IT

T is impossible for me to approach the question of the future of the public schools without bias. My social and political views inevitably predispose me to take a definite attitude, and this is, on the whole, hostile to the public school system. Some people would no doubt say at once that I should discuss the subject no further because this bias unfits me to do so. The obvious reply is that, if all those in whom the future of the public schools arouse strong emotions refrain from saying anything about it, then complete silence would ensue, for I have not been able to meet any one who can even flirt with the question without a certain heightening of colour and a freer use of adjectives. There is every reason why this should be so. Our attitude to the public school is in many respects the measure of our attitude towards every social problem of any importance. The sort of school we want depends upon the sort of society we believe in. Educational institutions follow the pattern of society; and, indeed, why not? Is it not one of the main purposes of education to give us that knowledge, those values and codes of conduct with which to adapt ourselves to the social setting in which we are to spend the rest of our lives? In the past the public school has been insular because those taught there expected to lead insular lives. If they did not mix with a cross-section of society in the school it was because they did not expect nor want to lead any other than an exclusive class-protected life. The hierarchy of education has followed and attempted to sanctify the hierarchy of the social system, and, if its most eloquent and far-sighted defenders want to modify it now, it is because they realize the social system itself is undergoing modification. Many of them want the public school to change as little as possible just as they want as little change as possible in society.

It will be seen that there is little chance of common ground being found between those who think as I do and those who desire to preserve the public schools. I want big social changes. I hope for them and work for them. Consequently I expect to see equally fundamental changes in the methods and institutions of education. They want frugal social reforms, and so, quite logically, they expect microscopic alterations in the structure of education. Indeed, it is the changes which are occurring in the distribution of the national income which are responsible for the crisis in the public schools. The public schools are living on a dwindling social foundation, and, instead of accepting this fact and making ready to die decently and without too much fuss, they are looking around desperately for something to shore them up, some of them with a nostalgic belief that the crisis is only temporary and eventually the erosion will cease. I do not wonder at the public schools trying to preserve themselves. All institutions fight to persist long after their vital functions have ended. Often it is good they should do so, for they ought not to end until their vital content has discharged itself into a new mould. Therefore, in such cases, a wise government eases their death, and builds up the inheriting institution pari passu with the decline of the old one. In this way rupture is avoided and the essential continuities of culture safeguarded.

If I could be persuaded that the public schools of Britain had any further contribution to make to either educational theory or practice, I should be prepared to support a proposal which would enable them to continue, albeit in a modified form. But it seems to me that all that is good in them has long since been emptied into the broad streams of education, and that what we are asked to prolong is a physical structure only, completely void of any historical sanction. Surely this is revealed by the reasons given to justify the State providing grant-aided places in the schools on a sufficient scale to enable them to live. The proposal, put another way,

"

is for public money to be used to give advantages (sic) to a limited number of the sons of the poor in order to enable the children of the rich to continue in the enjoyment of their class privileges. It is clear there would be the greatest resistance to grant-aided places in the public schools if it were not for the fact that this seems the only way to attract revenue from the public exchequer. Even if I thought the public school system a good one, I should resent the exceptional children of the poor being used as decoys to attract public money to support a private advantage. How much more do I resent it when it would be a sacrifice of the children of the poor to use them for this purpose. It was suggested by some writers in The Journal that the public school would benefit by a controlled infiltration of children from the elementary schools. The juxtaposition of the two types of children, it was thought, would make the public school a more faithful cross-section" of the community. Undoubtedly it would. But why blur, bemuse, and bewilder the whole educational system in order to bring about this result? It could be accomplished more easily and tidily by all the children of the well-to-do going to the elementary and secondary schools. Indeed, the school population would then be a photographic reproduction of the whole community, for the children of the rich would be a small minority. If the apologists of the public schools want to benefit the children of the poor, there cannot be a better way than to mix all the children together. Just think how the influential rich would rave about the shocking lavatory accommodation, the huge classes, and meagre equipment of so many of our State schools. The education estimates in the House of Commons, which now hardly ever interest Conservatives unless they are engaged in an economy campaign, would become quite exciting affairs. Conservatives would take as much interest in education as they now take in the income tax. Malnutrition, resulting in unpleasant and infectious diseases, would receive more attention if daily contact exposed the children of the rich to danger.

The benevolence of generous-spirited men is no substitute for the constant leverage which this situation would exert upon the general standards of education and the physical arrangements of the state system. It is surely not too much to say that the backwardness of State education in Great Britain is to some extent due to the fact that the education of the well-to-do flows through separate channels.

