believe in a religious education will feel that there is no
need to bring in religion at this particular point. But a boy is in fact commonly
taught to associate religion, and particularly the idea of prayer, with health. He is
taught to pray for the health of those dearest to him when he is a young child.
Later, he hears general prayers for the public health, and on occasions he joins in
prayer for individuals who are dangerously ill, though too often the whole
atmosphere of this last proceeding suggests a final abandonment of hope, rather
than a corporate effort and direction of the human spirit. The question is whether in
his own
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personal life he is not old enough to find that a living faith can help to overcome
those fears which so often lurk beneath bodily illness.
There is, I am sure, a third factor which accounts for differences in the health of
schools generally similar in their outward conditions. It is often overlooked,
perhaps because it is too close to our eyes, or because it suggests uncomfortable
comparisons. Good health depends largely upon happiness. The life of boarding
schools is, no doubt, a good deal happier than it used to be; but it is certainly not
yet all that it might be. There is still too much boredom and indifference, and for
many boys in their first few terms a special kind of loneliness which is none the
easier to bear because it has to be borne in the midst of a crowd. The bored or
unhappy boy is one of those who are most likely to find a refuge in the sick room
or the sanatorium, not necessarily by deliberate "shamming", which can be
detected quite easily, but finding unconsciously an escape from distasteful
conditions. It is worth while to remember that the happiness of most of us depends,
partly at least, upon how far we are treated as self-respecting individuals, and not
as mere component units of a mass. In any collection of people living under a
rather narrowly conceived discipline, in conditions which do not give much scope
for their several tastes and inclinations, it will be found that a number of them
consult the doctor for no adequate reason. They are not necessarily deliberate ma-
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lingerers. They have an overmastering desire to be, just for once, something more
than units in the ruck —Private X or No. Y—and to receive, if only for a few
moments, the whole attention of somebody in a superior position. They want
someone to be interested in them as individuals. The same thing applies, of course,
in a lesser degree, to boys at school. Other things being equal, the school which
most encourages individuality is likely to have the least illness.
For my part, I have the best of reasons to appreciate the wisdom and friendship of
more than one medical adviser with whom I have worked as a schoolmaster. The
foregoing remarks are in no way derogatory of the position of the medical officer
as such. On the contrary, they suggest that he might be a very much more
important person than he is at present. They do contemplate, however, a man with
a rather different outlook on life, and probably á rather different training. The
future medical) officer should be as interested in the mind as in the body, and
almost as interested in education as in medicine. Incidentally, he should probably
have under his general supervision all the physical activities of the school,
including games and athletics. But he should be as much a teacher as a healer. He
should be able to think of the girls and boys, and they should think of themselves,
less as his patients than as his pupils, and he should be associated in their minds
with health rather than with disease.
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CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATION AND SEX

From self-knowledge of mind and body one passes naturally to education in sex.
Throughout this chapter I shall give to this word its widest, and not merely its
physical, meaning. Of this side of education, as of sexual ethics and sexual life
generally, there has been so much discussion during the past two decades that one
is sometimes tempted to wonder whether it is all healthy, and whether there is not
another element in it—a kind of rationalisation on the part of an age which has
lost-perhaps temporarily—some of its vitality. However that may be, there is little
doubt that, on the whole, the subject is now treated in boarding schools with
greater understanding than before. This applies particularly to the treatment of boys
whose behaviour or habits are regarded as unsatisfactory by those who are
responsible for them. It is recognised, at least, that the causes of "immorality" are
more varied and more subtle than was formerly admitted, and that indiscriminate
punishment for those who happen to be found out is not the only, nor possibly the
wisest, treatment. We have, at any rate, ad-
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vanced beyond the crude and easy generalisation "expel the big boy and birch the
little boy". But is it not true that our methods even now in dealing with the sexual
development, and indeed the emotional life in general, of boys of the public school
age are often purely empirical, and marked by extreme timidity? I say the public
school age, but it would be more correct to say ages, for in this connection there
may be more difference between the child of thirteen and the boy of eighteen than
between the latter and the man of thirty. Modern psychologists have already helped
those schoolmasters who have troubled to read them with discrimination, but is it
unfair to say that among the more reflecting members of the profession there is
now considerable uneasiness about the effect on a boy's emotional life of being at a
one-sex boarding school for nine or ten years on end? In my own case, if on some
aspects of the subject I have arrived at a few conclusions, there are far more in
which my experience left me with unresolved doubts, and a sense of my ignorance.
By asking in this chapter some of the questions which were left in my mind, I can
at any rate indicate some of the points in which I feel that the profession still needs
the help of authoritative psychological opinion.
