The Old
Boys: The Decline and Rise of the Public School by David Turner – review
An
affectionate history of British public schools that fails to address the
divisive elitism they represent
Jenny
Turner
Thu 16 Apr
2015 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 14.21 GMT
Like
contemplating Hamlet without the ghost: that’s what one historian calls
anything about education in England that doesn’t mention the Endowed Schools
Act of 1869. Before it, England had no such thing as a secondary-education
system. If you were rich you might go to Eton or Rugby or Winchester or Harrow;
if you were lucky you might live near a city merchant’s charitable foundation.
But for most people there was nothing much at all. The 1869 act changed that by
seizing the endowments that had been left, over the centuries, to the ancient
grammar schools and distributing the money in what was, in some ways, a more
sensible fashion: for example, by funding schools for girls. But the act also
abolished provisions made for educating poor scholars completely free – this
wasn’t the something-for-nothing society, this was Victorian England. And it
helped split schools into three basic types, for working-class, middle-class
and upper-class children – a divide, buried though governments have tried to
make it, that continues to distort and disfigure the education system today.
There’s
something else people need to know about the 1869 act. The heads of the endowed
schools hated it, and set up a club, the Headmasters’ Conference, to defend
themselves against it. It is now called the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’
Conference, but it’s still the main body representing the elite education
providers in Britain, the schools that, even now, can promise pupils a much
better chance than average of gaining wealth, power, Ucas points, and
membership of the mysterious old boys’ networks that continue to gird the
globe. “More than half of the top medics, civil servants, lawyers, media
figures and Conservative MPs” in Britain attended an HMC school, says David
Turner, not to mention “pop stars – 22% of them, according to the Social
Mobility and Child Poverty Commission”. Worse, the very fact such privilege
exists causes many people to feel that state schools, no matter how good they
are, are never good enough. Academies, free schools and grammar schools, and
church places, music places and places for whatever else: all spring from a
sense of inadequacy that goes back decades.
Neither the
Endowed Schools Act nor the Taunton Commission on grammar schools that preceded
it feature much in Turner’s history of the British public school. As his title
implies, he’s an old boy himself, and comes not to bury but to prod gently at
the institutions that made him (the book is coy about which school he went to,
so I asked his publisher: King’s College, Wimbledon; followed by St John’s
College, Cambridge.) Much of the book is anecdotal and affectionate: “I have
suffered indigestion from trying to understand Notions, the Winchester College
argot, while lunching with the scholars”, and so on. But even when it is making
more substantial arguments, the book’s basic sympathy for the public-school
system – poor plucky little mites, forced on the defensive by all those brawny
state schools with their vulgar A-levels – makes it quite an odd and
frustrating read.
“From the beginning,” Turner states, “I need
to establish my definition of a public school.” But the definition he plumps
for – “a school independent of state control which has primarily educated
members of the elite” – surely isn’t right. The reason public schools were
called public in the first place was precisely because they weren’t entirely
independent, but regulated by the statutes of their founders: there it is on
the Charity Commission website, the Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton Besyde
Windesore, alongside Oxfam and Save the Children, and subject to the same tax
breaks, even now. Pauperes et indigentes scholares: that is what it says on the
founding documents of Winchester College. These schools have charitable status
because they were set up to educate poor and indigent scholars for the public
good.
The
earliest public schools, though, had education of the poor as only their
secondary purpose. The bigger aim was to make sure there were enough priests to
run the church. William of Wykeham, according to Turner, had observed how
church government was broken after the 1348 Black Death: in 1379 he established
New College, Oxford, to repopulate the priesthood, then added Winchester as a
feeder for it in the early 1380s. The founding statute famously allowed for 70
of the “poor and needy”, but also up to 10 fee-paying “sons of noble and
influential persons, special friends of the said College”. Thus the distinction
between the poor-but-brainy scholars subsidised by the rich-but-dim commoners
was built into the system right at the beginning.
