These are the British

by Drew Middleton

The phrase "Old School Tie" stands not only for the public schools but for their place in middle-class society. The tie is not merely a strip of silk but all the strange, sometimes incomprehensible customs and traditions that surround the public schools. Slang phrases used at one school for generations. Rugby football rather than soccer because there is more bodily contact in rugby and hence it is a more "manly" game and better suited to character-building. School courses which have very little to do with the problems of the modern world but which supposedly "discipline" the mind.

British public schools, like American universities, have been criticized for developing a type rather than individuals. There is a resemblance among their graduates, and the old Etonian and the old Wykehamist (Winchester) and even the graduate of some small school in Yorkshire have a great deal in common. The public-school graduate will be enthusiastic about sports, rather contemptuous and sometimes shockingly ill-informed about the world outside Britain, well-mannered, truthful, and amenable to discipline. In a crowd, whether it be an officers' training unit in war or an industrial training school in peace, he will seek out other members of the fraternity announced by the tie. He is ready to serve and sometimes idealize the State. He believes in, although he does not invariably personally support, church attendance, The Times, the monarchy.

Naturally, there are mavericks. Some of the greatest individualists in recent British history—the influence of the public schools on the nation really became apparent in the middle of the last century when the new mercantile and industrial leaders began to send their sons to them—have been public-school products. By a pleasing coincidence, Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Nehru of India, and Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis are old Harrovians.

Politically, the public schools are conservative in thought, and usually their graduates adhere to the Conservative Party. But there are many exceptions. Hugh Gaitskell, the present leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, is an old Wykehamist. His predecessor, Earl Attlee, went to Haileybury. Scattered through the ranks of the modern Labor Party are dozens of Old Boys of the public schools. If the Labor movement gradually sheds much of its old extremism, it is certain to attract an increasing number of public-school graduates.

The principal criticism of the public schools voiced by reformers at home and critics abroad is that it perpetuates in Britain a class system that divides society during a period when unity is essential to survival. There is truth in this, so much that it cannot be answered, as supporters of the system do answer it, with the assertion that there were no class differences in Britain until the Labor Party created them. Nor is the argument valid that the masses in Britain like class distinction, like to live their lives within a precise social classification. British society is changing today just as it has changed in the past. It would not have changed without popular pressure. The newly rich manufacturer of cheap cotton who decided to send his boy to a public school a hundred years ago was just as much a part of this change as the Labor Party politician who wants to abolish the public schools even though he himself is a graduate of one.

Another disadvantage of the perpetuation of the public-school system in its present form is that it is unsuited in many ways to modern conditions. It was admirable training for young men who were to rule thousands of untutored natives or maintain the might, majesty, and dominion of the British Empire with a handful of police or administer without deviation the justice of the Crown in smelly courtrooms half a world away. But today the young men are going out to sell Austins or electronic products or to represent a weaker Britain among peoples tipsy with the heady wine of nationalism. At home the old stratifications are breaking up, new groups of technicians and managers are shouldering the once unchallenged leaders of the professional middle class, new industries requiring a high degree of technical training are ousting the old.

In these circumstances the road will be difficult for a man who has been trained to regard himself as a leader, either born or educated to leadership, who has been taught that his caste is automatically superior to the industrialists of Pittsburgh or the scientist at Harlow or the excitable politicians of New Delhi and Athens. Certain traits encouraged by the public schools will always be important. But self-discipline, truthfulness, physical courage must be accompanied in the modern world by a broader outlook on that world and a more acute realization of Britain's place in it.

There is a strong movement in Britain for the expansion of technical education. The public schools are not technical schools; their object is the well-rounded product of a general education. While the public schools maintain their social prestige, the new middle class as well as the old will send its sons to them. But the leaders of tomorrow's Britain will be the leaders of the new technology taught in the technical schools. As these schools develop, they may offer a real challenge to the public school's position as the trainer of the governing or leading class.

The indictment of the public schools is that they are educating boys to meet conditions that no longer exist. Yet the public schools are trying to change with the times even while maintaining that what is needed to meet the challenge of modern conditions is not narrow technical education but precisely the comprehensive schooling backed by sound character-training that public schools are supposed to provide.