More Quotes about Boarding Schools

The dear old place

Send your child to a single-sex boarding school for a wonderful education and a lifetime of crippling social awkwardness.
Having served time at both Stonyhurst College and HMP Dartmoor, I can confirm that I was treated better at the latter institution. (A friend writes. He recalls cross-country runs in the dark every morning, followed by Mass. Cold showers, a tepid, shallow bath once a week, and daily beatings. This was the 50s – that Golden Age UKIP members want us all to go back to.)

Lol @ old Etonian criticising the left for “only talking to each other” and “not understanding the people.” #bbcqt (Ellie Mae O’Hagan ‏@MissEllieMae)

Eton “teaches you charm, concealment of your true purpose, the ability to make people believe in you”. (writer Charles Cumming)

I used to write notes, says Giles Coren. That was how I passed exams and got into a good school. But “I did not have a single friend. And I had never met a girl. So I looked around me at the boys with friends and, more importantly, the ones with girlfriends. And when I started in the sixth form I made a few changes. I yanked down my tie and untucked my shirt. I threw away my briefcase... and swore never to take a note again... By the end of the first week, I had mates. By half-term, I had a girlfriend. By Christmas I had a hot girlfriend.” (Times 2015-10-03)

Maybe, if that’s what you’ve grown up with – no play, no chat, no flirting, no female friends, no girlfriends who will and girlfriends who won’t, no trips to the cinema, no gradual understanding of when a coffee is just a coffee, and when you ought to not go for that coffee, because “coffee might mean something more"... Forget Isis. Worry more about that. (Hugo Rifkind on a programme about Muslims, Times 2015-10-03 But why does normal behaviour have to involve a strange code about coffee?)

Gabriella Wilde, Poldark star, went to boarding school, which she hated... “I went to quite a lot of schools. I was at Heathfield for three years. It’s a fun school but basically it’s a lot of girls who get bored and get up to no good. MY children will have different childhood; I don’t think they’ll go to boarding school. I think it’s a bizarre thing to do. I didn’t enjoy it and my husband hated it. It’s a strange way to grow up.”
Being sent away to board at Eton was as unhappy an experience as his parents’ death, the actor Dominic West has said. “It was the worst feeling I have ever had, very similar to the grief when my parents died. It’s the same thing really; you think you’ve lost your parents.” (Times 2016-07-26)

Mike Tindall, former England rugby captain, told The Daily Mail: “I’m certainly not keen on sending Mia away to a boarding school at the other end of the country. I know many people who say boarding was the making of them because they forged great independence from their parents, but I don’t really want her to be distanced from us. My school was a public one and plenty of my mates lived in, but I was just a day student and it definitely didn’t do me any harm. If anything, I enjoyed the best of both worlds. Personally, I’d rather she attend a school that’s nearby, where we’ll always be on hand if she needs us. Anything else goes against my instincts.” (boardingconcern.org.uk 5 Jun 2016)    

Parental interest can compensate for a lack of financial power to some degree: the children of the most interested and involved parents on a low income may do ‘better’ than wealthy children whose parents are less interested. (LRB May 2016)

My years at public school here in England were the unhappiest of my life. I have never taken kindly to discipline; I hate to be forced to occupy myself with things which don’t interest me, and I hate all the cruder kinds of physical discomfort. The only time I was ever warm at school was in bed... and the food was foul. The English school system leaves boys quite incapable of dealing with women in later years. (Leslie Charteris/Bowyer-Yin)

Sending a seven-year-old to boarding school probably isn’t a good idea. People would tell me that schooldays are the best days of your life, and I used to live in horror that it was true. I was probably all sorts of things that they would diagnose now, but they didn’t do that in those days. I was just thick. (Anna Chancellor, T 2015-10-24)

I really believe that segregating children in single sex schools risks stunting their emotional and social development. (Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, Times 2015)