Cruelty,
corruption and cheese-paring infested these places from the very start. In
1373, Turner reports, the bishop of Norwich forbade teaching in the churches of
King’s Lynn, “on the grounds that the cries of beaten pupils distracted
worshippers”. Scholars at Westminster three centuries later enjoyed thrashing
the commoners, “not only to bruises and bloodshed, but often even to wounds,
and Scarrs, that remain al the daies of their life”. And so, across the
centuries, the violence and damage went on: master-on-boy, boy-on-boy and
sometimes boy-on-master. Eton experienced six “full-scale revolts” between the
1770s and 1830s and Rugby five, including one in 1797 in which boys took
prisoners at swordpoint. It was after a rebellion at Marlborough in 1851,
Turner says, that the headmaster hit on the idea of team sports as offering “a
sublimated violence which made it an especially powerful substitute for the
knightly training of earlier centuries”, not to mention as a “prophylactic
against certain unclean microbes” – in other words, sex. Then, when the schools
belatedly started teaching maths and science, the violence became
technological. “In the 20th century, public-school boffins and leaders of men
invented the tank and worked out how to use it strategically … The improvements
in the curriculum made the upper class a much more effective warrior class than
before.”
Cruelty, corruption and cheese-paring infested
these places from the very start
Turner used
to work as the FT’s education correspondent, and his book gets more searching
the closer it gets to the present day. A “golden age” came in with the 1980s as
successive Thatcher governments starved the state schools while subsidising
private ones with the assisted places scheme. The schools used the extra money
to begin “the facilities arms race” – “You should always have a building on the
go, like your knitting,” as Heather Brigstocke, the former high mistress of St
Paul’s girls’ school, advised. By the time New Labour abolished assisted places
in 1997, a new global elite was emerging, prepared to pay almost limitlessly for
a prestigious anglophone education. International pupils made up 36% of
boarders by 2014, Turner points out, with close on half of that from China and
Hong Kong. Average fees are now in real terms the highest ever: £28,788 a year
for boarders, £12,723 for day pupils.
As Turner
says, attempts the state has made to curb the power of these schools “have
generally oscillated between mild and total incompetence”. Rab Butler had the
best chance ever in his great Education Act 1944, but for all sorts of
disappointing reasons, he blew it: “The first-class carriage has been shunted
into an immense siding,” as he later wrote. A future government, Turner
suggests, might try forcing top universities to take more state-school
children, thus removing the public schools’ biggest competitive advantage. But
instead of that, both Labour and the Tories are currently focused on the
public-benefit requirement placed on the schools by charities law. Labour
proposes what Tristram Hunt has called “a School Partnership Standard … if they
want to keep their business-rates relief”; the Tories have funded the
Independent-State School Partnerships forum, whose website is due to go live in
May. Both parties have also encouraged public schools to sponsor academies,
though so far the results are not auspicious. Wellington College’s Wellington
Academy was given a “Requires improvement” rating at its Ofsted inspection last
year, and in 2013, Dulwich College pulled out of sponsoring the Isle of Sheppey
Academy in Kent.
Strangely,
neither school seems to have experienced such problems when expanding overseas:
Wellington International Tianjin opened in 2011 and the Shanghai branch last
year; Dulwich has franchises in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Zhuhai, Seoul and
Singapore. Strangely, too, Turner has little to say about either academies or
overseas franchises, though, love them or hate them, such developments are
surely what the future is all about. Instead of that, he concludes by noting
that today’s public schoolboys “are cognisant of the fact that roasting boys
[is] not morally acceptable”, which I suppose is always something, and that
“the public schools deserve much of the credit” for teaching them “to embrace
and master the modern world”.
The Old
Boys by David Turner, book review
A
sympathetic analysis of private education may amuse, but it fails to address
the issue of inequality
James
Runcie
Thursday 12
March 2015 15:00
We live in
a country where the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and the Archbishop of
Canterbury are all old Etonians; where public schoolboys shape more than half
of Britain's "elite", and where even the entertainment industry has
been taken over by toffs – Headmaster: Fry. S (Uppingham); Head Boy:
Cumberbatch. B (Harrow); Senior Prefects: Redmayne. E (Eton), West. D (Eton)
Lewis. D (Eton) Hiddleston. T (Eton).
If you are
comfortably amused by this information, then David Turner's sympathetic history
of private education may be just the ticket; but if you are worried by the long
shadow of unearned entitlement, social injustice, bullying, paedophilia and
casual racism present in the history of such establishments, then your response
may be more nuanced.