One thing is quite clear, If the education given in the school is to be regarded
partly, or principally, as preparation for adult life, it must include preparation for
adult sexual life. Schoolmasters must
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not think of their function in sexual education as mainly to help exceptional boys
when they are in difficulties, or to be ready to deal with abnormalities (which are
usually not abnormalities at all) when they arise. Still less must they think of their
duty as being primarily to prevent certain things from happening, or to detect
wrongdoers. Until not so very long ago that was the common attitude of the public
school master. Sexual education, however else we may conceive it, must be
something positive, and an integral part of education as a whole. However much it
may have to allow for personal idiosyncrasies, it must not be thought of as
anything peculiar, which some people, for some reason or other, do not need. It is
not a separate compartment of education, it is education itself viewed from a
particular angle. Like any other kind of education it aims at an objective, which
must not be so narrow as to exclude the growth of individuality, and like all other
moral education it looks forward to a positive ideal expressed in a way of living.
The schoolmaster's first difficulty is that at the present time there is no substantial
agreement as to what that ideal should be, or, if that is to put it too strongly, as to
how far it is attainable, and how it is to be attained by the ordinary man. In this
respect there is a parallel between the present positions of sexual and religious
education. In an age of faith, or whenever the parents who send their children to
the same school hold the same beliefs and perform
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the same acts of worship, religious education can hardly present very great
difficulties to the schoolmaster. It is literally a matter of spiritual growth from
childhood in an environment where all influences work together to the same end.
At the present day, however, headmasters have no certainty as to what parents
believe, or whether they profess to believe anything at all. They cannot assume that
a boy brings with him from his home any positive thoughts about religion, and they
are not usually told frankly if the attitude that the boy has learnt to think of as
natural for older people is negative or hostile. Similarly, with regard to sexual
ethics, there has been a change of standard during the past twenty or thirty years.
Before that time the schoolmaster who dealt with what may be called, broadly,
upper middle class or middle class boys could feel reasonably sure that certain
standards of conduct and certain ideals were presented to them by their parents and
older friends. I do not say that these standards were always the best, or that they
were not sometimes presented in a way which was misleading or hypocritical. But
the schoolmaster, in directing this side of a boy's education, at least knew where he
started, and what kind of help he could expect from the home. He does not now
know this to at all the same extent.
Parents, if they are to be judged by the general public, are in fact at present in a
complete muddle of uncertainty as to how far and in what way the
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facts of sexual life and sexual conduct should be made known to boys and girls.
Among the same kind of people there are to be found in practice all manner of
contradictions. This was brought home to me forcibly a few years ago, when I
visited within a few days two entertainments in the West End of London. The first
was something between a revue and a musical play, and met with considerable
success. None of the scenes could be said to have erred on the side of reticence,
and in one of the most popular a comic Englishman visiting Paris found that he had
been directed by mistake to a girls' school, when what he really wanted was a
brothel. The comedian made the most of the situation, and the scene was evidently
regarded as a roaring success. All round me sat happy family parties of what may
be called public school kind of people, and immediately in front of me, enormously
enjoying the show, were two girls of sixteen or seventeen. The next evening I went
with a friend to a cinema where there was then being shown a film which was
described as biological. There did not seem to be any marked difference in the
social character of the two audiences. The film itself was a rather strange mixture
of good and bad. The climax, a kind of procession of humanity, in which the white
and coloured races, discreetly clad in bathing drawers, marched towards the rising
sun, seemed to me rather silly. But there were some interesting photographs,
illustrating, among other things, the be-
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haviour of various animals and birds when mating, and the human embryo at
different stages of its development. The film, as a whole, was healthy and
informing, and I remarked to my companion, "This is one of the few films that I
have seen which I should like to show to my boys". "Oh, would you?" he replied,
"look at the bottom of your programme". Glancing down I saw that the film was
not regarded as fit to be exhibited indiscriminately to young people.
There is another parallel between the two aspects of education which I have just
compared. In both of them it is too often forgotten that education is something
altogether bigger than instruction. Sexual instruction, in the sense of information
about the structure and functions of the body, is becoming more common in
schools. In some quarters it is almost a fetish, and is probably being given here and
there by a large number of people who are not particularly well fitted for the task.
Sexual education, in which we have to think of a boy as potentially the future
lover, husband, father, and citizen, is something far wider. It will include
instruction, but it will also be a matter of environment, example, and suggestion.
To take the most obvious example of what I mean–if happy married life is to be
held before boys as the aim, or one aim, for the sake of which they must exercise
prudence, and unselfishness, and self-control, the schoolmaster, whether he likes it
or not, is in the widest
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sense of the word giving sexual education whenever he allows boys to share the
life of his family. He is giving some of the best that a father can give to his
children. The hackneyed phrase in loco parentis applies even more deeply to the
married schoolmaster in the boarding school than is commonly supposed.
A question immediately arises. Unless virginity is to be upheld as the ideal for all,
or for the majority, can this kind of education be given satisfactorily in any
boarding school, unless at least a fair proportion of the staff are leading what is for
most people the normal sexual life? This question applies particularly to the growth
of girls, whose secondary education in boarding schools is almost exclusively in
the hands of unmarried women. It is one of the peculiarities of our present
educational arrangements, which will very likely cause some surprise to future
generations, that so many parents send their daughters away from home-often for
six or seven years or more to institutions from which married women and mothers
are almost entirely absent. In the day school it is clear that the question does not
arise to the same extent. .