A boy killed himself aged 21, after being bullied by a master at prep school. “[The master] became infatuated with some young boys while subjecting others to the misery of emotional bullying and humiliation.” Mother: “I had no idea that the place where we wouldn’t be able to keep him safe was an incredibly expensive private school. Parents and teachers need to be taught how fragile a child’s psyche can be.” The child kept telling his parents, and was obviously distressed. “Initially, we thought he was bringing this dislike upon himself by his silly behaviour.” The child was in a scholarship class “where academic success was paramount, but they sensed that poor pastoral care was viewed by some parents as a price worth paying. [His mother] remembers being told by one mother that you put up with [the school] in order to secure a place at St Paul’s.” The parents complained, and the school responded by nitpicking about procedure, and saying an investigation would be too much of an ordeal for the boy. (Times magazine 2015-10-11)

Readers under the age of 60 may not be fully aware that back in the 1960s, ‘being at boarding school’ didn’t necessarily mean that your parents were well-heeled as it does now. The world map was still coloured pink, and boarding school was a sort of gentle fostering service for the children of the army of sometimes quite lowly civil servants and military that were stationed in the outposts of the British empire. (annaraccoon.com)

Self harm and depression are on the rise in private schools. Social media, exams, and the pressure to be beautiful are blamed (Times 2015 Oct 5 Not “sending children to live away from their family, friends, and community in a loveless institution”.)

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Schools and Careers

Grayson Perry: networking

The clearly glaring gap in the English system is that of social class. The relationship between parental wealth and background and children’s educational outcomes is particularly strong. (Becky Francis, Professir of Education and Social Justice)

I hated school. I hated Stockport. The school I went to had perhaps ideas above its station, in terms of the type of school it should be: a grammar school that thought that kind of emotionally illiterate, highly didactic method of teaching was righteous, because it somehow separated the wheat from the chaff. In other words, kids who could learn that way were clever and worthy, and kids that couldn’t were stupid and unworthy. (John Amaechi)

For decades the belief among many educated by the state was that the arrogance and sense of entitlement that is instilled at public school secured the best jobs and highest pay. That has been debunked, however, with a study concluding that those with the best education get the most pay, and that bluster counts for little... Character traits that may impress employers were, in many cases, already held by the children at the age of ten, before they went through the independent school system... Money spent on schemes that built the confidence and aspirations of state-school pupils would be better off focused solely on improving the education they received. (Nicola Woolcock, 2015)

Recent articles complain that a two-tier system at university is expanding the class divide. The richer students live in more luxurious accommodation and never mix with the less well-off in more basic halls. When I was at university in the 70s, there was a small enclave of upper-middle-class students. They thought I might be one of them, but weren’t quite sure. They tried me out, and decided I wouldn’t do – I wore a pink nylon scarf and made friends with whoever wanted to be friends with me. One of my best friends was even American. The enclave lived in large houses in town, or in outlying villages, and drove in to the campus, where they spent as little time as possible.

Per Toby Young, in the 80s working-class undergraduates at Oxford were known as “stains”. His contemporaries disagree: they were known as “northern chemists”.

And what about when you graduate? Social mobility can only succeed if it fails. What would happen if the entire working class became middle class and wanted graduate jobs? Of course it’s never going to happen, there aren’t enough university places and white-collar jobs for a start. What the middle classes really mean by “increased social mobility” is “We’ll cream off a few more of the really intelligent, useful ones and get them on our side.”

But of course the college tells you that a degree will help you get an interesting, highly paid job. They want your fees. Make sure you aren't being qualified for a field that doesn't exist, has disappeared, or is now over-crowded.