The
approach is broadly chronological, starting in the 14th century, with the big
guns going first (Winchester, Eton, St Paul's; then Shrewsbury, Merchant
Taylor's and Westminster). All of this is diligently done, and there are
informative moments when it seems extraordinary that these schools got off the
ground. The difficulty of finding teachers of sufficient quality and charging
the fees necessary to sustain privilege was harder than everyone first thought.
"Another
problem was more straightforward", Turner drily observes, "the public
schools were beating their children too much."
An
obsession with the classics at the expense of almost every other subject, a
focus on sport to exhaust boys away from hormonal "vice" and an
indifference towards troublesome assessment in the form of 'O' and 'A' Levels
threw the future of such schools into doubt. But, as Turner tellingly points
out, their hopes improved when state education became so appalling in the 1970s
and 1980s and there was sufficient middle class "flight" to improve
standards. This coincided with public schools finally getting their act
together (mainly by admitting women) and realising that fagging and flogging
were not the only means of building character.
In many
ways, this book is a fascinating account of the rise of privilege, but I would
have liked more context and analysis. If one is going to talk about the
seed-beds of patriotism, then it might have been informative to discuss the
Royal family's adoption of Gordonstoun as a favourite school; unhappiness and
rebellion would have benefited from even a cursory mention of John Betjeman's
Summoned by Bells or Lindsay Anderson's If; and the controversial business of
charitable status, by which private schools enjoy beneficial tax advantages, is
hardly mentioned.
The writer,
like me, went to a public school (I went to Marlborough, Turner does not confess)
and his position is more kindly than mine. I still find it bizarre that people
are prepared to pay for their child's education three times over: once to the
state, secondly in school fees, and then a third time for tutors to cram for
re-takes. The cost is approximately one house per child (five years of
secondary education at £35,000 a year is £175,000; twelve years if you start
from prep school is £420,000; and as this is post tax income you might as well
add 40 per cent. Even then this won't quite "do" in London.)
So why do
people go through with it? It seems to me that, like business travel, the main
purpose of private education is the avoidance of the poor. Set in secluded
grounds, surrounded by playing fields less fortunate establishments have long
since sold, public schools are havens of protection from the sordid business of
getting on with people who are different. The child's upbringing is almost
entirely outsourced, with mothers emailing proxy parents (otherwise known as
"housemasters") to check on the progress of children they hardly see.
When the little darlings do finally emerge, some 12 or 15 years later, they
find jobs in politics or the law where they can still keep the poor at arm's
length by sending them to prison or to war.
Staff are
reassuringly, imperialistically, foreign; the divine Filipino does the
cleaning, the Pole does the plumbing, the Indian the electrics and the
necessarily fit and white New Zealand nanny doubles as eye candy for hubby.
There's no need to meet the English working class at all. Job done. Pimms all
round. Do we really want to live in such a country? And, if so, shouldn't books
like this address the issue more critically?
The Old
Boys: the Decline and Rise of the Public School by David Turner, review: 'a
worthy effort'
Lewis Jones
gets to grips with the colourful history of the British public school
4 out of 5
stars
David
Turner introduces his history of the public school with a variation on
Palmerston’s gag about only three people understanding the Schleswig-Holstein
question. Over the course of the past century, he jokes, “it is highly unlikely
that as many as three people have understood fully what a public school is”. A
former education correspondent of the Financial Times, Turner has clearly
looked into the subject, but even he seems unable to supply an adequate
definition.
In the
beginning were the grammar schools, which taught Latin, charged fees from those
who could afford them, and went in for beating. The major public schools all
began as grammars. Winchester, the oldest, was founded in 1382 by William of
Wykeham for 70 poor scholars, with provision for as many as 10 “commoners” (ie
fee payers), and with a curriculum based entirely on “grammar” (ie Latin). In
1440 Henry VI copied Wykeham at Eton. St Paul’s was established in 1509 as a
day school for 153 scholars, occasionally supplemented by commoners. The
ancient grammar school at Westminster was refounded by Elizabeth I in 1560 for
40 scholars. Merchant Taylors’, another day school, was founded the next year.