The advocates of state-aided places in the public schools do so in order to ensure the preservation of special advantages for a special class of the community. I want the whole school population to pass through the State system so that the presence there of the children of a special class may result in benefits to all.

If you want to democratize the children of the public schools as distinct from the quasi-democratization of an institution that is the best way to do it. Any other way is to use a principle that commands universal respect in order to promote its opposite.

Another argument against an attempt to wed the public school and the State system is the confusion which would result. The existing condition of affairs is sufficiently incoherent. It is not necessary to have a confusion of machinery to achieve diversification of opportunity and variety of educational stimuli. If we attach the public school to the State system, the next demand will be to incorporate the private preparatory school. The result would be chaos. The bewildered parent could be provided with no guide through such a morass except the interested advice of competing institutions. A generation must pass before he can decide whether he has made the right decision. It is necessary that the educational plans of the State be

the whole system; it does produce he-men in goodly proportion. But man is bisexual: every man has a woman in him, every woman a man. The he-man represses his essential femininity, and that is why he is so deadly dull. I have the feeling that every good public school boy must be unconsciously ashamed of his mother. A few have told me how scared they were on parents' visiting days that their mothers would kiss them in public. Any he-man system strives to exaggerate the father element and curb the mother element.

I cannot criticize the teaching and subjects side of a public school. All I can say is that it is just as futile as the elementary and secondary brands, for all believe fatuously that school subjects are education. I understand that imbeciles still talk of compulsory Greek, but they are not more insane than their secondary school fellows who believe in compulsory mathematics. Education when compulsory is like compulsory attendance at church in the armysenseless and worthless.

Education should concern itself primarily with character. And here the pukka public school man will cry: 'Here I agree heartily, for our system aims at forming the best character ". That's the rub: that is one of the disasters of the public school, that it does form character. For to form a child's character is a crime of great magnitude. Character can develop only in freedom from fear and authority, and all the silly adjuncts of authority-dignity, respect, discipline. Luckily the formation of character from

without does not always succeed-witness my public school boys who wouldn't wash. Their aversion to soap was the natural reaction to an unnatural school belief in soap and cleanliness. Possibly the public school imagines that bodily cleanliness symbolizes the other cleanness of morals it wants so much to foster. I have also seen with great satisfaction how quickly public school boys lose their manners when given freedom to be their true selves. They come to my school with insincere voices and manners: they call me "Sir " (that most degrading of titles for any man); they open doors for me, and I hate their insincerity, and rejoice when the day comes when they call me a silly ass to my face and plop themselves in my favourite chair (from which, being fairly sincere myself, I push them out). True manners are possible only under complete sincerity, and no boy who has respected a head, or served a prefect, or worshipped a rugby wing three-quarter can possibly be sincere. His manners must be the superficial manners that designate gentlemengentlemen in a world that so badly and sadly wants men.

However, what we all say about the public schools is of little moment. They will die with the system that produced them, and Mr. Hitler has done much to hasten the end of that system. What the coming Socialist State of Britain will do with them I do not know, but I fear that our workers have been so imbued with the snobbery of class, that they might turn Eton and Harrow into schools for training young commissars. But, again, they may have the sense to turn them into free colonies of free children.

WHAT do I want to happen to the public schools?

Whaddollant to happen to them. Ever since

the Editor invited me to take part in this discussion these two questions have been buzzing around in my mind. They are really quite separate and distinct questions, but since, with our fatal tendency to rationalization, prophecy and desire are always inextricably intermingled, it is very hard to keep them apart.

The events of the last twenty years have made me very sceptical about social prophecy. No one in 1920 had the least idea of what the world in 1940 would be like. What would old Clemenceau have thought if he had been told that twenty-one years after the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, France would be again invaded by Germany, that the French army would retreat in disorder, and Paris be occupied after a few weeks? It is clear that we don't know what is going to happen, but that If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars". All we can do is to guess, and then consider whether the guess is to our liking.

My own guess is that the public schools will suffer a sharp decline in numbers and prestige, and I shall not be surprised if they practically disappear. The severity of the decline will depend upon the duration, severity and cost of the war, and upon the social changes that it brings with it. But I feel sure that there will be some decline.

To begin with, there are the financial factors already discussed in these columns, and affecting all boarding schools, and not merely those classed as public schools. It seems clear that one result of war finance will be to diminish very substantially the aggregate sum available for the payment of school fees. In the class that supports the boarding schools, the increase of income tax in a single family in the last two years may already exceed the school fees of one, or even two, children. This process will not be reversed for some time. Perhaps, owing to the pressure for new social legislation, it will never be reversed.

