What Schools Do for Us

Hawera Star, Volume L, 20 December 1930, Page 11

What Schools Do for Us

Viewpoints on Education

prVHERE arc three ways in which one can [I regard boys’ schools —and. for that matJL ter, girls’ schools, too, 1 dare say. The first and simplest is from the point of view of education, writes Evelyn Waugh in the ‘ 4 Daily Mail. ” This is usually overlooked by parents, but is a matter of unsuspected concern to schoolmasters. My own opinion is that a great deal more education goes on at public schools than anyone ever realises, and that the predominant obsession of athletics, with which they are always charged -is not so much typical of the large and famous schools as of the smaller and less august, who imagine that -they can better raise their status in public esteem by producing Test match cricketers than by producing professors or artists. A second very sensible point of view is that boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen are completely odious creatures, destructive of peace and property, uncouth, self-assertive, and generally unsuited to civilised company. Accordingly parents have to find a race of men so desperate and mercenary that they will devote their lives to keeping them away from home during the greater part of this period. I do not see how anyone of experience can quarrel with this opinion. But the third idea, equally widespread, is that by going to a public school a boy is given “a start in life.” I am sure that this motive impels a great number of parents to make severe sacrifices in order to pay the high fees of a public school. It is looked on as a form of insurance. For five or six years of a boy’s life premiums are paid for him in the form of his terminal bills. At the end of that time—provided no untoward incident upsets his career —he is presented with his “leaving book,” he pays his subscription to the Old Boys’ Society, buys himself two or three old boys’ ties, and sets out a fully equipped member of the mysterious secret society of “public school men.” He is supposed to have made friends who will be useful to him, and to have received a stamp by which other public school boys, all over the world will recognise their own kind. Of the first of these advantages I can speak from experience. There is nothing so useless as useful friends. They are far too busy retaining and enlarging their spheres of usefulness to be able to waste time in being actually useful. The other is more doubtful. There is certainly a distinguishable simil-aritv--between me-n who have had a public school

Old Boys Who Never Grow Up

education. One can usually—though not invariably—recognise them as such. But this is just, like saying that you can recognise Scotsmen. or parsons. The point is whether the recognition is of any value. Except for schoolmastering, there is practically no profession nowadays in which the possession of a public school old boys’ tie—and that alone —is of any definite value. There is, moreover, a sad race of people one can only describe as professional schoolboys. Mr J. B. Priestley, in his new novel, has drawn a painful picture of one of these. They are for the most part the men who have been least, successful at their schools. . Boys who toiled painfully up the school, just avoiding superannuation, just scraping into their house teams, inconspicuous, neither popular nor unpopular. For some reason it is usually these who are the most zealous old boys; they subscribe to new buildings and come down to see them opened; they read their old school magazines and write querulous letters to it when they detect any sign of change ;tliey attend old boys’ dinners. They follow the careers of their schoolfellows and' always write letters of congratulations when they become engaged to be married. They encounter you anywhere. They greet you boisterously by some long-forgotten nickname. There is a sadder tale of professional schoolboy. That is the one who was brilliantly successful in boyhood, but for some reason proves unable to repeat his success in after-life. They were able athletes, respectable scholars, just and dignified prefects—just the type beloved by their housemaster, who writes in their reports: “I have the utmost confidence in his success.” But suddenly they seem to stop developing, and they remain school prefects for the rest of their lives. If they are born with estates to manage, they are able to settle down to useful, if limited, lives. When, however, as is frequently the case, they have no advantages of money or position. they drift into subordinate positions in commercial or Government offices ;and there they remain doing their work sensibly and honestly, but never again rising to the eminence they held at the age of eighteen. It is no wonder if they look back rather wistfully to their schooldays.

Another type, happily becoming extinct, is the old boy who feels that by virtue of his public education the world owes him a living. He is at first greatly concerned with the dignity of whatever post he is offered; he Avill only accept, what he considers a “gentleman’s job”; he will refuse to work under someone whom ~he*: c ana skiers "fin 11 outsider. ’ ’