We can think, then, of the schoolmaster and his wife, if they are the right kind of
people, as engaged in this kind of education in the course of their ordinary married
life, and inside the enlarged family which their school or house should be. We can
think of them, too, as doing this work, for the
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most part, without being aware of it. Moreover, all ethical education has its
application to the world of sex. It is surely a mistake to give boys the impression
that there is a special code of ethics in the sexual sphere. Unselfishness, courage,
selfcontrol and the power to face self-knowledge hold good there as elsewhere.
Once more, we do not want a sexual watertight compartment, which means an
unhealthy and unnatural accumulation of interest and emotion at this one point. Is
it not the teaching of modern psychology that sex, so far from being something
which can be separated from the rest of life, interpenetrates it at innumerable
points, and is interwoven with its texture? Nevertheless the schoolmaster working
in a boarding school with boys of the public school ages will find that there are
certain specific problems of sexual education to which he must turn his attention.
The first of these is the question-shall he pursue a policy of complete frankness? If
I appeared in an earlier paragraph to speak disparagingly of sexual instruction, it
was because I was thinking of those people who seem to believe that the whole
problem is solved by a few special, and rather solemn, lessons or talks about the
sexual organs and their functions, and possibly some vague warnings about the
dangers of indiscriminate indulgence. Of sexual instruction as only one part of a
whole method, and with the right background, I am a convinced advocate. But a
policy of frankness
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means more than that. Need the schoolmaster in his ordinary conversation be any
more self-conscious or circumlocutory than other intelligent people? If boys get the
idea that he is somehow a "shockable person (which is entirely different from a
person who knows the meaning of reticence), or that his outlook and even his
vocabulary in matters of sex are different from those of other men whom they like
and respect, his chances of helping them when they need help are very much
diminished. They ought to think of him as a man with whom, if they wish, they can
discuss, at the right time, anything under the sun. Does this sound obvious? It is
not many years since I was in the rooms of a friend, a master at a public school. A
boy had come to see him in some distress, genuinely worried about his own
emotional attitude to another boy. He was not sure how far he was experiencing
something "unnatural", and, being perhaps hypersensitive and extremely
conscientious, he did not know what course to pursue. “Why not tell your
housemaster all about it?" asked my friend, feeling that the business was rather
outside his province. "Oh, I couldn't do that," answered the boy; "he is a fine
fellow, and we all like him tremendously, but he is the last man in the world you
could talk to about a thing like that." Which is rather the same as if he had said that
the medical officer was a fine fellow, but the last man in the world to whom you
could take a broken leg.
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It is one, and to my mind not the least potent, argument for the policy of frankness,
that it generally helps to break down barriers between master and boy, and to
promote confidence, not only in that but in other parts of school life. Sex is, after
all, the subject in which, even now, the child has had his natural curiosity most
often baulked by grown-up people, and in which, perhaps unconsciously, he has
given up hope of hearing the truth from those in authority. To find himself trusted
and treated as a self-respecting individual on that hitherto forbidden ground will
help him elsewhere. Psychologists of at least one school will object that there are
unbridgeable gulfs which inevitably separate people of different ages, and that to
ignore these is mere folly. That there is on the unconscious level between two
generations as a whole, and between father and son, this permanent division is very
likely true. Is it for that reason that the work of the schoolmaster, who, as seen by
both, must be something of a dweller in no-man's land, has seldom in the past
received the respect which, on all purely reasonable grounds, is its due? Is it indeed
true, perhaps, that the world is almost bound to think of the schoolmaster as doing
something different from, and in one sense less than, a man's work, while he is
equally bound to believe that it is in another sense more than a man's work?
However that may be, boys do on the conscious level respect men who can talk to
them truthfully
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and without self-consciousness on this subject, and who can make them feel that
they will answer questions, without in the least wanting to force confidences.
It is worth noting from a practical point of view that in a school where the policy is
to be one of frankness it should be pursued and shared by the staff as a whole.
Boys who have been accustomed to talk freely with those considerably older than
themselves, may not be too patient with the selfconscious or prudish young master
who omits or reads with blushes an outspoken passage in the Bible or in
Shakespeare, or is unnecessarily periphrastic in his replies to their questions.
Another argument for the method of frankness arises from the fact, which I have
already mentioned, that boys come to public and secondary schools with very
different degrees of sexual knowledge, and with every variety of attitude-healthy
and unhealthy to sex as a whole. If left to themselves it is obvious that the
ignorance of some may be a difficulty, or even a temptation, to others, and make
them liable to wrong suggestion. It is not, perhaps, equally obvious, but it is
nevertheless a fact, that the healthy and outspoken attitude of boys from
enlightened homes or schools may also be a difficulty to boys whose previous
training has been unduly repressive, or even morbid. To give himself a fair chance
of guiding the sexual education of the group as a whole, the schoolmaster must
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be able to count upon the boys having some common measure of knowledge, and
for that reason alone it is desirable that at one definite stage in his school career a
boy should be able to hear the facts which his natural curiosity-if not already killed
or satisfied-impels him to learn, and to ask any questions which may occur to him.
