Boarding school boys rule Britain, at what cost? | The New Statesman podcast

In March, Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, published his Memoirs of a Very Private School, which recounted in devastating detail the emotional and physical abuse he had been subjected to at his Elite Prep

boarding

school

. The brutality is laid bare for listeners who are not as familiar with private

school

. school system a prep school in the UK is for children aged 7 or 8 up to 13 years old for centuries in the UK a private education has been the route to opportunity today those who attended private schools are five times more likely to occupy high positions in politics Judicial media and corporate

boarding

schools, particularly

boys

who make up less than 1% of the population, have been running the country for most of the last 14 years, but at

what

cost

to both the survivors of these institutions as well as for the country that joins me today?

To talk about all this and more, I'm delighted to welcome writer and poet laureate 1999-2009, Andrew Moan, and author Richard Beard. Both Andrew and Richard have written for the New Statesman about boarding schools and Britain's relations with these institutions and you can find links to their pieces in the program notes. Well, for starters, he's similar to Charles Spencer. Your parents sent you both to boarding school when you were seven or eight, and Andrew, your experience in particular was extremely similar because you went to the same one. school like Charles Spencer Madewell Hall, but I thought we could start with whether you remember the day you found out you were going to boarding school at that age and how you felt about it.

I remember very vividly the long and agonizing drive from my house to school, which was about 100 miles away, um, and I felt like the sky was getting darker so to speak the whole way I was going, but I still couldn't believe that The worst was going to happen, that my My parents were not going to leave me in the company of these people, none of whom I had met before at this great distance from home. I remember looking back through one of the two glass doors that enclosed the small hallway inside. the little hallway area, um and seeing my mother crying and being comforted by my father as they walked away from me and thinking that in a sense and this was the beginning of a pattern of behavior that has tremendous ramifications, I think.

Thinking that he had to not be visibly upset to prevent her from getting angry. I guess my dad was angry too, but he wasn't going to show it in a stoic way, but my mom was. she just wasn't able to contain her own unhappiness about this um and then being thrust into the not very cheerful company of a boy who had been delegated to take care of me um, which of course she didn't do, I mean in other words. In all those respects, my experience was very similar to that of Charles Spencer and Richard. Do you have similar memories?

Do you remember when they told you that you were going to go to school? Well, it's a little different. Probably because Andrew said that. he traveled 100 miles to get to his and Charles Spencer's school in the book he goes from Norfolk to Northamptonshire and is very far from home both geographically and emotionally, while my parents' compromise was that the boarding school was six miles away away. from where they lived in Swindon and my brother was already there and I always had the feeling of being half in this and half not in it, which I think allowed me to keep a bit more perspective, um maybe, and than those guys.

When I started, I was at a school for kids who had effectively been abandoned there, I mean, parents living abroad, um, it was pretty common on the other side of the country and, uh, they didn't really have any contact with their family. in Everything and this, as Andre says, had an impact on the way they felt because they felt very sad and they were told that they were not really allowed to feel that and therefore they doubted their own emotions and also wanted to go back to house and they were told that they weren't really allowed to want that, so they also doubted their own desires, so you have these two key things that from the beginning become unreliable, you know

what

you feel and what you want and When you take away That makes it very difficult for someone, not just children, to find your place in life.

Can you tell me a little about the culture at your school, the silence you encountered in those first days and and and the punishment? If I. I think I mean having read Charles Spenser's book and Andrew's Memoirs too, in fact I think mwell Hall had a particular cast of really grotesque characters and other schools would have had the same kind of punishment routines, the same guy. of disciplines, but in a slightly diluted form, the EXP experience seems to be very intense there with a kind of collective of disturbed teachers, in fact, disturbed staff reaching down to the midwives, as Spencer has explained. in your book, but I think the kind of rituals and routines in the schools of the '70s and '80s and boarding schools were based on schools going back to the last century, so they had a lot more to do with what happened at first. of the century that at the end um and let's say George Orwell's experiences at his school in the 1910s that he recounts in the 1940s in such were the joys that his essay was recognizable to anyone at a boarding school in the 1970s until the vocabulary and so this is a very strict education where transgression will be punished where no one is expected to question the reasons why um and really the idea is to break down the child and then reshape him in a way that um going back to the roots of these schools. where you will be ready to serve the Empire, we will go to public schools that will then perfect this, um Early Education, um, but you will be a good servant of the Empire, we have no question. of authority, there is no doubt about British greatness.