It follows that the present boarding school population could be maintained only if parents were prepared for much. greater sacrifices than in the past. There seems little reason to expect this, since the motives leading parents to choose these schools seem likely to get weaker rather than stronger.

Good secondary day

There are several reasons for this. schools are both more numerous and more efficient than in the days when most of the big boarding schools were founded. The snobbery which causes many parents to choose boarding schools is on the decline, and one may reasonably hope that it will decline further. Thirdly, the point of view which inspires public schools will, I think, be increasingly out of touch with the kind of society which we may reasonably expect and for which we must certainly hope. I shall amplify this third point presently.

Assuming, however, that the reasoning so far is valid, we may expect a decline in the number and prestige of the public schools. Unlike most of your contributors this is a prospect that I welcome and I should like now to turn to this aspect of the question. The public schools are, as Sir Frank Fletcher admits in his article : the product of a society already divided by social barriers". Now it may be true, as Sir Frank Fletcher asserts: that the public school system did not create the social divisions of English society; nor would these disappear if the privileged schools ceased to exist". But that surely is to argue a theorem from its converse: the question is not whether the public schools create the social divisions, nor whether the abolition of the social divisions would automatically result from the disappearance of the public schools. The question is: would a society which had determined to get rid of these social divisions tolerate a system of education which tends to perpetuate them? A group of schools existing mainly for the sons of the well-to-do, and promoting by their very existence a special kind of class consciousness in their products, is incompatible with a society that aims at any genuine democracy. Sir Frank Fletcher seems to think that by bringing together in the same school boys of very different social standing they have helped to break down the barrier of birth". And adds that, If somehow they can be thrown open to the sons of parents who cannot afford to pay, they will have broken down the barrier of wealth". But surely this is a very optimistic view. The public schools at present create definite barriers which would not exist if the whole population went to the same schools. Any one who doubts this need only take the trouble to inquire among

products of secondary schools who happen to have been interviewed for commissions in one of the older regiments. It is surely naïve to suppose that these barriers can in any serious sense be broken down by admitting to the schools for the privileged an inevitably insignificant fraction of the unprivileged. Let us suppose that, under some such system as that advocated by some of the contributors, a miner's son from an elementary school is admitted to Eton or Harrow. By virtue of being a miner's son it is almost certain that he will never be quite at home in, nor accepted by, the bulk of the public school caste. By virtue of having been to a public school, he will be cut off from the other miners' sons who have not. In the attempt to give him the best of both worlds you may only succeed in giving him the worst. There may be an argument for privilege based upon birth and wealth, and there may therefore be an argument for privileged schools, but, if we decide that privilege is not justified, it is merely trifling with the problem to suppose that we can undo its effects by admitting to the public schools a sprinkling of elementary school products. The existing degree of privilege in England is incompatible with genuine democracy, and, if we aim at a genuinely democratic society after this war, we must be prepared for a very rapid reduction in the amount of privilege. As things stand at present, the principal public schools are one of the main bulwarks of class privilege in English society, and I think that their continued existence is incompatible with the abolition of this privilege.

It is contended, however, by many of your contributors that the public school tradition is so valuable that it must at all costs be retained in some form or other, and that democracy merely demands that we should spread it over the whole population. Here again I find myself unable to agree. The world which I hope to see, and for which I intend to work, is a co-operative, cosmopolitan commonwealth, with some effective machinery of international government based upon democratic, federal principles. I do not believe that the public schools have anything very useful to contribute towards the creation or preservation of that kind of world. The harsh and autocratic discipline, with the threat of corporal punishment still in the background when it is not in the foreground, is a poor preparation for a peaceful and non-aggressive society. It may produce Empire builders. It does not produce democrats or cosmopolitans. Democracy is based upon reason and persuasion, upon the

M°

denial of the utility of arbitrary authority, and upon creating in the mind of every citizen the feeling that he is part of the government, and not merely one of the governed. To this end schools need a large measure of the self-government which the progressive schools have done their best to develop, but which is certainly not part of the public school tradition. It is sometimes maintained that prefects are a form of selfgovernment, but this is a pure delusion. Prefects are analogous to gauleiters appointed by the Führer, and have nothing whatever to do with democracy.