When I was at university, “entrepreneur” wasn’t a career choice. Now it is. It’s passed the parent test. Which is a big zeitgeist change. In other words, if you tell your parents you want to be an entrepreneur, they think, “Great”. Whereas previously, they thought you were nuts. (Public schoolboy and businessman Brent Hoberman)

One of the changes that happened in my adult life was the vanishing of the idea of safe careers. Nowadays, if you say, 'My son is in television,' people no longer grip the chair with white knuckles. (Julian Fellowes in the NYT)

Somerset Maugham’s uncle rejected the Civil Service, not because of the young man's feelings or interests, but because his uncle concluded that it was no longer a career for gentlemen, since a recent law had required all applicants to pass an entrance examination. (Wikipedia)

In my day going into business after graduating – for yourself or anybody else – was just not on the cards. It was never mentioned. At university there was something called the “milk round” (visits from firms which needed graduates), but it was never suggested we should put our names down or even find out what jobs they were offering. It was trade.

Publishing and writing were “gentlemen’s careers”, ie you needed private means to pursue them. Most of the French Impressionists and avant-gardists had private means – and sneered at Douanier Rousseau for having a job. They called him a “petit bourgeois” and elaborated a “funny anecdote” about a dinner given in his honour where he was ridiculed and humiliated. And they ripped off his art.

A hipster is someone who can charge middle class prices for a working class job. (Karl Sharro ‏@KarlreMarks)

Hippies were supposed to live by going with the flow, letting it all hang out, opening their minds, sharing everything, so if they were selling you sandwiches they couldn’t just be selling you sandwiches - it must be a happening, or an experience, or something….

Hipsters have pulled off the same trick: they’ve persuaded punters that their businesses aren’t really businesses but art projects, spiritual experiences, distillations of the zeitgeist, a totally new way of relating, a meeting place of rare spirits – or somesuch garbage. Hipster cafes are cafés, their shops are shops, their businesses exist to make money. The “hipness” is just set dressing, and there’s even a chain furnished from a warehouse full of old school desks etc.

Gentlemen are not supposed to want to make lots of money – you’re supposed to have it already. Nobody ever talks about the advantages of having money and contacts (social capital) when you start out in any business or profession. Or marrying money. Apart from Grayson Perry – he advises going to all art show openings and being incredibly charming to everybody. Add “social skills” and “good looks” to the list.


Here’s some advice from a friend (ML):

I've had a few clients over the years who have started a retail adventure. The thing is it is dead hard to make a living out of a single shop.

a. gift shop near Huntingdon selling all sorts of very nice things, like bits of arty decoration, furniture, rugs. She struggled on until the lease ran out but essentially the shop made a contribution towards the rent and her husband had to find the rest.

b. gift shop near Baldock or one of those hell holes up the A1 in Hertfordshire. Sold nice wicker furniture and other nice decorationy things. Struggled on for a while. One partner left and the other carried on until, apparently, a tear in the space-time continuum caused the whole thing to vanish one day. At least that's how it seemed because it just disappeared.

c. mobile phone shop... They had to pay for the phones up front and wait months to get the sign up commissions.

d. off license somewhere in Hertfordshire, just not enough volume and while she was closed evening/weekend Tesco were still flogging it.

e. video shop in Cambridge. This was in VHS days. They couldn't compete with Blockbuster (who moved in two doors down) but survived for a while by developing a speciality (Kung Fu movies).

They all end in tears. The problem is:
1. If you are selling something mainstream like baked beans or bog roll then you can't match Tesco/Aldi prices because you can't get the discounts from the wholesalers.
2. If you are selling something nice but not really necessary then people don't need to buy it and so you are the first expense to be cut when times is 'ard.
3. Before you get any profit there is the rent/rates/gas/electric/staff/stock to pay for and they are all hideously expensive.

Was he the one who said that people come in and look at handmade things and go "Ooooh, lovely!" and then go and buy something mass-produced?

I'll say it again: if I had children I'd send them to butler school.