A further consideration is that it is in an atmosphere of frankness and confidence
that the schoolmaster is most likely to become aware of those cases of sexual fears,
and obsessions, and inhibitions which require the help of the psychological expert.
These are more numerous than we like to think, and they are the cause of an
immense amount of unnecessary unhappiness. I refer to something more serious
than the very common worry about masturbation, though that can be bad enough. A
boy outwardly quite normal may carry about with him for years some baseless fear
of a sexual character, or sexual in origin, which makes his schooldays miserable,
and turns him, possibly, into an unsociable and nervous man. It may be part of his
compulsion that he cannot tell his trouble to anyone until it becomes unbearable, or
leads to some kind of disaster. But he is far more likely to disclose his secret to
someone whom he has heard talk about sex impersonally and objectively. The
master may not himself be able to help him, but he can send him to those who have
the expert knowledge to do so. I can remember one such boy whom I knew years
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before I went to Churnside. Intelligent and altogether likable, he nevertheless did
not seem to be getting all that he ought to have got from school life. His
housemaster, a comfortable kind of person, used to complain that he was not more
cheerful. Then one day he told another master, who had previously talked to him
with some frankness, the story of his troubles. The son of a repressive moralist of a
father, and a none too wise mother, he had been told nothing definite about sex by
his parents, but had gained the general impression that the whole thing was
somehow queer and secret. When he was no more than a child, his nurse, a young
woman of a different race, had behaved to him in a way which both gave him the
material for pleasurable fantasies, and left a fear of discovery and disapproval on
the part of his parents. All through his time at a preparatory school he had fought
against these thoughts, believing them to be wicked, and he had almost succeeded
in banishing them from his mind. Then, when the time came for him to have the
normal sexual dreams, of which nobody had forewarned him, the woman and the
actions reappeared. “It seemed so horrible", he wrote, “that I couldn't get rid of the
thoughts. I had managed to get rid of them when I was awake, and now they
followed me when I was asleep. I felt inclined to curse everything and everybody
—including God". There was more in this than could be dealt with by the ordinary
schoolmaster. The point is that condi-
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tions had been brought about in which the boy could take the first step towards
obtaining the help that he needed.
The argument most commonly advanced in support of the schoolmaster's imparting
information at this age is that it both satisfies a boy's natural desire to know, and
destroys or dissipates a morbid or excessive curiosity, which may have arisen from
unfortunate incidents or unwise treatment in his earlier years. I believe that
argument to be entirely sound, provided that we recognise that, from the ethical
point of view, when we have finally satisfied curiosity, we have, after all, only
done something negative. The primary natural sexual urge and impulses remain,
and for their direction and control positive ethical teaching is required. But of the
power of unsatisfied and half-repressed curiosity to reinforce, and at the same time
to misdirect, normal sexual impulses no schoolmaster who uses his powers of
observation can fail to be aware. Curiosity about function can be allayed by matter-
of-fact information. But there is a good deal of curiosity about the form and
structure of the other sex, and this raises a practical question. Is the complete
solution of this problem to be found in the practice of nudism, or, on the other
hand, would that practice if adopted in adolescence (particularly if it had not been
prepared for in earlier childhood) create fresh problems of its own? A recently
published work on the Sex Education of Children contains this
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passage. “There is one way in which the teacher who has misgivings as to giving
sex instruction can overcome inhibitions. The practice of nudism produces a real
psychological change. ... I wish every boarding school were co-educational and
that it were the practice for both sexes to strip entirely for combining in sports and
exercises. What a clean-minded generation we should breed”.* It is not in any case
a remedy which the headmaster of the segregated boarding school can adopt, but
he ought to be able to ascertain whether the practice does obtain elsewhere the
results which are sometimes claimed for it. I have no personal knowledge of nudist
societies, nor am I aware whether they are conducted by scientifically minded
people. To judge from some nudist literature this would seem unlikely. But I
should have thought that they ought to have at their disposal a body of information
as to why people join their societies, and what is the effect of the experience on
them, which might be of great use and interest to those concerned with sexual
education.
To some extent, and in some sections of society, the "clean-minded generation", in
the sense of an incurious generation, may have arrived already. During the past ten
or fifteen years convention has undoubtedly been less sedulous than before in
concealing the bodies of children of one sex from the
* The Sex Education of Children, by R. Macdonald Ladell. Cornish Brothers, Ltd.
