Monbiot on public school damage
Only class war on public schools can rid us of this unhinged ruling class – Guardian Unlimited
George Monbiot wrote this article in yesterday's Guardian, outlining the damage that boarding schools, especially boarding prep schools do to kids, who eventually become the British élite:
British private schools create a class culture of a kind unknown in the rest of Europe. The extreme case is the boarding prep school, which separates children from their parents at the age of eight in order to shape them into members of a detached elite. In his book The Making of Them, the psychotherapist Nick Duffell shows how these artificial orphans survive the loss of their families by dissociating themselves from their feelings of love. Survival involves "an extreme hardening of normal human softness, a severe cutting off from emotions and sensitivity". Unable to attach themselves to people (intimate relationships with other children are discouraged by a morbid fear of homosexuality), they are encouraged instead to invest their natural loyalties in the institution.
This made them extremely effective colonial servants: if their commander ordered it, they could organise a massacre without a moment's hesitation (witness the detachment of the officers who oversaw the suppression of the Mau Mau, as quoted in Caroline Elkins's book, Britain's Gulag). It also meant that the lower orders at home could be put down without the least concern for the results. For many years, Britain has been governed by damaged people.
I went through this system myself, and I know I will spend the rest of my life fighting its effects. But one of the useful skills it has given me is an ability to recognise it in others. I can spot another early boarder at 200 metres: you can see and smell the damage dripping from them like sweat. The Conservative cabinets were stuffed with them: even in John Major's "classless" government, 16 of the 20 male members of the 1993 cabinet had been to public school; 12 had boarded. … They recognise each other, fear the unshaped people of the state system and, often without being aware that they are doing it, pass on their privileges to people like themselves.
The system is protected by silence. Because private schools have been so effective in moulding a child's character, an attack on the school becomes an attack on all those who have passed through it. Its most abject victims become its fiercest defenders. How many times have I heard emotionally stunted people proclaim "it never did me any harm".
I also went to boarding school, and I remember acutely the distress of the first few days and the stress of most of the rest of the period. I certainly agree that boarding prep schools are damaging to children, who need their family around them, the love of their parents and siblings, if they have them, and not to be sleeping in a dorm full of ten other kids. However, this is not the only reason why the "public" boarding school system produces many who fiercely defend it. After all, people do not get into major universities and high-paying jobs only by doing well at these schools; they get there mainly by virtue of staying the course.
What adults who remember school usually remember best is the last few years, and in the last few years the "discipline" and abuse is much less and the privileges much more. They may well be allowed out more, allowed to socialise with adults more, and allowed more personal space, than they were as 11-year-olds, let alone prep-schoolers. More importantly, they may well have become prefects. This usually means being able to inflict petty inconveniences on younger pupils, or just those out of the loop, but in some schools prefects are allowed to issue orders to staff as well. At university, I met the former head boy of the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk, who told me that he had used this privilege once (and had to inform the teacher in question that this was in the rule book). In past generations, prefects were able to issue beatings to younger pupils, and there is still a system of younger pupils acting as servants to senior ones.
So, it's not surprising that somebody who remembers a time when he could lord it over younger pupils thinks it did them no harm, even if the first couple of years was unpleasant.
