The School and the World

by Victor Gollancz; D. C. Somervell

"Generally speaking, the intellectualist phase [of a boy's career] is remarkably brief. Just occasionally its morals are such as to cause the swift expulsion of its leaders. More often they leave in the natural course of things, or grow weary of their pose—which has, indeed, not made them popular—and return after the holidays frankly and unaffectedly Philistine. This transient fashion is not new. What is new is the deliberate encouragement given to it by a certain type of assistant master. We do not imply that the wise master will suppress… That kind of intellectual measles will work itself out… But to leave the phase alone is one thing; deliberately to foster and give it official backing is quite another."—The Church Times.

When the morality of the public schools is being discussed, attention is usually concentrated almost exclusively on that particular branch of morality which is concerned with sex. Nor is this unnatural; for sex plays so important a part in the life of a growing boy, and the development of his character is so closely bound up with the development of his physical nature, that the determining part may be very easily confused with the whole. Yet there are many boys who are sexually virtuous, but filled with the worst type of hardness and intolerance; many, too, who are sexually vicious, yet full of love and sympathy. To imagine that the problem of public school morality is solved as soon as we have discovered the best method of making public school boys continent, is to look at the matter from an altogether too narrow angle; for the sins of the spirit, we have been told, are more unpardonable than the sins of the flesh.

Nevertheless, when we have said this, as say it we must, the fact remains that the sex question is one of overwhelming importance. For if once self-indulgence is allowed to become firmly rooted in a boy's character, in the majority of cases it will be ineradicable; and he will either be the victim throughout a great part of his life of temptations which he loathes, and which will be a constant source of unhappiness to him, or he will end by acquiescing in a manner of life which is degrading, it may be to himself alone, it may be both to himself and others. It will be urged, of course, as it has been urged against every school novel which has attempted to give a true picture of the "manners" of a school house, that we are grotesquely exaggerating the whole business; that there may be a problem in the case of this boy or that, but that in general there is no problem at all. This simply will not do. There is a problem, and a very grave one; and we had better anticipate the possibility of being misunderstood by stating very directly what it is. We believe that the number of cases in which boys have undesirable relationships with one another is not very large, but we believe also that there is a very great deal of that purely personal self-indulgence, that purely self-regarding licentiousness, which is the cause of so much unhappiness in boyhood.

But the reader will already be asking, "What is all this to do with political education?" The connection is a close one. For the prevalence of this particular form of immorality may be ascribed to two main causes. At some time during early adolescence the majority of boys automatically become acquainted with the sensation of sex, and, as part of a natural process, try to reproduce the pleasurable experience. But why do so many of these repeat and repeat the process, until the thing becomes a habit for which they can find no escape? Partly because the verbal warning which is given to them by parents and masters is made in a wrong form, and partly because there is not that constant joy and romance in their daily lives in comparison with which temptation, when it comes, will appear sordid and unworthy. In the second place, there is an atmosphere in the houses of tolerance towards these practices, accompanied by constant discussion, sometimes open, sometimes secret, which encourages and not rarely actually suggests them. This is certainly true of many houses in many schools. The house prefects, it is true, usually try to suppress as much of the unhealthiness as they can; but since, on the one hand, they are often known to have been "as bad as any one" in their day, and on the other they use the method of pretending that these are things which no decent boy could possibly be guilty of, they meet at best with a very partial success, derived only from the fear which they inspire.

The common method of dealing with the evil is a system of "talks" by masters and heads of houses. The "talks" follow a fairly stereotyped plan; they are either religious in nature, and contain references to "the temple of the body," or medical, and convey warnings of the physical consequences which will follow if excess is persisted in. Sometimes the two types of address are dovetailed into a single whole. Neither are wholly satisfactory. The medical variety sometimes terrifies a sensitive boy, who will imagine that his whole life is ruined and all his chance of future happiness wrecked. He will become somewhat morose, and not unfrequently will finally turn, in his despair, to the very thing against which he has been warned. On the other hand, and with another type of boy, it often fails equally disastrously, because, judged by the medical standards to which it appeals, it is proved by experience to be unsound. In his anxiety to create a strong impression the schoolmaster will sometimes make statements that are simply untrue. He will tell the boy that these practices will ruin his cricket or his football. No doubt it sometimes will; but it is more than likely that the boy knows several highly successful athletes who are, as the boy knows, though the master may not, complete adepts in schoolboy vice. Then there is the old threat, possibly obsolete to-day, though one hesitates to say that anything is obsolete in the conservative world with which we deal—the old threat that half the inmates of the asylums of England have been brought there by this practice. That, again, is simply untrue, and if the boy happens to know it, the effect of such an untruth upon him may be very bad. Equally unsuccessful, in the majority of cases, is the religious talk. The unspeculative, dogmatic type of school religion does not make an appeal to the ordinary boy sufficiently strong to override what he has found to be the most fascinating thing in his experience. It is too much a conventional decency imposed upon him from without, too little a force within him which he has been helped to develop, such as is alone powerful enough to contend with a desire itself arising spontaneously from within. And when the sermon is accompanied by exhortations to pray against temptation, it is sometimes not only useless, but (again in the case of the ordinary boy) positively harmful. For to get into the habit of praying against temptation means to get into the habit of thinking about it, to become self-conscious, and to succumb. Not but that there are some quite young boys who feel Christ's nearness to them as Friend and Helper so vividly that they can gain real strength from praying to Him. But we are talking of the average boy; and the average boy is not of this type.