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eyes of the other, and it may be possible already to trace some results. I should be
surprised if the average age of the spectators at those entertainments which are
known to rely for their appeal upon the exhibition of as much nudity as is legally
permitted, was not commonly higher than that of those who attend an ordinary
cinema. Nudism in the home, too, is more common among members of the same
family of different ages and sexes. But this is a matter in which the schoolmaster
finds that boys will have had the most different kinds of training and experience.
He will almost certainly come across cases where an exaggeratedly prudish or
otherwise mistaken treatment of the relation between brother and sister has created
unnecessary difficulties. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether in the various forms
of inhibition which too often impede sexual growth a Jocasta is not occasionally
held responsible by psychologists for the influence of an Electra.
Of my own practice in regard to sexual instruction in the narrow sense I propose to
say little. I only did what many others are doing. I saw that every boy received in
his first or second year the common measure of information to which I have
referred. It is an interesting fact that older boys several times told me that in their
opinion the first year was a more appropriate time than the second. The advantage
of postponing any detailed talk to the second year was that by that time a boy had
acquired a good deal of objective and relevant in-
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formation in his lessons in biology. I believe that nearly always the first talk to a
boy about any human aspect of sex should be given to him as one of a group, and
not in the form of a private conversation. Sex, that is to say, should not be made
into something solemn and portentous, but a talk or talks about it should seem to
come naturally from a man who is accustomed to converse with a boy and his
friends about all manner of things that are interesting and important. It should be
something, too, of general interest, which can be discussed openly among
intelligent people, and not something which must always be thought of personally,
though obviously it has its private applications. In the same way, if it is ever
necessary to talk to a boy privately about masturbation, it should as a rule be only
after he has heard masturbation mentioned openly as but one of a number of habits,
which can be examined and explained quite unemotionally.
In the first talk it is absolutely essential that the master should be prepared to
answer any questions which are put to him then and there, and that he should
encourage boys to come to him either alone or in small groups if they want further
information, after they have had time to think over what he has told them. There
must be no suspicion of his wanting to withhold anything. The success of this will
naturally depend upon the general atmosphere of the school, but that is merely to
repeat that instruction in this matter is only one part of education. I
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am sure that the first talk should come unexpectedly though it should appear to
arise naturally out of what has preceded it. I used to introduce it in scripture
lessons at a point where it seemed to arise easily from what we had been saying
about the continuous process of the creation of the world. Lane used to say-and I
was profoundly grateful to him for the idea–that religion and sex are so often
associated for young children by their elders in the wrong way, particularly by a
misdirected emphasis upon sin, that the best method for the schoolmaster to
unravel the twisted strands of thought and emotion is to associate them again in the
right way, that is to say, to insist that sex is a gift of God to be used by man to
further His creative purpose. He was right, too, to insist that the creative and
beneficent aspects of sex should always be put first to a boy, and that the warnings
and talk about aberrations, if they are necessary, should come second, and only
when the idea is firm in his mind that sex is not in itself something secret, or
unclean, or alarming.
It should not be necessary, but I think it is, to add that if anything at all is said by
adults to boys about sex and the sexual functions of the body, it should be said
clearly and in such a way as to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding. Half-
and-half methods are futile, if not dangerous. Yet who has not heard stories of
masters who, believing that they are doing their duty with complete throughness,
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never really come to the point? They leave some boys feeling awkward and
bewildered, and others despising the man for being such a fool as to be
embarrassed. The vaguely alarming, but not at all informative, talks to which many
of my generation were subjected on the last Sunday of their last term at their
preparatory school were exactly what was not wanted. More recently than that I
have been shown letters addressed to young boys at public schools which, though
they were written with the best intentions, were masterpieces of woolly-minded
and frightening suggestion.
There comes to my mind one example of what must have been almost incredibly
clumsy explanation, which would be wholly ludicrous if it had not been the cause
of genuine anxiety, though fortunately for only a few hours. It was the case of a
boy who had some slight and harmless malformation of his body. Like many
people who have some slight peculiarity, he did not talk about it, and therefore
never discovered how little it mattered. It remained a dormant cause of
unexpressed anxiety. The classical form to which he belonged were reading
Catullus, and had reached the wonderful poem which contains the frenzy and
lamentation of Attis. What the master must have said in explanation of the first few
lines of the poem, I cannot conceive; nor how he can have so completely muddled
the mind of the boy, who, admittedly, must have been pitifully ignorant for his age;
but that evening the
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latter came to me in great distress, terribly afraid that nature had endowed him with
the same incapacity that was self-inflicted by the devotee of Cybele.
Who, it is often asked, are the right people to give this kind of instruction? If the
child's questions are answered wisely from the first in the family, and if the home
background is healthy, the problem is virtually solved. But if, as commonly
happens, in any group of boys who enter a secondary or public school there are
some who have been told nothing by older people, and the others have been told in
different ways by people who approach the subject with different emotions, it
matters a great deal to whom a boy can look for this necessary help. Of one thing I
am certain. It the process of enlightenment has been continuous from infancy,
beginning with the mother's answers to the first questions, the father will naturally
take his share in simple instruction as opportunity occurs. But, when there has been
a policy of silence and evasion till the age of puberty, it is not likely that a father
will suddenly play an entirely unfamiliar role with ease and success. Shaw
somewhere makes one of his characters say, "The relation between parent and child
may be an affectionate relation. It may be a useful relation. It may be a necessary
relation. But it can never be an innocent relation." A good many fathers seem to
feel something like that, when it comes to the point of talking
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to their own sons about paternity. And they simply run away from the task.