I mean, there's a kind of jingoistic element to education, but if you do it, you'll be punished, so you have abuse on the one hand and you have this very biased education on the other, um, and of course, there's a social aspect. in which you are better than other people who have not received this education. I mean, if you're continually told that this is the best education money can buy, you should know, implicitly, that everyone else who isn't in a private school isn't. receiving the best education and ultimately they will be less intelligent than you, less moral than you, less capable than you and less qualified to be prime minister.

So I think the knock-on effects go through that sense of abandonment and the fear that occurred. With this I have helped develop in my later life all sorts of aspects of myself that I wish weren't there at all, for example, I think it cultivated in myself, and in many people who had similar types of experience, a rather dire desire to pleasing because pleasing was simply a way to avoid being punished, and that, among other things, has made me, I think, quite reluctant to be confrontational, and I've spent a lot of my adult life trying to moderate that because clearly there are times when life where you need to confront things that you find unpleasant, offensive or just plain wrong, but I've always found it quite difficult to be and do, and I have to do it.

Let's just say I also noticed it a lot in my dad, who had a very similar experience to mine, which speaks to Richard's point about how this is kind of a multi-generational problem that we're talking about here, so there's that um and with this a general temptation to avoid in my behavior to avoid making firm decisions about things because I was likely to get in trouble if I did, and by that I must say despite the absolutely correct point Richard is making about how these schools have produced everything type of people in positions of power across generations. um it also had an absolutely numbing effect on my intellect.

I mean, I learned almost nothing at this school um because I was in such a state of tarity of one kind or another that my mind was really frozen when I left I was a pretty stupid kid um no, I'd like to think because I'm kind of innately stupid but because my mind just wasn't able to deal with the requirements of learning because all their effort was to persuade me to deal with the kind of daily things I had to deal with so as not to get into trouble so as not to be punished so as to stay on the right side of things. things, you know, and although an alarming number of people in positions of power still had this kind of experience, very often I noticed that, or I have convinced myself anyway that the kind of cunning that is found in many people in positions of authority um, I think it's because of this encouragement to be evasive in the early days, especially political cunning, I think it's interestingly connected to this.

I think there are many strategies that you developed to then hide yourself, I mean you and this goes back to those early days of nostalgia when your true self wants to go cry in a corner and you hide it and learn as a protective strategy to not showing who you really are and Andrew is saying that avoiding confrontation is one way to do it, being charming is another way to do it because you give an impression of yourself which means you don't have to show who you really are. Another way is to go in the opposite direction of Andrew and actually, um.

Trying hard in a competitive sense to do well in school because the approval you can get for that, on the one hand, keeps you from being punished, but it's also a substitute for love. You don't have anyone at that school to love. but you want this approval to replace that and if you do very well in your lessons you will get that approval and then that competitive boost if I do well in school if I do well in my job um then eventually that that the boost is due to the absence of love rather than loving a job or wanting to do good and, again, that can skew attitudes slightly, um in old age, in fact, it can skew them intensely, not slightly, um, but there are all these different strategies that can go into at play in different proportions in different people, but I think it's about hiding that terrified little boy, in fact, um and so it's his strategies, what are the ones you know, that's most important to you and your sense of yourself is actually hiding that true, inner self that is suffering, you know it at that young age and all of those strategies are part of that reading of your article Richard um uh, when you talk about this, the emotional damage that has been caused by this boarding school experience you say that the symptoms instilled from an early age include emotional detachment cynicism exceptionalism defensive arrogance offensive arrogance cyst compartmentalization guilt grief denial emotional strategy deflection and stiff-lipped stoicism or translated into non-therapeutic English you write thank you I'm fine and I wonder if you are talking about staff who have gone through this same experience.