Conversations between master and boy on the subject are, of course, quite necessary and often very helpful. Very often a boy is mystified, or it may be terrified, by what seems to him some peculiarity in his nature, and it may do him all the good in the world to unburden his soul to some one older and more experienced than himself. It is best, too, that the House master should be the man to whom such a boy naturally turns; though if the boy should prefer to turn elsewhere, the fact should be to the House master food for thought rather than for anger. Indeed, while in one way there is far too much talk on this subject, in another there is far too little. Too much may easily be made of conventional "talks" on conventional occasions. What is rather wanted is a relationship between boy and master, created by frank intercourse on other topics, such as will naturally bring the boy to the master for help in these difficulties, with the sure knowledge that the latter will not "lecture" him, but will speak as one who has been through similar difficulties in his own boyhood, and is anxious only to help and to explain.

Under the present system, when the verbal appeal fails, recourse is often had to corporal punishment. We have no room here for a discussion of the ethics of punishment; but a method more foolish could scarcely be devised, if the aim is to enable the boy to overcome temptation. And of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment is the worst. The physical side of the boy's nature is asserting itself in all its strength; and you attempt to combat it by making a physical appeal which must from the nature of the case be far less powerful and compelling. Moreover, any one with even a slight knowledge of sexual psychology (and it is curious how few schoolmasters take the trouble to acquire such knowledge) is aware that given a certain temperament on the part whether of the giver or the receiver, perils lurk in this form of punishment of the very type which it is designed to meet.

But the only sound way of combating the over-development of one side of a boy's nature is to develop the other. Make a boy's whole life one of joy and interest; let him live with a constant sense of the beauty of grass and sky, of the exultation of vital work, of the happiness of love and friendship. As the days go by, let him feel his latent powers developing, and glory in the thought that they have been given him for his own joy and that of humanity. Then when temptation comes to him, and he remembers how its indulgence has left him slack and bored, it will seem to him like a candle-flame in the sun of his happiness, a wretched little mean and unworthy thing breaking in on and threatening to ruin the peace and harmony of his life. And so he will not give it a second thought, and soon all danger will be over. This may seem preposterously difficult. It is: but it is also the only way. The master cannot do it for the boy, but he can perhaps give the boys some help towards doing it for themselves.

What we want is that every house should become a small community of boys carrying on together absorbingly interesting and romantic activities—a kind of club in which they may forgather and undertake in common the intellectual and spiritual adventure which thus become a part of their individual daily lives.

In this way there will be none of that boredom, that feeling of "having nothing on earth to do or think about," the presence of which is the chief cause impelling a boy to turn to the one thing which at least can provide him at any moment with a temporary excitement. Rather will his whole nature develop harmoniously, and sex, about which we have become too self-conscious, take its proper place as the (normally) unconscious inspirer of many of our most vital activities and happiest emotions. And once morbidity has been put away, and with it the constant preoccupation of boys and masters with this one topic, and all that suspicion and suggestiveness which we know so well, then the graver problem which has to do with the relationship of boy to boy will be found to have been solved at the same time. No one who knows a public school is likely to deny that sexual emotion is nearly always an element in the intensest schoolboy friendships; but that makes them neither the less lovely nor the less desirable. Indeed, the value of such friendships at their finest cannot be overestimated. For when a boy "falls in love," he learns for the first time something of the real splendour of living: he comes into his birthright of beauty and ecstacy, and understands how the greatest happiness is to be found in doing everything for the service of another. There is something very loathsome about the spying, and secretiveness, the jokes and unclean hintings which, in the majority of schools, make such a friendship appear a thing to be ashamed rather than proud of, and often in the end actually render it shameful. Given a clean atmosphere, an absence of suspicion on the part of masters and of morbidity on that of boys, and we believe that very rarely would physical acts result from schoolboy love.