Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

And, in the same way that at a later point of his career he will awake with a start six months after marriage and ask himself whether it is all over: 'Heavens!' he will say, 'I can't be finished with; what's going to happen now?' So, during his last term, he discovers that this stage has not the finality he had supposed. Something has got to happen next. School life was, after all, no more than a prelude. He had valued too highly the enticing emoluments it had to offer. And he does not see what new prizes life will hold for him.

If he is going to Oxford he may toy with the prospect of athletic honours. But unless he is particularly gifted, or particularly conceited, he will appreciate the vast degree of specialised rivalry to which he will be subjected. If he is going into business he will envisage, perhaps, the days of affluence and power, of private secretaries and private telephones; but all that is a very long way off. There is no immediate focus for his ambition. There is no particular reason why he should not, if he wishes, make as big a nuisance of himself as his fancy pleases. He is passing from one phase of discipline to another; and because the nature of neither is definite, he considers himself free. A last term is often indeterminate and ineffectual.

Now if the discovery that school life is only a prelude is made by an unimaginative athlete during these last weeks, we can confidently assume that it will be made a good deal sooner by a boy of originality and independence, especially by one who has not entered with any great zest into the conflict of athletic distinction, and has, therefore, been in a sense above the battle. He realises a good year and a half before he has to leave that life in its fullest is to be encountered beyond the limits of a cloistered world. The discovery does not contribute to his content. He knows that if he wishes to win a scholarship he will have to stay on his full time, and he feels that he is marking time, that he is sitting in the stalls of a theatre waiting for the curtain to go up. Now that is a most unsatisfactory position to be in. In the theatre we kick our heels, read our programmes, turn round to see if we can recognise a friend, speculate on the possibility of innocence in the lady who is sitting in the front row of the dress circle. One does anything to make the quarter of an hour pass quickly. The imaginative schoolboy behaves in a similar fashion. He frets and grows impatient. He assumes an intellectual snobbery. He despises the majority of his companions and labels them as Philistines. He disparages the values of athletics and exalts in essays and in the debating society the literary standards of the nineties.

It is possible that on Saturday evening he will leave a carnation standing in green ink in the hope of emulating his divinities. He is encouraged in his rebellion by the indignant astonishment of the master, who refuses to regard his outburst as a very natural and, on the whole, harmless pose. He is lectured severely on the dignity of his position. He replies in a cryptic epigram. He even criticises the public school system—an unforgivable offence. Being unacquainted with the ways of systems, and feeling that his personal liberty is curtailed, he considers that for this curtailment the public school system is solely and peculiarly responsible. He will not allow that all systems oppress the individual, that systems are made for the service of the many, and that it is for the individualist to decide whether the privileges he will receive by consenting to remain with the mass compensate for the unpleasant restrictions that are placed on the free play of his personality. It is, after all, the first system with which he has contracted an intimate relationship, and in the same way that a monogamist considers his wife worse than anybody else's, the schoolboy delights, in spite of a deep affection for his own school, in hurling at the public school system all manner of accusations, in which the word sausage machine is not infrequently repeated.

There are such boys in every school. Age is an arbitrary definition of development. Many boys reach the age of seventeen, and stay there for the rest of their lives; others are twenty-five years old before they have done with their teens. When a boy is tired of school he has outgrown school. And there is only one sure remedy—to take him away.

But there are the claims of a university career; there is the parent's natural wish that his son should gain a scholarship; it is often impracticable for the boy to leave: in such circumstances we can only recommend on the part of the masters a general leniency. Such outbursts should not be taken seriously. The school, as a whole, is not concerned with the unusual behaviour of those who, by the possession of brains, are already considered slightly abnormal. And the jester who is disregarded may well become a monk. If, however, a boy feels that notice is being taken of him, he allows his flattered vanity to dictate to him. He cultivates his pose; he wonders how best he may shock the mid-Victorianism of the common room, and there is the danger that the pose may, in the course of time, become part of his intellectual equipment.

Sermons and addresses inform us that in the last term is to be found the significance of school life. But, as I have previously tried to show, the last term is no more significant than the first. The new boy is outside school, pausing on the fringe, his eyes full of a sheltered curiosity. The boy who is about to leave is equally outside school; he looks backwards and he looks forwards; the continuity of his life is about to be broken; its rhythm is temporarily suspended. He is no longer leading the same life as his companions. And it is vain to compare the new boy with the boy that is about to leave, and by analysing and examining the change that there is between them to arrive at the meaning of school life.

They are two entirely different people. One is a child; the other is a man. The change that must necessarily have taken place during this passage is so considerable that it is impossible to say how much of it is due to environment and how much to physical growth. You might send a man of thirty to Timbuctoo, recall him at the end of four years, and, examining the change in him apprehend the significance of Timbuctoo society. He went a man and he returned a man. What change there was in him could be attributed directly to the wholesome, or unwholesome, atmosphere of Timbuctoo.

You cannot follow this line of reasoning with a public school boy. A parent cannot say: 'Six years ago I sent you a young, innocent boy, industrious, honest, truthful. You have returned to me a young man who knows more than I consider it proper that he should know, whose sole object appears to be to extract from life as much pleasure as is commensurate with a minimum of work, a young man, moreover, who considers that a lie told to an official is not a lie. Look what you have done!' But that is not a fair attitude. Anyhow, during those six years, a boy must to a certain extent have lost his innocence; most young men of nineteen place the claims of personal indulgence before those of work. Most young men look on life as a game that is played between themselves and a perfectly ridiculous antiquated body which is called 'government,' and whom it is permissible to hoodwink, misinform, or otherwise deceive whenever the opportunity is presented. The corroding forces of knowledge must make themselves felt during those six years. It is unreasonable and absurd to attribute their effects solely to the public school system.