Then there is the team spirit that we are always being asked to admire. The team spirit, as it exists in an orchestra, is an admirable thing, and produces the sort of co-operation needed in a peaceful and non-competitive society. It is true that the public schools have increasingly introduced this type of co-operation, but it is not the type that they have principally fostered, nor the type which is commonly associated with the idea of team spirit. What is meant by team spirit is the co-operation which occurs between the members of combative, aggressive herds. You cooperate with your fellows, in short, when there is another herd to be defeated. From the point of view of psychological pattern this is the same thing as nationalism, which it must therefore help to promote. Nationalism is the chief evil which at present afflicts the world, and the alternative to the destruction of mankind is the destruction of nationalism as a political force. Nationalism is useful only when it is non-political and rather humorous-the sort of local patriotism that Yorkshiremen have, for example. So strong, however, has been the influence of the public schools in promoting a belief in the efficacy of group competition that day schools all over the country have developed artificial' houses', having no residential or other type of reality, and existing solely in order that they should compete with each other and promote the competitive herd instinct among the children. These things—herd instinct, group combativeness, prefects, a strict authoritarian type of discipline, the absence of any genuine self-governmentare the principal characteristics of what the public school system seems to mean in practice. It seems to me that they all need abating in the modern world, and that, for the reasons I have suggested, if they remain at their present strength, they will be an obstacle rather than a help in the creation of the sort of world to which men's minds are increasingly turning.

By T. C. WORSLEY, Author

OST of the public school headmasters who contribute to The Journal, I notice, admit and deplore the class basis of their schools, and are ready for a change. They now all assume this to be the major fault and seem to imagine that if they can find some way of getting over the difficulty, the public schools ought to go on pretty well as they are. It is just this view that my book wished to challenge and I suggested that, unless the public schools were so radically altered that they pretty well ceased to be public schools in the present sense, their continuation would be a national disaster.

It is common to hear public schoolmasters saying that it is the last two years of a boy's life at a public school which is the most valuable (responsibility, &c.). This is the first heresy which I want to challenge. There should be no need to describe to you what community life at the average public school is like (though headmasters have a quite amazing capacity for deceiving themselves in these matters). It is run off the batteries of organized competition; around and through the rivalries of form work and team work stalk the public school virtues of loyalty, discipline, fair play. The life is public, tough, ritualistic. In fact, the best analogy to public school life, with its quaint or obscene or brutal customs, is the life of the savage tribe. Now for this kind

of Barbarians and Philistines

of existence we know that there is a certain psychological justification for adolescents. Somewhere between II and 15 the average boy likes being in a gang, is naturally cruel, homosexual, intensely competitive, and inventive of secret ritual. Whether or not it is a good thing to encourage these traits as a preparation for a civilized society I do not feel competent to decide; personally I am inclined to think there is something to be said for it. But, at least in the ordinary course of things, a boy begins to grow out of these traits by 16 or 17. At a public school, however, or any boarding school or Borstal institution run on public school lines, that growth is deliberately retarded. The tribal life is not only continued up to 18 or 19, but worse, the older boys, the very ones who should be growing out of it, are plunged right back into the centre of it. From being members of the tribe, they become the tribal leaders. At 17 or 18 they are set to perpetuating and enforcing the very existence from which they ought now to be emerging. The school prefect, especially if he is also an athlete, becomes at 18 a sort of super-fourteen-and-a-half. It will take him four or five years to recover from that, unless as too often happens (the most casual observation of your own ex-pupils could convince you of this) he never recovers at all.

That is my first objection to the public school system

and I suggested that adolescents and senior boys should be educated separately, the latter going to local colleges which would be day schools, co-educational and run on something more like a cross between the university and a sixth form in the best schools. You were pleased to be very highhanded about this suggestion which you described as cloudcuckoo-town. I think I know why.

You approve, and have always approved, of the deliberate retardation of development, in the interests of a philosophy of leadership, a conception which I believe to be irrelevant to the needs of a modern democracy. That philosophy of leadership was evolved to meet the demands of a growing Empire which had to be dominated. It was a success; it was perfectly adapted to its purpose at the turn of the century. But history does not stand still-not even for ex-headmasters. And what was good enough for our fathers—however good it or they may have been-is not necessarily relevant to the world of their sons. The enormous crisis through which we have been living since 1914 could never have been solved by the attitude of 1890. After the last war the pace of our democratic experiment quickened, the scope of it widened. If it was to develop successfully and with the least possible violence—which is what I am interested in-two things above all had to be changed the old contempt for useful knowledge, and the old conception of authoritarian leadership which the European tyrants were so soon to copy and the impact of which we are enduring to-day.