The expanding ranks of billionaires worldwide are creating a new market for more esoteric services: publicists, pilots, nutritionists, super-tutors, floral architects... (And social-media contractors to monitor and curate your children’s online lives. One family advertised for a butler who could drive a horse and carriage to transport his guests.) (Times, 2015)

The arrival of so much wealth provides opportunities to the quick-witted. Careers that might not have appeared  financially rewarding 30 years ago have begun to wear a different face. (Clive Aslet, Times 2015 on the arrival in London of “ultra high net worth individuals”.)

Step forward art dealers, estate agents and tutors, says Aslet. But apparently the most popular careers are writer, academic, librarian – is this because middle class young people want to impress others they meet at parties? Working with books gives you a sackful of middle-class Brownie points. If you work in the City, or as an industrial chemist, you’ll never be invited to the right dinner parties, and won’t meet the kind of partner who’ll impress other people at parties.

When I worked as a temp, I wondered why some people kept asking me to come back when I was clearly useless – they wanted someone with a posh voice to answer the phone.

More here, and links to the rest.

Quotes about Boarding Schools

Still wish you could give your children "all the advantages"?

Mount adds a brief exegesis on Spartan schooling (boys were flogged at random to keep them on their toes. Needless to say it appealed enormously to the sociopaths who constructed the British boarding system.) (Catherine Nixey on Harry Mount’s Odyssey, July 2015)

While presenting the Hampton Court flower show, Monty Don said that he’d been sent to boarding school at seven “from chalk to ericaceous soil”. He was so miserable that for a long time he couldn’t bear to look at rhododendrons and azaleas. (Arthur Marshall, once a prep-school master, wrote a book about them called Whimpering in the Rhododendrons.)

After boarding school in Sussex – where she began a Resistance Movement which saw her put unhappy girls on trains home, but later redeemed herself by becoming Head Girl... (Obituary of Jill Hyem, writer of Tenko)

As long as you’re awake, you’re being watched. The first year was miserable. (Stephen Mangan)

Children in the Britain of [the 20s and 30s] did not always enjoy a happy family life. The upper classes shunted them off to boarding schools and the lower classes forced them into jobs at a young age. (ruemorguepress.com)

The novelist William Boyd, who started boarding there aged nine, described his nine-and-a-half years at Gordonstoun’s junior and senior schools as “a type of penal servitude”. Smaller children were at the mercy of older ones... In the 1970s there was no central heating. Windows were left open at night: in the winter, the children could wake up with snow on their blankets. (Guardian)

Boarding school is utterly brutal and hideous. It’s a secretive empire where you’re brought up without love... I find it difficult to talk about my feelings, even to identify them sometimes. (Katharine Hamnett March 2015)

Being married to an Old Etonian is a bit like living with a war veteran. Most of the time, they remain stoically silent about the things they’ve seen and done. (Jemima Lewis)

Sending kids away to boarding schools at 7: “privileged abandonment”.

Prep schools have proliferated, but private secondary schools have not. The head of a girls’ prep school in West London says some parents “almost explode” from stress. “The pressure is beyond boiling point now. Children ... will be sitting six or seven separate schools’ exams... There are so many prep-school children and so many more prep schools and no new senior schools to speak of. There aren’t enough places... We’re having to try to prepare 10-year-olds to have sophisticated exam technique as well as knowing how to answer the questions, such as writing legibly, looking at the clock and dividing up the questions, not spending too long on a question that is worth only one mark, allowing time to review what you’ve done. It’s not just about aptitude, it’s about those tricks to go with the aptitude.” Another head says: “There is very little innocence and freedom left for children... pressure on places is becoming such that parents are beside themselves with anxiety to get their children into schools.” 

Earl Spencer told the Times he hated boarding and wanted to go to a state school (January 2015). He found his first boarding school cold and unpleasant, with a “terrifying headmaster”, military-style drill and a culture in which boys whose work was not up to standard were caned on their bare buttocks... “I was sleepless for six months before going. But it was the done thing, so off I went... straight into survival mode.” Those who couldn’t do moderately well at exams or sport “had an absolutely miserable time”.

So what's the point of it all?