There are, no doubt, exceptions, but I feel that it must usually be best for sexual
instruction of any kind to be given by men and women who are themselves leading
the normal life of married people. Are there not inside the teaching profession a
certain number of entirely blameless bachelors and spinsters whose own sexual life
consists largely in talking about sex to boys and girls, and who enjoy doing this for
reasons that they do not themselves understand? Married men and women are less
likely to bring to the subject a misplaced emotion which properly belongs
elsewhere. Secondly, I think it should be given by someone who is not deficient in
a sense of humour. To some this suggestion may appear irrelevant, or even in bad
taste. Is not one of the objects of sexual enlightenment, it may be asked, to get rid
of what a character in one of Arnold Bennett's plays calls the "fifth-form snigger",
and to teach boys that there is nothing funny in sex? Certainly there is nothing
funny, just as there is nothing alarming, in sex in itself. But sex is so bound up with
half-understood taboos and changing conventions, and it calls into play so many
diverse, and sometimes conflicting, emotions, that it would be surprising if it were
not the cause of some of the most comic situations and wittiest speech both in
literature and life. The schoolmaster who cannot appreciate and accept this fact
will find him-
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self using language which will seem to his pupils ridiculous and insincere, and he
may do more harm than if had left the subject alone. It is not the undiscriminating
prude, but the man who is able to appreciate genuine wit and comedy wherever he
finds them, who will be most likely to help boys to dislike the merely coarse and
beastly, and at the same time to keep some sense of proportion. If a master and a
boy are reading one of the franker scenes of Aristophanes and find it funny, I do
not see that anything is gained by either pretending the contrary. If they both
happen to be amused, say, by the presence of primitive and quite unpremeditated
symbolism in the decorations for a harvest festival, it is as well for them to smile
together as to smile separately.
However healthy and happy in this matter may be the general life of a boarding
school, the master will have to deal with individual difficulties; and his next
problems will be—what shall be his attitude to masturbation and to real or apparent
homosexuality, which does not, of course, necessarily take a physical form? On the
first of these there has been so much written in recent years, that there may be said
to be something like agreement among intelligent people. The greater freedom with
which the subject is now discussed by schoolmasters and others is itself an
advantage, for it is essentially a habit which thrives on secrecy. The second is a
problem of which the extent varies tremendously between different schools
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and different houses in the same school. It may be doubted whether it is ever as
serious, even in boarding schools, as some people who have never themselves been
to those schools like to believe. It is probably already less serious than it was, at
any rate among the oldest boys, owing to the increased opportunities in recent
years for social companionship in the holidays between boys and girls. If a boy has
opportunities for friendship with girls he is less likely to have with one of his own
sex that kind of emotional relationship in which the physical side, though at first
unsuspected, does finally assert itself. I have already expressed the view that it
should be part of the duty of those directing boarding schools to see that this
companionship does not wholly cease during term.
On this subject views are sometimes expressed which, if they could be
substantiated, would strike pretty near the root of the present boarding school
system. There is, first, the extreme position that boarding school life actually
creates homosexuality. A well-known writer has said, “For every one born
homosexual there are at least ten permanent pseudohomosexuals made by the
public school system". It would be difficult to imagine a more damning indictment
of the system. I believe that most experienced and observant schoolmasters, even
those who are not hopelessly prejudiced in favour of the public schools, will agree
that expressed in that form the statement is dangerously misleading. Is
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it not time that they were reassured, or, if necessary, further disturbed, by more
positive conclusions from the psychologists?
If the boarding schools are held to be guiltless of creating homosexuality in those
not already predisposed in that direction, it may yet be asked whether their effect in
the past has not been at any rate to postpone the flow of interest towards the other
sex, and so to postpone the age of marriage for those who have been educated in
them. That is a question at least of some historic interest. It raises the further
question whether in the nineteenth century there was not an unsuspected
connection between the influence of public school education and economic
changes. In many respects the public school system, as it is to-day, dates from the
group of new foundations which occurred between the years 1830 and 1845, a time
when an enlarged middle class, with a higher standard of comfort and a keener eye
to security, were likely for material reasons to postpone the age of marriage.