Do you think the behavior is a product of the institution or do you think the fact that these people later move into positions of authority is what has enabled them? boarding school system to operate that way for so long or both, well the path was very clear from high school and you described in your introduction that high school is there to prepare children for public schools. then through public schools and then if all goes well you will go to Oxbridge, then from Oxbridge to the civil service or eventually to the government or to the banks, to the army, to the church, to the judiciary, you can see all these different types of paths that are there, but the path is absolutely clear now if you continue if you continue to get rewards now why is anyone going to change the way you go down the ladder?

You know some point if I still get the reward in the end and I can see how people have gone through the system, why would you change any part of it while British society still rewards this way of raising children? And you know that was true in this era where boarding schools could be incredibly abusive like Andrew School Charles Spencer School um or just very dated, which I think was more the case with my school um, but it's still the case now with the private education system or why change it if you pay a lot of money. and by entering these same exclusive schools, you end up where you wanted to end up all the way, which is, you know, in the elite of the country, so I think that's the answer to the question: the two things are connected if society in We generally decide that we're not really going to reward this kind of behavior, so you would think, well, there must be a different way to create different behaviors and children are more open, more generous, less fearful, but in fact, there is no need to do it. that because you go through the system you will end up as a judge, you know, or a member of parliament, so no, I think the two things are connected, really the path is so clear that it mitigates the change, what impact does it have? that in the long term have affected the country, well, let's look around us, see what it looks like now and see if it looks like a country in good health, good psychological health, you know, a kind of psychological assessment of Britain at the moment,certainly since 2006 I say get a quote out of my head um uh, I would say it's not very healthy and uh we have to start analyzing the reasons why this legacy now exists and the hangover of the people who are now in positions of power who were raised in the '70s and '80s, but then there are younger people who went through the same system who seem to have some of the same issues to address, but you know it would be a great job to basically apply therapy to Great Britain and it would be a very useful thing, but to back up the thesis a little bit, I mean, given that we have, you know, a younger cohort of politicians and judges of lawyers or whatever who haven't had those same experiences, do you holds?

I think it does hold up because the isolation of these schools allowed for the kind of horrible experience that Andrew had and Charles Spencer had isolation. Still there, I don't think the same kind of horror stories are being experienced in these schools, but the isolation is there, the exclusivity is there and it is in that isolation and exclusivity that strange ideas can arise even if they are not related to corporal punishment . or around sexual perversions and these strange ideas, you know, they could be economic, they could be social, but being so excluded from the rest of the country means that there is a lack of empathy for the rest of the country when you leave the country. this system and that is as true today as it was at mwell Hall in Andrew's time.

Well, I feel a little hesitant to answer this with any sense of authority because I haven't lived in England for the last 10 years and um and one of the reasons I was so glad to get out of this has to do precisely with all the things that we're talking about, but when I look back across the Atlantic and I speak to you now from Baltimore, where I live and and work, um, I see a government that seems to be run entirely by people who look a lot like the people who are prefects in the type of schools I went to and where they apparently performed highly.

Many cases come from those types of schools, including, of course, the Prime Minister himself. I have friends who are aristocrats. I have friends who are upper class. I have friends who are working class, but not working class, and even if they haven't been. through the mill in the same way that people of my age and generation did, it seems very likely to me, in fact, certain that the patterns of expectations that those schools raised in them are the ones that they are now representing. in society in general, so all types of acceptances of inequalities, injustices and imbalances, etc., are based on that original model.

