The faculty found freedom in shifting responsibility for discipline to the Sixth Form.
Read the diary of Arnold, and you will be amazed on seeing how he fought against taking from the Sixth Form the right to bodily chastise any scholar in the school that the king of the Sixth Form declared deserved it.
If a teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip them, but to beat them into insensibility if they fought back?
Such was schoolteaching in the public schools of England in Eighteen Hundred Thirty.
Against this brutality there was now a growing sentiment—a piping voice bidding the tide to stay!
But now that Arnold was in charge of Rugby, he got the ill-will of his directors by declaring that he did not intend to curtail the powers of the Sixth Form—he proposed to civilize it. To try out the new master, the Sixth Form, proud in their prowess, sent him word that if he interfered with them in any way, they would first "bust up the school," and then resign in a body. Moreover, they gave it out that if any pupil complained to the master concerning the Sixth Form, the one so complaining would be taken out by night and drowned in the classic Avon.
There were legends among the younger boys of strange disappearances, and these were attributed to the swift vengeance of "The Bloody Sixth."
Above the Sixth Form there was no law.
Every scholar took off his hat to a "Sixth." A Sixth uncovered to nobody, and touched his cap only to a teacher.
And custom had become so rooted that the Sixth Form was regarded as a sort of police necessity—a caste which served the school just as the Army served the Church. To reach the Sixth Form were paradise—it meant liberty and power—liberty to do as you pleased, and power to punish all who questioned your authority.