Art School: What I Did Next

So, what did I do next? After a rotten non-education at an expensive boarding school, I did another O Level and A Level at a tutoring establishment. And then I went to Camberwell art school in South London, aged 17.

From the age of about ten I’d been “going to art school”. My mother wanted me to relive her days at Chelsea Art School in the 30s and 40s, with boyfriends, parties, lunch at the Savoy and tea at the Ritz. 

When I was 15 or 16, she took me round to see friends from her art college days. I wore a frilly white blouse and a pink tweed pinafore dress she’d made me, and they were polite about my work. I was sent to talk to them on my own. I had nothing to say. At the official interview for Camberwell Art School they asked me what I read. I said “George Orwell and the Evening Standard”. I didn’t know I was supposed to say something like “Leonardo’s notebooks”. We were given a reading list before the first term and I got my parents to buy all the books (including Leonardo’s notebooks), and I read them. I loved Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and later wrote an essay based on it that impressed the tutors.  

We arrived for the first day bringing work we’d done in the summer holidays. The paintings were pinned up on a wall, and one of the staff critiqued them one by one. He was a small man with a beard and a sneery, nasal voice and was rude about every single painting. He was keen that we shouldn’t paint “cottages with roses round the door”. One student had been “looking at something to do with hobbits and Tolkien”. (She had an innovative technique and didn’t really need instruction from anybody. She’s now a psychotherapist.)

During the Foundation year we were at least given something to do, even if it was make-work. We were sent to the V&A to copy what we liked, and then we came back to a converted school and made collages from our drawings. The tutor in charge used to go to the pub at lunchtime and come back and harangue us and punch us painfully on the arm – especially the female students. There was a little tea bar run by elderly ladies, and a Victorian stove that we gathered round occasionally. Life wasn’t wonderful, but we had no idea how much worse it was going to get. 

There was a canteen and a library at the college, but no common room. Students from out of town were found a rented room nearby – though one girl was housed in faraway Sidcup. She referred to the college as “this place” in a fed-up voice and left after the first term – I don’t blame her. There were no evening activities, apart the occasional film screening – just lectures and more classes. (The college is now part of a university with halls and a campus.) 

We were set to draw from life, and make studies of plaster casts of antique sculpture. It was the fossil of an approach that had once made sense. In the 19th century and earlier, wannabe artists assembled their studies into theatrical scenes of life in Ancient Rome, Biblical episodes or dramatic moments from Shakespeare. Or, like William Powell Frith, vivid scenarios on railway stations or at race courses. It was also good training for creating book covers, adverts and magazine illustrations – all of which had just been taken over by photography. The rationale had gone, but artists still labelled their works "Study of a Head" – not "Portrait of Doris".

After the Foundation Year came the Painting Course. At first, I didn't get in, but I think my mother pulled strings again. I cried when I was told I'd failed – why? I was already disillusioned, tired and fed up. 

What kind of art were they expecting us to produce? The staff loved the Camden Town Group, Walter Sickert and his townscapes, or the works of William Coldstream and the Euston Road School. Social comment was out, and they loathed sentimentality. They expected us all (including 17-year-old girls) to live and paint as if we were 40-year-old men.

It was the late 60s, and the tutors were probably shuddering at memories of a genre that emerged when war artists, deprived of a subject, became embarrassingly mystical – see Evelyn Dunbar. Coldstream, and his follower and our teacher Euan Uglow (see picture), were both excellent painters, now rather forgotten. They left underdrawing and grids partly exposed, and reduced landscapes, still lives, fruit and people to flat planes and straight lines. 

We weren’t allowed to paint or draw anything we cared about. We weren’t allowed to make political statements, have opinions or convey emotion. We had to pretend people were no more interesting than a bunch of flowers or a cabbage. The tutors were keen on “objectivity” rather than “subjectivity”. They wanted us to look at what we were painting, not to make up what we thought it looked like. They hated anything “literary”, like the PreRaphaelites, who were having a moment. Paintings should be “painterly”. (I was delighted, a few years later, to read an article that called this a dead debate.) Other diktats? Don’t use a ruler, and “There’s no black in nature”. 

All the best artists have had a thing for pure black. (Christian Furr, Times 2019) 

The only portraits we were allowed to like were by Giacometti – ugly, unemotional. When we looked at art we weren’t allowed to comment on facial expressions or the story behind the picture.