The Head of Cheltenham Ladies College suggests that homework and prep are Victorian and stressful and should be banned. (June 2015)

The master of Wellington, Anthony Seldon, replies: We shouldn’t be shielding girls or boys from anxiety and stress – we should be helping them to cope with it because they are essential and inevitable in life. That’s the whole point of the wellbeing agenda. A lot of people don’t understand it. It is not about avoidance, it is about learning to cope with the inevitable things that life will throw at us. (There is always some reason why we should be cruel to children.)

Currently Westminster’s all-party parliamentary group on SOCIAL MOBILITY has published several excellent papers on CHARACTER AND RESILIENCE... noncognitive “soft skills – including DEFERRED GRATIFICATION, SELF-DISCIPLINE, APPLICATION, RESILIENCE AND REFLECTIVENESS...  As John M Doris points out, “discourse of character often plays against a background of social stratification and elitism”. (Obs April 2015)

Private schools don't have a monopoly on "character". They have a monopoly on power and privilege. (Sathnam Sanghera)

Tristram Hunt ... invoked Winston Churchill in his call for good character to be instilled at school: “Churchill was bang on when he said failure is not fatal, and it is the courage to continue that counts.” (Times Dec 2014)

Anthony Seldon also mentioned grit, resilience – and morality. “Every Monday at Wellington, two prefects remind pupils about the importance of values they have chosen: this week it was respect, courage, integrity and kindness. Entrusting this role to pupils not only gives them a sense of responsibility but also carries a greater weight with their peers. We set our pupils difficult challenges inside and outside the classroom. Reflection and self-awareness, helped by regular “mindfulness” sessions, are also part of the mix.”

Things that can’t be tested: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, question asking, humour, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership, compassion, courage, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, resourcefulness, spontaneity, humility. (This list went the rounds. Is this “character”? Or “moral compass”? Not much use if you can’t read and don’t know anything, or don’t know how to do anything. And they spelled it “enthusiasum”.)

Private schools need a constant intake of pupils (and their fees) to survive. If they can't do better in the league tables, they have to stress intangibles like the above, and pretend they are a unique selling point.


Be honest, what is the point of it all?

As Brooks (2008) notes ‘differences in the social composition of schools and colleges and their norms and practices can have considerable impact on the social capital available to young people and the resources upon which they can draw when making their decisions about higher education’. (Coming to Terms with Being a Working-Class Academic)

It isn’t about money, or class or anything but the style of education. (Telegraph Dec 2014 lies through its teeth.)

More here.

Classy Careers (and Money)

The wicker workshop was a great success

“I’ve made an almost vulgar amount of money.” James Braxton, Antiques Road Trip

The Antiques Roadshow “clumsily punctuates [the personal and historical] narrative with a judgment of exchange value”. (paulmullins.wordpress.com archaeology blog)

Hire-purchase rules were relaxed after the war – middle-class Upwards were furious. Here were common people getting what they wanted now (probably over-shiny furniture), instead of employing “deferred gratification” – something they are still very fond of. Access ("Takes the waiting out of wanting!") was one of the first widely available credit cards in the early 70s. The middle classes had another hissy fit. American Express, Diners Club and Barclaycard were different because exclusive.

Upwards and Weybridges used to be very shocked if you bought anything in a corner shop: “It’s so much more expensive than the supermarket!” And of course you can only buy chav food like Heinz salad cream and tinned steamed pudding. But it’s in walking distance, and I haven’t got a car, in fact I can’t drive, and I don’t need to do a huge weekly shop because I don’t have a husband and family... (“You haven’t got a car!!!” I think they stop talking to me at this point. Happy thought: filch a lot of Waitrose bags to carry the corner shop food. Or invite them to dinner and serve up spam fritters and spaghetti hoops.)

Is “artisanal” the new exclusive?