But even if the boarding school system has, or has had, either of these results (of
which one at least is wholly undesirable), need we necessarily say that all parts of
the system are equally to blame? Does it necessarily mean that either the day
school or the co-educational boarding school is in this respect generally right, and
the one-sex boarding school generally wrong? May it not be that the system is
wrong in parts only, that is to say that for what
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I have called the middle period it is essentially right, but that it begins too early and
ends too late? We must remember that when people speak of the public school
system they really include the preparatory schools, to which boys go at the age of
eight or nine. We have never tried in England on any large scale a system of
educating in boarding schools boys who, till the onset of puberty, have been
educated in day schools, or in co-educational preparatory schools, and have
therefore had every opportunity to acquire at work and play a healthy attitude to
the other sex before full sex-consciousness arrives. It was part of the interest of our
work at Churnside that the greater number of our boys before they entered the
school had been at day schools, and often at mixed day schools. That experience
strongly suggested to me that in a day school education till the time of puberty, or
in the co-educational preparatory school, lies the prevention of much that often
causes difficulty and distress at a later stage.
But, when all is said, the principal problem of the schoolmaster in sexual education
is—what preparation for life shall he give to the oldest boys, who will soon be
leaving school? In an earlier chapter I took the position that there is a period which
seems more or less "naturally” suited to the traditional boarding school. It is surely
all-important for his emotional development that as a boy emerges from that period
he should come under new influences, which shall
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guide him from the conditions of the segregated school to those of the adult world.
If he cannot share his work with girls, cannot he share some of his recreation? It
may make all the difference, too, if he can meet at this stage the right women who
are some years older than himself. The reaction of most schoolmasters of my
acquaintance to the play Young Woodley was curious. While ready to deride the
story of the outcome of the boy's passion as ridiculous and fantastic, they were not
prepared to deny that the passion itself was credible. But they failed to explain
what was being done to help the potential Young Woodleys in their own schools
and houses to achieve a happy transition from boyhood to manhood. A friend of
mine, who spent most of his life working among boys and girls, used to say half
seriously that the wives of the younger masters should be essentially people with
whom the older boys might be able to fall in love. He meant that to many boys of
that age nothing can be more valuable than the friendship of a woman who has
sufficient feminine tact and intuition to recognise the affection which she has
aroused, and sufficient wisdom and humour to prevent it from becoming too
strong. He was thinking of a woman who, so far from wanting to retain a boy's
dependence, would want most of all to help him to understand himself, and to
direct the tide of his emotion into other channels. It will be generally agreed that
some kind of
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ethical teaching on the subject of sexual life should be an essential part of the
education of older boys, though it may be doubted whether in the upper forms of
all secondary schools any such teaching is in fact encouraged. This teaching is not
likely to be of much use unless it is given by men of definite convictions, who are
prepared to say without reservation what they understand by sexual morality, and
unless it points to some positive ideal to be followed in mature manhood. In a
matter where such strong inclinations are concerned, we can go too far in leaving
boys of this age to enjoy the open mind. We can hardly go far enough in trying to
anticipate the questions which a boy will later on have to answer for himself. They
may be troubling him already in anticipation, though he scarcely likes to admit it.
If the schoolmaster believes in happy marriage as the proper goal for most people,
or in pre-marital chastity, or in conjugal fidelity, let him say so, and with
conviction, without in the least pretending that these are always or for all people
easy to achieve. Half-hearted advocacy is probably worse than useless. We have
certainly reached a stage, too, when the master who talks to older boys must be
free to express his honest opinion about the use of contraceptives.
A great deal of teaching about chastity seems to me to miss the mark, not so much
because it seems to a boy too remote from current standards—he will not mind
that, if the teaching is sincere—but
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because he dimly feels that it confuses moral values. It is simply dishonest to talk
about chastity, and not to distinguish between different kinds of lapse, between, for
example, an isolated act of passion and the continuous practice of cold blooded
lust. And ought we not to try to see all such failures in their proper perspective, as
compared with other lapses from the Christian ideal, into, shall we say, cruelty,
pride, selfishness and malice? Here, once more, there is the danger of sex being put
into a separate enclosure, and a concentration there of emotion which should be
spread over the whole field of morality.
I cannot help thinking that the "morality"-by which they meant chastity-which
schoolmasters used to preach about the time when I was leaving school was
advocated in the name of sanctions which were not the highest and best then, and
are in some cases even less valid to-day. There was, first of all, the appeal to the
mother-ideal. “Never do what your mother would not like you to do. Have nothing
to do with women of whom your mother would disapprove." There can be no
doubt that this was often extremely—even devastatinglyeffective. It is not
particularly difficult, so modern psychologists tell us, if you play persistently on
this note with a sensitive boy, to preserve his chastity through early manhood. They
also tell us the price that has to be paid for this backward-looking policy. We all of
us know negatively virtuous men, who
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never really grow up, and remain mothers' boys till the end of their days.
Then there was the appeal to chivalry. We were "the stronger sex”, who took the
initiative in sexual life and, because we were the stronger, had to bear the
responsibility. The seduced and deserted young woman and her baby were familiar
figures in plays, novels and moral talks of those days, and no villain was painted
blacker than the scoundrel who victimised a young girl-she was always thought of
as a girl in a lower social stationand left her. All very well. But social life and
conventions have changed since then, and the form in which the appeal was made
to us would now be obsolete and ridiculous.