Jane Rosenberg (court artist) trained in the 1970s, when figurative art was deeply unfashionable at art college. “Jane Rosenberg grew up on Long Island in New York and studied art at the University of Buffalo. It was the early 1970s and “abstract art was very in. My teachers always discouraged me from doing realism. They said it’s very passé.” She did it furtively. “I was a closet portrait artist. I would sit at home with a mirror and draw myself.” (Will Pavia, Times 2021)

They told us to “look at the work of X”, which meant “copy X because he’s someone we approve of”. They would never talk about painting techniques, or admit that you could just pick a method and try it. You might go for “squared, interwoven brushstrokes,” as art historian Richard Morris describes. Or you could “block in your masses and then add detail”, like any Victorian painter.

They wanted us to decide on some subject matter (only ever referred to dismissively as “the image” – we were probably meant to select it for purely formal reasons), come up with a technique, and produce a body of work which would be judged at the end of three years. But they never told us any of this. And it required us to decide on a course of action, and have the discipline to carry it out. I'd never done anything like that in my life. What's more, all the education they'd given us so far had been about process, not product.

Nobody mentioned that being an artist was a career, a profession or even a trade. The idea that anybody might buy our work was not on the table. My mother recalled that in her day they were taken on trips round art galleries to see what sold! These days students get seminars on marketing and being taken up by a gallery. (Start a movement, get in the papers.)

I worked on paper because I didn’t have a choice. I had no carpentry skills, had tried to make stretchers but failed miserably. Canvas was out. So were wood or Masonite panels: too heavy, expensive, large, and I didn’t know how to cut them. (Jerry Saltz, artist and art critic) 

We were all, including the girls, expected to hammer together and stretch canvases 6 foot by 6 foot. The only other option was to buy pieces of hardboard from a local wood yard where they'd cut them for you, but this was looked down on. We were supposed to go out drawing carrying paper pinned to a heavy board. We couldn’t do anything on a small scale unless on the Graphics course (it used to be called Commercial Art). We were told to buy a certain kind of portfolio – huge, heavy, cardboard, with no carrying handles. Small girls couldn’t even get an arm round them. On the first day we were advised against “some kind of plastic contraption” – light, with handles. In fact the tutors treated all students as if they were men. And then girls were marked down because their work was too small. I’ve thought this was unfair for 50 years. A student called Terry used house paint in buckets and created a vast painted surface several inches thick. I wonder what happened to him? (He brought in a pig's head and hung it up and painted it. (One day someone put a tape recorder in its mouth that played a laugh track on repeat as the head turned slowly in the air. I tried telling people about this, but they were theatrically uninterested.)

Another favourite was Julia, who worked in thin layers that she constantly overpainted, leaving some of the under-layers showing. Catherine created Abstract Expressionist studies of erupting volcanoes, and Debbie painted mantelpieces and their contents. She wrote up in her cubicle “You can change your life. Rilke”. I thought: “How ridiculous, of course you can’t.” 

For the first few weeks of the painting course we were set to depict Platonic solids (square, sphere, cone, pyramid) and meaningless containers: boxes, milk bottles, wine bottles – in grisaille, i.e. shades of grey. It was an exercise so dull and devoid of human interest that some students got fed up and left. Perhaps that was the intention. Many had sensibly gone back to Bolton after the first year. 

After the grisaille exercise we were each given a cubicle and pretty much left alone. There was no more need to collaborate with each other – or talk to each other. We worked in silence. If we chatted, we were shushed. There was no banter.

Once they stopped setting us exercises I had no idea what I was meant to do. It didn't help that we'd been told that "introspection is morbid". We weren't used to asking ourselves if we were happy, and if not, what to do about it.

We each had a tutor of our own and met with him from time to time. Mine decided that I was an upper-class party girl and was more interested in socialising and boyfriends than doing any work. I couldn’t disagree because I was so shy I couldn’t talk to adults. I must have seemed completely uninterested. Did he ever wonder what I was doing there?

He must have assumed that I knew that we were supposed to decide on a practice and a subject, and produce a body of work that would be assessed in three years' time. His job was probably to discuss my plans with me, and look for some kind of development or progress in technique and process. This is really the key. He must have thought I couldn't possibly be that naive – something that happened quite frequently later in my life. (People assumed I was lying, and tried to work out why, probably invoking Freud.)

We weren't given projects or tasks, or set to learn anything. Our Art History seminars were just discussions. Few facts were imparted, and no historical background. We were shown pictures and expected to respond. There was an older German student whose response to everything was, "Well, it's very graphic". I just had no idea what to do with myself all day. On the bus there and back, I read Lord of the Rings, the Gormenghast Trilogy, and Cecil Sharp's collection of Appalachian folk tunes.