Latest middle-class careers: hand-make bespoke ordinary things like leather satchels, bicycles or fountain pens. I’m not sure how you’ll get organic materials into a bicycle – wooden pedals? Wicker basket? Hessian panniers? Is there a basket shop in East London called “The Wicker Man” yet?

Why don’t middle-class people open Internet cafés? For the same reason that they can’t learn to tap dance, act in musicals, or become estate agents. (Update: Internet cafés have largely gone now everyone has a smartphone.)

Is this the educational end-game: all children should aspire to pass exams, go to uni and get a white-collar job? Who’s going to do the blue-collar jobs? We need bus drivers, firemen, shop staff...

An Upward wrote in to the Guardian complaining that if schoolkids don’t learn French they’ll “have no knowledge of other cultures”. Reminds me of getting an Arts Council grant: with breathtaking culture-centrism, the form required us to promise we would “contact other cultures”. But Upwards can always send their children to an inner-city primary school - they'll contact many other cultures. Some of the pupils may even be French.

More careers here.
More money here.

Classy Schools and Careers

Only desperate pleading won Shirley Williams six months at the local primary school and a brief reprieve from boarding school. (LRB Dec 2013)

A world of nurseries and pinafores which felt like "the snuffing out of every spontaneous impulse". (Architect Alison Smithson on her Edwardian-style upbringing)

When he appointed me in 1988 John Major said me, him and the filing clerks were the only non-Oxbridge Treasury staff. (@PeterWanless)

Writer Tim Lott’s daughter doesn’t quite understand “that one only goes to a faith school in order to get better exam results, not to actually sign up for a medieval worldview.”

If anyone in the news went to public school, journalists are determined to make something of it. OK, with the government they’ve got a point, but David Walliams? Interviewer Robert Crampton of the Times marvelled that Matt Lucas, from a “deprived” background, was sunny and relaxed, while Walliams – who had been to a public school – admitted that his childhood hadn’t always been happy and he suffered from nerves and angst.

Upwards all think they should be a writer, artist, actor or musician. As talent is rare, they work “in the arts” or the media. If they can’t get a media job, and decide making their own chutney will never pay, they want to lead informative walks around London.

Without capital there was no means of making a start [as a novelist]. (Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Magic of My Youth, writing about the early 30s.)

Middle-class Upward parents are furious that after all their piano lessons, activities and private tutors their children are "obsessed by” pop culture heroes and heroines – who are working class kids who have achieved instant fame on a chav talent show. The pop culture heroines have probably put in gruelling years at stage school, or are naturally talented. But the Upward parents want to push the line that their kids must work hard 24/7 if they want to achieve anything.

Gap years are now too expensive (higher uni fees), also middle-class kids can’t afford to waste time. Instead they are going on mini-gaps of three months (as we used to before it all got so competitive).

Relatives will always ask young people at university “And what job does that qualify you for?”, but the Upwards still send their kids to uni to get a general education, while lower-middle-class Teales train as dog groomers and fantasy artists, or set up their own interior design practice. Working-class Definitelies become tattooists and nail technicians. Middle class kids become ballerinas, not dancers in musicals; conceptual artists, not fashion illustrators. In the 50s, they were never allowed to learn to tap dance.

Writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s husband got a job “issuing train tickets for the Lunn Poly travel agency. It was low-paid and menial, far below what either had expected: ‘I’m not going to pretend anything about my job,’ Edward says in [her novel] Offshore, as his wife realises ‘in terror’ that he will ‘never get anywhere’.” LRB Jan 2014

James Hawes’ typical character realizes that working hard and playing by the rules will never get him the family home in a nice area the middle-class children of the 70s took to be their due… the children of the rich he thought of as friends at university are from a world whose admission price he cannot afford. “You have to go and be an accountant or a schoolteacher.” [Now this character is as likely to be a young woman with] a degree that was next to worthless because so many of her contemporaries had one too. [If she wants to work in the media, she has to do work experience:] a refined version of slavery. (Waiting for the Etonians by Nick Cohen)

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