Rugby was established as “a free grammar school” in 1567, and Harrow as a
grammar five years later.
Turner
argues that they became public schools when the poor scholars were outnumbered
by fee-payers. At Winchester, for example, there were as many as a hundred
commoners by 1412, and by the end of the 17th century Rugby and Harrow were
mainly fee-paying. But St Paul’s took only occasional fee-payers until the late
19th century, and in 1976 Dulwich (founded in 1619) had 85 per cent of its
places funded by local authority scholarships. His other criterion is that a
public school educates “the nation rather than just local people”, but that
would obviously exclude the day schools.
It may not
be possible fully to understand what a public school is, but we know one when
we see one, and there is a clear distinction between public and merely private
schools, which are often more disreputable, and short-lived.
Turner’s
subtitle echoes Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, and the more entertaining
sections of The Old Boys cover the era of decline in the 18th and early 19th
centuries – the days of corruption, fag-roasting and riots. The Winchester
mutiny of 1710, over beer rations, was followed by five more; there were six at
Eton, and five at Rugby. At Rugby in 1797 the Riot Act was read, and rebellion
was suppressed by soldiers, special constables and farmers with horsewhips.
Even after
Thomas Arnold’s headmastership of Rugby (1828-42), which reformed not just his
school but all of them (23 of his masters became heads of other schools), in
1864 the Clarendon Commission judged that public-school education was generally
bad, though not as bad as it had been. At Christ Church, Oxford, which then
took more than a third of its undergraduates from Eton, and about 10 per cent
each from Harrow and Winchester, the dons reported: “The answers we get to
simple grammar questions are very inaccurate.”
Turner does
not shirk the topic of homosexuality – “little pretty white-handed curly-headed
boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows” (Tom Brown’s Schooldays)
– and nor does he neglect the girls’ schools, with an account of how the Girls’
Public Day School Company (now Trust) was launched by four feminists at the
Albert Hall in 1872. At Roedean, established in London in 1885, but soon moved
to a windswept hill outside Brighton, the headmistress promised that “special
pains will be taken to guard against overwork”, and the headmistress of Wycombe
Abbey (1896) similarly guaranteed that the “hours of study will be strictly
limited”.
In the
Sixties, Empire and snobbery were on the wane, academic education was free at
the grammar schools, and the public schools were in trouble. Then they were
rescued by the Labour Party. In 1965 Anthony Crosland (whom Turner calls a
Wykehamist, though actually he went to Highgate) set about abolishing the
grammar schools, a mistake compounded by the abolition of direct grant schools
in 1976, when most of them became public schools. Public school pupils
accordingly rose from 4.4 per cent of the school population in 1977 to 6.2 per
cent in 1981.
William
Dawson, headmaster of Brighton College from 1906 to 1933, was once asked by his
head boy why he admitted foreigners. He explained that he took two years’ fees
in advance as surety for good behaviour: “They’re all highly sexed, and it’s
only a matter of months before they sleep with a maid. Then out they go.” In
recent decades fees have tripled in real terms, and since the crash the
professional classes can no longer afford them, so the schools that began by
being colonised by the indigenous rich are now overrun by Russians and Chinese.
And it’s a
two-way process. Dulwich has three schools in China, and others in South Korea
and Singapore. Haileybury has an outpost in Kazakhstan, and Harrow in – where
else? – Bangkok. This, apparently, is the golden age.
Turner
dutifully rehearses the somewhat tired arguments for and against the schools.
He notes that “opponents attack the public schools for isolating their charges
from native working-class culture”. Supporters presumably defend them on the
same grounds. Others may wonder what native working-class culture is, to which
the approved answer is: pop music.
According
to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, though, 22 per cent of pop
stars were educated at public school, which if true is quite the most shocking
statistic in the book. The next most shocking is that the percentage of
public-school Tory MPs has fallen from 70 per cent in 1983 to 54 per cent in
2010.
But there
is never any real doubt whether Turner regards the schools as “dangerously
dominant or benignly pre-eminent”, and for as long as 10 per cent of
comprehensive school pupils take media studies at A-level many parents will
agree with him.
The Old
Boys is a worthy effort, but I could have done with less editorialising and
more history.
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