Update: I've just remembered I used to illustrate those grim Appalachian ballads in black ink in small sketchbooks. One of the tutors even said "It's a nice little book". At least it showed I was doing something.

But I felt a complete failure: the glittering social life hadn’t happened, I’d never had a boyfriend, and I felt I had no friends. Over one Easter holiday I deliberately gave up hope that I’d ever have either. It was painful. But I did have friends – Penny, Liz, Sarah, Joan, Gillian, Catherine and Pam, a nice girl from Liverpool who liked CS Lewis and got married in a white lace catsuit.

Perhaps class had something to do with it. In the first year, the boys never talked to me or my friends. If they looked at us at all it was with an expressionless, unblinking stare. Were they put off by our accents? Or by our shapeless, paint-stained clothes? 

I burned out. Living in a bedsit didn’t help, either. I hated walking along streets alone. I couldn’t make the effort any more. I stopped speaking to people, so naturally nobody spoke to me. I thought life would be like that for ever. By the end, I only spoke in seminars. They were the only bearable part of the experience.

And I was deeply, deeply ashamed of never having had a boyfriend. It was the reason I couldn't get in touch with friends from school any more. This went on for years.

When not in a bedsit, I lived with my parents. From Day One, they never asked me what the other students were like, what I had done that day, who were my friends. At boarding school or university, their children were out of sight, out of mind – but they continued this policy when I was right there, day after day. I didn’t talk about my day-to-day life to anyone. 

And after being at boarding school from age 10, this was my first try at creating a social life from scratch. Nobody had told me it might be hard. The students from Bolton had gone to local schools and had at least grown up with a bunch of friends, but middle-class children were always being sent off to cope with new situations entirely on their own, without any briefing or debriefing. And hang on a minute – my mother had known me all my life. I’d always been painfully shy – why did she think I’d suddenly turn into a social butterfly?

Years later I bumped into Charlie, a fellow student, and compared notes. One night he was so desperate he walked home from his bedsit to Surrey. I used to walk to college to reduce the hours I had to spend there. Louie walked out of London just to see if she could escape. (She left and went to America.) 

We weren’t used to taking an audit, wondering if we were happy, and if not why not. On rare occasions, we tentatively shared our feelings, but we had no idea what to do about it. We were 18 or 19. It was the late 60s, we were supposed to be achieving bliss. 

Eventually I too decided to leave. But I didn’t dare tell my parents – I was back living with them. For a whole term, I left the flat in the morning, and came home in the evening, pretending I was still at college. I trekked long distances, went to free galleries, took long bus rides, read. One day I bumped into one of the teachers. He said: “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” I said: “I’ve been wanting to talk to you too”. So we made a date and looked at my pathetic “work”, which he disparaged severely. But we agreed it would be best if I left. However, I couldn’t just walk out – I had to endure an excruciating official exit process, which included laying all my productions on the floor in front of a committee of sneering men with beards. I deliberately dressed badly, with dirty hair, a too-small green dress and magenta lipstick. Nobody could think what else I might do apart from “get a job as an au pair”. They probably hadn't wanted to intervene because they thought I was no use for anything.

It was the first decision about my life that I’d ever made for myself and I had no idea what else I wanted to do. My parents were devastated and outraged. They could no longer tell their friends I was “doing a course”. They didn’t have a Plan B. They used to shout at me until I cried. They tried to bully me into going back: “You’ve got to get a qualification!” Well, I wouldn’t have got it. And you can get other qualifications. We didn’t research other colleges or other subjects. We never looked at college brochures or the UCCA book of colleges and courses – I didn’t know they existed and apparently neither did they. They didn’t consult their friends. There’d been no careers advice at school – we were all expected to marry young. Apart from me.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. I'd never been required to think about it before. If I thought about it at all, I thought it would be just as bad anywhere else. I didn’t know how to work out how to do anything. I didn’t know you had to work out what needed to be done. It didn’t occur to me that it was me who had to work it out, or do it. (Though I had managed to leave art school, all on my own.)

I used to see the London College of Printing from the top of the bus, but I never got off, went in and asked what they taught there. I didn't know how. I passed a street market on my bus journey, too, but I never went to it. I only broke my journey to go to the second-hand comic shop. Early on in the ordeal, my mother and I went to the Royal School of Needlework to buy embroidery supplies. I briefly thought: "I might be happier here. I'd be surrounded by girls and I could wear nice, clean clothes every day." But then the thought vanished, and I could barely think at all. Likewise I used to pass the Regent Street Polytechnic opposite the BBC – there were always foreign students standing on the steps. I had a year in hand, I could have done the A Levels that the Convent only pretended to teach (Biology and Geography).