I think it's interesting though because some of the qualities or some of the impact that you've described from being in that environment you would think would be the opposite of creating a good leader, you know, you talked about compliance, taking down someone who doesn't question that, that It's what you know, the anti-Confederate position has to do, then, the kind of path it weaves. he leads through politics. It may have to do with the kind of things we're talking about here. I think if you go to any of these schools' websites now, that's not today at Andrews Day Medwell Hall, but on any of the websites, they will look at leadership as one of the things they will teach the kids whose parents will pay for it. education, so there is an expectation of leadership even if there is no corresponding skill set imparted through education. m I wish not to necessarily confuse private schools with boarding schools.

I mean, do you think there's anything unique about the boarding school experience? You know it's your home, don't you, besides your education? That doesn't apply to private schools or Do you think or know that you are equally concerned? Do you think there are enough similarities there because obviously more people went to private schools but as far as I know it's still disproportionate, is that a distinction worth making? I mean, I don't know what private schools are like in general in the UK anymore, but certainly the experience of being uprooted from home and transplanted in the way that both Richard and I were was deeply formative of one's character and our expectations of life.

One thing I wanted to say before is that it took me a long time to be able to speak critically about what happened to me because it always impacted me and I think I'm not alone. feeling this that um I was really complaining about having had what everyone else thought was a silver spoon put in my mouth um in other words this was meant to be a privileged upbringing and it was described as that um and paid as something that has a kind of nauseating effect because no one wants to hear someone complain about being privileged, you know, that's kind of ridiculous, and I think that was an important part of the way that these scandalous institutions and, apparently, especially o in particular, um, we were able to get away with it.

I think the exclusivity, the social exclusivity, the kind of social distinctions that are made within the school between those who are there at the school and those who are lucky and those who are privileged as Andrew has said, um, it's just instilled in them. to those children who are lucky to be in that private school and that there are reasons for that, but this reinforces the divisions between people who go to private schools and those who do not now go to boarding schools. It's an extreme version of that and if you're in a private day school and you have the advantage of going home to see your parents every day, you obviously have love in your life in a way that you wouldn't if you were at a boarding school.

Hopefully you also get some common sense from your parents to counter some of these wild claims that private schools make about what they can achieve for children. very interested in Andrew's response, um, about this idea that you know the privilege of going to school, um and I think if what was interesting in the Charles Spencer case is that there is an idea that he sent that school. Because his family has always done this, they've been private schools since I think he says in his book 1716, you know, he has ancestry in Eaton, so really going to a private school for his kind of person is very much about measure to avoid downward social situation.

Mobility is just making sure that you don't go down, but most people seem to be interested in private school because of upward social mobility, um and again if your parents are very interested in that, the point of making sacrifices to pay for you. Going to school it becomes very difficult to resist the school propaganda so when you say well do you think it's good for some people and Andrew says you know he knows people who say it was great? I mean, part of the internal propaganda is these are the best days of their lives going back to boarding school people have gone to boarding school to the same school as Andrew and I think in the new Statesman the addition of the new Statesman after his review where he said which yes charles bin said it was terrible i was there it was terrible there was a letter saying i was there at the same time and it wasn't terrible and i loved it the best days of my life frankly i'm quite skeptical about it i think someone who I really didn't want to question what happened in that school after those experiences and it's part of education not to be too interspective.

I want to ask you about how to move forward because if workers are elected in the next election, whenever they are, we will see a cabinet that will be Britain's most state-educated since 1945, so we have 133% private education in compared to 59% of the conservative cabinet, taking into account that only 7% of the population has private education. I just wonder if that gives them any hope. You know, if that gives you any reason for hope or optimism. Damn, I hope so and yes, yes, I feel optimistic about it, I mean, even at this distance, I feel very optimistic about it and it possibly presents such an exciting contrast to what could happen here in the states that, in some way way, it goes further. increases my sense of optimism uh yeah I think it's going to be interesting to see what actually happens in terms of the plans to add VAT to school fees and the other financial penalties that could be imposed on private schools because private schools have a long history of resistance to change and of course their lobbying groups, the people who are willing to lobby for them are incredibly powerful, and I think it will be interesting to see how much that is diluted.