Finally, there was the appeal to fear, not always, of course, to a fear which was
wholly selfish. We were warned, though usually in quite unnecessarily vague
language, of the danger of venereal disease which lay in resorting to prostitutes.
Within limits this was sound practical advice. Thousands of young men must have
been deterred, at least for a time, by this fear from following their inclinations. But,
setting aside more subtle considerations as to the effect of the awareness of danger
on certain forms of temptation, we can scarcely be content with a rule of sexual
conduct which is purely negative, and tends to degrade the idea of sex itself.
Moreover, even as a mere warning it was only partially applicable to the conditions
which a boy
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found when he left school for the outside world. In modern conditions the young
man of nineteen or twenty certainly does not think of recourse to prostitutes as the
most natural or easy means of physical satisfaction.
Of any statement or explanation of the Christian ideal of marriage I cannot
remember hearing a word during all the time that I spent at school and university.
Is it not true that any appeal and any effective teaching must look forward to a
complete manhood and not backward to childhood, that they must be addressed to
hope and resolution, and not to fear, and that they must never confuse ignorance
and innocence? The man who starts from the ideal of monogamous marriage, to
which Western culture, at least outwardly, pays service, and wants to take what he
believes to be a Christian point of view, will find that his teaching carries him over
a wide range. He will naturally say something about the ideal of virginity, both in
history and in personal life, though he may like to add that on either side of that
path lies the danger of self-deception. He will mention the negative Pauline view
of marriage, which many find not easy to reconcile with the essentially positive
and creative spirit of Christian morality. He will examine, if he is wise, the
pseudoromantic idea of love which is presented ad nauseam by the third-rate novel
and the popular film. He will try to reveal what deep and beneficent forces lie
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beneath the first emotional interest which the young of both sexes take half shyly
in each other. He will explain the biological view of marriage as an enduring
human institution for the continuance and improvement of the race. Finally he will
try to express however inadequately, his belief in another ideal of marriage, which
accepts the idea that life is a school of character and that marriage is a dynamic
element in that process. It accepts the facts of the biologist, but finds in them a
spiritual meaning and purpose. It finds in the quality of the human relationship—in
its trust, and self-sacrifice, and communion in joy and sorrow—a value which is
not to be expressed in terms of this life alone.
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INDEX

Athleticism, 227-50
Authority, attitude to, 39-43,
86, 90, 129, 266
Camps, 220-3
Churnside, chapters I, II, III,
et passim
boys admitted, 27, 32–3, 38¬55
foundation, 10
founder, 10-12
Citizenship, education in, 128,
285-7, 290
Class division and education, 73-81
Classical curriculum, 260, 278
280
Coeducation, 53, 54, 337
Cricket, 235-7, 254-6
Curriculum, 257-90
loose ends, 260-1
tests of, 265-6
David, Dr., Life and The Public
Schools, 142
Discontent, 61-5
Dramatic work, 274-5
Elementary School boy, com-
pared with Preparatory
School boy, 38-55
Fagging, 172-6
General Meeting, 82–139, 155,
157, 188, 206, 207, 251-3
and assistant master, 114-7
and headmaster, 118-22
advantages of, 127-39
Council, 95, 109-11, 123,
125
economic scheme, 96-104,
112
Greek, 185, 280–2
Groups, size of, 196-8
Handicraft, 72, 273-4
Health, attitude to, 298-301,
306-9 and happiness, 312-13
and suggestion, 275-7
Holmes, Edmund, What Is and
What Might Be, 20
Howson, G. W. S., 19-20
Lane, Homer, 22-4, 83, 90,91,
161
Little Commonwealth, 22, 82,
83, 84, 85, 90
Marks, 145-8, 299
Medical Officer, 295, 313
“Middle stage”, 191-210
Nunn, Sir Percy, 181, 201
Physical education, 234-5, 269-71

345
Prefects, 56-7, 126-7, 170-2,
177
Preparatory School boy, com-
pared with Elementary
School boy, 38-55
age, 184-91
Public Schools, 19, 34-5, 196,
200, 210-15, 224-6
Punishment, 162-70
inflicted by boys, 122-5
Religious education, 54-5, 156-7,
202-4, 225, 267-9, 298,
311-12, 343-4
Rules, 160-2
Schoolboy customs, 134-5, 201-2,
204, 233

School Certificate Examination,

260, 263-5, 291-4
Self-Government, 82-4, 87-9
Self-understanding, 287-90,310
Sexual curiosity, 327-9
education, 315–29, 335-44
ethics, 316-9, 339-44
instruction, 329-35
Stages of growth, 181-4, 210–1
Stealing, 163
Subjects, boy's choice of, 141-5, 274
Suggestion, 138, 304-6
Sunday, 155-7
Trust, 177-8
Types, 217-8

346