But actually, I’d told my parents I wanted to leave, more than once. They just wouldn’t listen. And afterwards, they rationalised what had happened as “She left art school because she’s lazy and didn’t want to do any work”, not “She left because she was miserable and lonely and sending an 18-year-old to live alone in a bedsit is maybe not such a great idea”. Other parents might have explained it as a “breakdown”. And you know, I think they’d have been right.

But my parents weren’t just furious because they didn’t know what to do with me, or worried that I might never live independently, they were mortified that I hadn’t had a glittering social life, and more importantly had never had a boyfriend. I might be on their hands for good. 

And in fact they had noticed something was wrong. My father said: "You leave late and come back early. We're worried about you – you don't seem to have any friends. You tend to cut yourself off from people." But by that time I couldn't reply, I was too miserable. I was convinced it was the other people who cut themselves off from me. And I've just (2024) realised that they hadn't suddenly noticed, suddenly become worried. They had been worried about me almost from from the start. They just hadn't said anything to me.

In the end they sent me to secretarial college and I learned shorthand and typing which turned out to be extremely useful when I became a journalist in the 80s (I even recycled that Kandinsky essay). There was a basement where we hung out at lunchtime and between classes. This is where I say, like so many actors who were bullied at school, "And then I discovered I could make people laugh". I didn't know people wanted to laugh, but fortunately they do. I liked learning shorthand and reading Sherlock Holmes translated into Pitman's. 

But as a family we just never mentioned art school again. I’ve never talked about the people I knew there. I’ve never really talked about it to anybody (apart from Charlie) – those years were just assumed not to have happened. They didn’t count. They weren’t part of my life story. But as my sister said a lot later: “People have dropped out of college and changed course before – why did they behave as if someone had died?” 

Who had died? The person they thought I was going to become – despite all evidence to the contrary. But they thought childhood didn’t count – you developed on the caterpillar, pupa, butterfly principle and your life began when you left school.

There had never been any suggestion I should go to university. But when my sister went, a few years later, she told me: “You could do it – there are people here who are stupider than you!” She gave me the UCCA guide to courses. I’d never even read the Floodlight directory of London evening classes, which was on sale in every newsagent. (UCCA is now UCAS: the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.) And hang on, why didn't the tutors at Camberwell hand me the UCCA book and suggest I look for a course that might suit me? All my parents said was: "But there must be something you want to do."

I eventually looked up classes in Floodlight, did Art History A Level in six months (it was a year’s course), got an A and went to university. Because I’d worked for three years or more, I got a grant. (Nina Stibbe in Love, Nina went through the same process, finding out about grants through word of mouth. Perhaps “they” didn’t want to advertise this loophole too widely. See also Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy not knowing there was a comedy scene, or that he ought to submit a recording of his act to the show he wanted to be on.) 

I probably could have made it sooner – but then I wouldn’t have got the grant. And it took several years to get over the idea that I would never have friends. I wish I could apologise to those nice people who probably wondered why I wouldn’t hang out with them any more. I had no idea that they needed me as much as I needed them.

One of the Camberwell students moved to Goldsmiths College to do conceptual art. He told us it was the coming thing and the Camberwell approach was as dead as the dodo. He was right – their approach and the painters they revered went sharply out of fashion, and were only welcomed back recently. I started painting and making art again about 20 years ago. I think my old teachers might quite like my stuff. 

More about a privileged education here, and links to the rest.

Boarding Schools 3

I went to a fee-paying convent school. I'm privileged. Thanks to the Old Girl network, doors opened for me throughout my life – or so people like to think.

We had a dinner monitor I didn't get on with – let's call her Deirdre – who struggled to keep us in line. One day we were playing up and she told me to take my elbow off the table, so I put it on my plate. She must have reported me to higher authority, because I was told my punishment was to eat with the older girls at the top table, for the rest of the term. They were much bigger than me and I was terrified of them. So I didn't turn up to meals - not even tea, where you could sit anywhere. I don't remember even drinking a glass of water. After 24 hours of this I was summoned by the Head Nun.

She turned on the charm and held my hand and persuaded me that I had to sit at the top table - I couldn't go on not eating. It was as horrible as I'd foreseen, and none of the top-tablers spoke a single word to me. (They might have been kind, don't you think? Especially after all that propaganda about the most important virtue being Charity.)