The contempt for useful knowledge derives from the concept of liberal education: about the value of that theory in the past I am not concerned; about its merits at this moment of history we are all very much concerned. You dismiss with a few ironic questions my contention that there is to-day a dangerous divorce between culture and life. Yet it is rather surprising that you should never have noticed this. Did it never strike you as odd, for instance, that, after an expensive liberal education, so comparatively few of your old pupils ever opened a serious book again? Or consider that Oxford where you preside, that Oxford which is the home of liberal culture, where every day during term your colleagues are giving lectures on the beauties of Greek art, on proportion, form, commodity, and sweetness; and then take a look at the New Bodleian with which this home of culture has been graced. These things and they are symptomatic-are the fruits of liberal education in decline. You do not notice them, so there is no use in pointing out to you the deadening effect of the liberal treatment of ' subjects', or deploring the lack of a general scientific or technical education, or—and it may in the end be more serious-the divorce which exists between specialized technical or scientific education and 'culture', as if they were antitheses. Your reaction to the word science or scientific is that of any nineteenth-century classically educated schoolmaster, but it is ingenuous to flip the problem off as if I had just invented it. Classically educated myself, I was only using the arguments which Sir Percy Nunn and others a great deal older and wiser than myself have used.

But the public schools, as you were always so fond of saying, are less concerned with learning than with character. So we come to the question of discipline. There is a kind of elder statesman who has only to pronounce the word discipline to suppose that he has solved a major problem. That there may be different kinds of discipline, different approaches to it-that one approach may be better or worse than another, more suited to producing this kind of person or that, more appropriate to this kind of way of life or that, -doesn't enter their heads. By discipline, in fact, they simply mean absolute obedience a quality highly prized in animals, slaves, Nazis, and public school boys. A democracy should have evolved a conception a little higher than this, and that it has failed to do so I ascribe largely to the influence of the public schools. The practice of English education provides far too little between the Nazi discipline of the public schools and the anarchic licence of the

' progressive' schools. (For whatever reason, you obscure, in your review, the fact that I rejected both these extremes.) At one moment I am" anarchic"; at another my courage has failed me" because I disapprove of anarchism. My contention is that, if the experiment of democracy is to go forward, we must find the mean between the kind of slavish obedience you admire (your words are on record), and the anarchic licence of some progressives. If the public schools are to continue merely to purvey authoritarianism, then I should consider the extension of their influence over a wider section of the population to be disastrous.

"

So my book was not, as you seemed to suggest, another of those books which have been written for the last twenty years attacking the public schools for their handling of sex, religion, discipline, &c. On the contrary, I was at pains to point out that the public schools are extremely successful at handling these things-for their own purpose. What I doubted was whether they are successful in producing leaders for the kind of society in the defence of which this war is being fought. You yourself boasted, not so long ago, in an article in The Spectator, that the public schools were one of the few institutions which Hitler has learnt from and copied. That is quite true. What is surprising is that you should solemnly suppose this to be a testimonial to them. My question was, Has the public school tradition helped to solve the problems of a developing democracy?' You answer-as you have answered for the last twenty years with what I confess to find the cheapest kind of sneer about democratically deciding to eat sweets in form". History may have a more serious answer. My question was "Is the public school training relevant to the needs of a modern industrial democracy?" Your answer to that is even cheaper; it is to find comfort in the fact that the products of the old tradition are proving themselves heroic ". Now you know perfectly well that no one-least of all I-questioned the courage of public school boys. But, as you have been in London during the last few months, you should not have fallen into the vulgar error of imagining that the public school classes have a monopoly of that quality. I have left myself too little space to explain here the concrete suggestions which I made for fitting the public schools into a national system, in such a way that their virtues are applied to that age-group to which they are suitable, and their admirable buildings and equipment used for the benefit of the whole community. It was at best only a sketch, and those who want to can read it in my book and I hope improve on it. But it would not be the least good any one doing so who is not convinced by any of the foregoing arguments. It seems clear to me-every day makes it clearer that the history of the last thirty years shows that there has been something disastrously wrong with our education; and the tradition of that education has been derived largely from the public schools. And, if the public schools which are now mercifully dying are to be put on their feet again, whether by grants or free-placers, that tradition will persist.

You on the other hand see the public school tradition as a rock in a dangerous whirlpool, and believe, like Marshal Pétain, that it is the desertion of the old tradition that has led us astray. There is no bridging that gulf. We are simply on different sides.

"We now know that the development of the next generation will so narrow the oceans separating us from the Old World that our customs and our actions are necessarily involved with theirs. Beyond any question, within a few years, air fleets will cross the ocean as easily as to-day they cross the closed European seas. The past generation in Pan-American matters was concerned with constructing the principles and mechanism through which this hemisphere would work together, but the next generation will be concerned with the method by which the New World can live together with the Old.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech to the Pan-American Union, April 14, 1939.