Schools for Scandal and Virtue

By Paul Gray

THE OLD SCHOOL TIE by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy; Viking; 480 pages; $17.95

Those who know that English public schools are in fact private may go to the head of the class. You are clearly ready for a longer lesson in paradox. Open your copies of The Old School Tie and begin studying a system of education that has been bullying and beloved, tyrannical and anarchic, rigorous and howlingly inept. Memorize the ways in which a relatively insignificant number of masters and students created an ethos that spread, via the British Empire, worldwide. Questions will be asked later, and laggards can expect a caning.

Social Historian Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is interested in how his countrymen got to be the way they are, i.e., typically British. His previous look at this process, The Unnatural History of the English Nanny, uncovered early influences on the children of the upper and middle classes. What happened to the boys when they left home is a more complicated subject, because the schools to which they were exiled at around age eight have a history dating back some 14 centuries. That is a daunting span for any single book to cover, but the author attacks it with zest.

The story he spins out is not a tribute to the human imagination. The germinal public schools were founded in the Dark Ages, and then stayed rooted there well into this century. Originally extensions of churches and monasteries, set up to train some boys as choristers and others as clergy, the schools were anachronistic by the 16th century. Their curriculum consisted of little but the classics, drilled by rote into chilled, hungry, stupefied boys.

Behavior inside these prisons was scandalous and unchecked. In the 1540s, while headmaster of Eton, Nicholas Udall was convicted of sodomy. He was later released from prison--and made headmaster of Westminster. Discipline was ferocious and sometimes fatal. An 18th century legal tract noted: "Where a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occasion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter." Dr. John Keate, a notorious Eton headmaster from 1809 to 1834, once publicly flogged 100 students in a single afternoon.

Gathorne-Hardy devotes most of his book to the past 150 years, the period of the public schools' greatest influence and eventual decline. Masters like Dr. Thomas Arnold injected Victorian moral earnestness into the system. Schools became molders of character and soul. Students who had been forced to memorize the Aeneid still graduated unable to write their native tongue, but the harrowing, evangelical zeal drummed into them for years helped them become high-minded gentlemen, trained to follow their superiors and lead the lower classes. Rabid athleticism flourished. So did sex.

"British upper-class males," one source told Gathorne-Hardy, "were homosexual in everything but their sex lives." If true, small wonder. Adolescent boys cut off from all outside contacts and jumbled together night and day will become unusually aware of each other. Clandestine activities leave few traces. Reviewing what facts there are, the author guesses that the percentage of public school boys who actually engaged in homosexual acts was no greater than in the young male population at large. But many scholars fell into Platonic love affairs with each other that haunted them all their lives. A pattern of boy worship emerged in the schools and filtered into the British society at large. The popular poetry of the Rev. E.E. Bradford is crammed with hilariously unconscious sexuality:

What led him to lay

His whole heart bare,

When nothing compelled him to?

Looking away

With a vacant stare,

He dragged all out to view!

The current prevailing view of the public schools derives from writers like Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, who were as unhappy there as budding authors typically are anywhere. The Old School Tie is a useful corrective. While glossing over none of the system's barbarities and stupidities, Gathorne-Hardy points out its virtues as well. True, the rigid conformity imposed on young boys did not encourage incentive or initiative. Peter Ustinov's master at Westminster wrote of him in 1939: "He shows great originality, which must be curbed at all costs."

But Ustinov, not to mention generations of statesmen, artists and thinkers, somehow emerged with originality unchecked. There is scarcely a field of public endeavor in the English-speaking world that does not bear traces of the public school imprint. Fighting oppressions as youths may have strengthened the graduates for the larger trials provided by life. Above all, the schools seem to have given their charges a sense of belonging together, a memory of childhood that they shared with their peers and never forgot. -- Paul Gray

Excerpt

"If the major role of a school is to teach games (and to create 'character' through games) the academic goals, in deed all intellectual and artistic values of any sort, are likely to suffer. And that meant that anyone who wanted to pursue intellectual activities or was any good at them would suffer too. There were forces working towards this in the public schools in any case. The classics were so boring, their mastery so much a special skill, that most people were instinctively irritated at anyone good at them. It was unfair. Again, those who spend a lot of time working have, inevitably, to cut themselves off from the community -- thus appearing to express a dislike of the community. The community resents this (unless, which was emphatically not the case at this time, a tenet of the community is to respect the individual more than itself). Time spent on games, on the other hand, is by its nature communal. And although success in other fields is for the fame of the community, games success is more obvious, more dramatic and more frequent. Lastly, the public schools took a fairly high proportion of stupid boys . . . It was simply a sizeable slice of their market. But it was another reason for the rise of games and another force toward the despising of intellectual and academic achievement."

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