I suspect it will be a lot. It is more difficult than the opposition seems to make these changes because there is a history dating back to the mid-19th century where private schools can resist anyone who enters their territory and are quite ruthless in doing so. I would expect them to put up a great fight. You think it will be doubtful that they will go ahead with that 20% VAT. I think there will be many obstacles that will stand in your way and until then. It would be interesting to see how determined they are to do that when they see interest groups in positions of power, you know, in the judiciary, in the media, um in particular, it's going to really be a test of their principles, it would have A great impact. impact because it would be a start.

This is a way of starting to say: well, if this is a commodity that you are buying and you apply VAT to it in the same way that you do to other commodities that are purchased for this type of The special status that is granted to private schools is beginning to erode and in doing so may begin to erode the special status they have in relation to, for example, Oxford and Cambri. It was happening since the University. from the private school's point of view, but not from the private school's point of view, they wish it hadn't happened and the more that is taken away from it, eventually that will be a way to prevent it from having so much power in the country, preventing private education from having access to these Paths I think doing it gradually this way is much better.

I bet it's more likely to have a lasting effect than if you try to say, as the Labor Party did in the 1980s, let's just abolish the private sector. education I think that was never going to be something that could happen and I think this idea of ​​doing it in increments, um, is the best way to do it, but if you increase the price and that means that the middle classes that have aspirations find it difficult to enter and they have some reservation in reserving this education for the children of their well-known oligarchs and hedge fund managers, but it suddenly becomes much less attractive, forcing this very active sector of society to get involved in their public schools. and being involved in their own communities, which right now doesn't happen as much as it should.

I mean, fortunately it happens in some places, but it can happen more. How do you respond to the argument that you are leveling? down you're not raising state schools, aren't you raising state schools as a consequence of making private schools so expensive that fewer people go there and in the process allowing the voices that, um, are presumably heard within the private school? system moves those voices into the state system and forces them to lobby there, but you also have, um, you know, hopefully the people who are in positions of power making decisions about education will have some knowledge of the British state school education system, which is not necessarily the case at this point.

I don't see that there are many, you know, disadvantages to this new dispensation, I mean, apart from the proposed policy of putting 20% ​​VAT on private school fees, are you sorry? Although we will have a different sense of government because a smaller proportion have gone through this private school system that we have been talking about. Do you think there will be a difference in the style of government compared to just that policy? Once again I want to say that it seems perfectly reasonable to me to expect that more people will be able to recognize themselves in the people who occupy positions of power that affect their lives in the sense that they will be able to more easily identify with the experiences they were given there in the first place. , you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you , you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you , you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, that you have described, the parents are clients, the fact Even though you are paying for this education, these elite private schools are undergoing significant and adequate reform.

You think it depends on where parents place the emphasis, doesn't it? I mean, if I were a parent like that, my priority would be for my child to receive a proper education in the sense that it was to do with learning and being taught brilliantly by people who knew what they were talking about and did it in a way that connected the things they were teaching with the life that these childrenwhat they were going to wear once they left the place um and if that emphasis was placed correctly then I can easily imagine that many people, many parents would want to send their children to such an institution, but the idea of ​​trying to reconcile awakening with an institution of elite like Eaton is.

It's such a paradoxical notion that it's very difficult to imagine it working in reality because it's eaten for goodness sake. I mean, how can you fundamentally wake up? And I think that connects to the idea of ​​what a good education is, a good education. Education for me would include learning about the absolute injustice of having more sports facilities than most small towns for a thousand privileged children and if If you don't come out horrified by it and wanting to change everything, then you haven't been educated properly and there is a kind of paradox: it's not going to happen and therefore it means that the education can't be that good because otherwise you would realize this and You would want to do something about it and that doesn't happen.

It doesn't seem to be what happens to most people leaving schools, so can it change? It can't really change unless you confront these kinds of injustices, but confronting these injustices threatens the existence of schools in the world. first place, so I think it is unlikely to happen what place to leave it