My mother met the parents of some schoolfriends and their immediate response was: "Lucy! Hunger strike!" It was the first she'd heard of it and she was mortified. She was still telling the story in her 80s – but it was always a story about her being embarrassed.

The school hadn't told my parents. And nobody ever said, "Actually, what was she being punished for?" She put her elbow on her plate.

To the nuns, this was disobedience, and nobody in the Catholic Church disobeyed. There was a chain of command right down from the Pope. And so I got a reputation, and eventually was expelled aged 16, mainly for making the Head Nun look a fool. That's another story. It wasn't difficult.

When I didn't turn up to lunch or dinner, nobody came after me. Nobody was sent to find me. One friend smuggled me some food, but I wouldn't eat it. I couldn't explain why. I wish I'd kept it up for longer - they'd have had to do something! Ring my parents, call the doctor, put me in the infirmary.

How did my behaviour appear to them? Just as a direct refusal to obey an order. It didn't matter what they were telling me to do, or why. And they never asked me my reasons or said another word about it. And it wasn't just that I defied them - it was so public. They couldn't be seen to lose, or to give ground.

In the end I ceased to believe in the concept of authority. As Falstaff said, it's just a word.
I rebelled in other ways – after a couple of years I never went to "games". But nobody said anything to me about it. We sometimes used to take off for whole days and our absence must have been noticed. Again, no reaction. And they were supposed to be looking after us.

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Childcare

Poor little mites

Upwards think they are excused having children who behave like children.

Middle classes of all stripes despise babies’ dummies.

If children are “resilient” we can be as cruel as we like to them and it won’t matter. And there's always some reason why we should be cruel to them:

Thomas Mann justified spoiling his eldest child over his 5 others with the line, "One should get the children used to injustice early." (AdamNathanielFurman @Furmadamadam)

The Fortean Times ran a piece on the abusive way the Greeks and Romans raised their children. Someone commented: “No wonder the Romans were cold, callous, sexually precocious and impulsive.” (Paraphrase.)

Middle class parents have a strange impulse to teach very very small children “how to grow their own crops” (and try unfamiliar foods, know where food comes from, eat with a knife and fork, manage risk, say please and thank you, understand money, and generally behave like a middle-aged adult). They really do wring their hands over the fact that “children today don’t know where food comes from”. It comes from the supermarket, you noodle. But they have to reinvent children + food x angst = guilt every few months so that they can keep ahead of the other parents. Turning up at parties with boxes of unsweetened vegan food which are all that poor little Milo is allowed to eat is sooooo five minutes ago.

David Cameron said we need “tiger mothers” to encourage children to study, and “character” modules to teach children “resilience” and “perseverance”.

Letter to Times Jan 2016-01-14
Sir, Whatever happened to having supportive parents? Mine were supportive and encouraging, and I seemed to turn out all right. Tiger parenting does not help children as adults: it usually results in low self-esteem, failure to cope when life doesn’t go right and an inability to be independent. What happens when children fail to meet David Cameron’s “high expectations”? Tiger parenting is a short-term solution to the long-term raising of a child. Bronwyn Molony, Dublin

Even during the holidays I saw very little of them: They would be in another part of the house while I would stay upstairs... My mother hardly ever came to my attic floor, but I could hear her running her bath... my world was the staff. They were my only friends. (Redeeming Features, Nicky Haslam on his “privileged” childhood in a stately home)

As a new biography of Evelyn Waugh is published (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited), a former Times theatre critic tells the story of the novelist’s first wife, his mother, Evelyn Nightingale (Times June 2016)

Her troubles began with her birth in Charles Street, Mayfair, in 1903, since she was meant to be a boy and heir to a new title in danger of becoming extinct... She was the last of four daughters.

As she always said, it was a different era with different ideas about upbringing, yet seldom can a girl have been so neglected. Evelyn never went to school but was semi-educated by a series of mostly German governesses, one of whom, she recalled, stuck pins in her arms if she rested them on the table. And she seldom saw her father, who died when she was 17, remembering a benignly aloof figure...

But then she was kept away from him by a mother she found terrifying. “One could never explain one’s presumed misdemeanours because the words froze in one’s mouth or didn’t get as far as freezing,” she wrote in an informal memoir many years later, adding that Lady Winifred never came into the nursery or schoolroom. “There were no goodnights, loving or otherwise, or prayers being heard at bedtime.”

Her greatest friends, she wrote, were the servants, who were “kindly and understanding”, though she was forbidden to play with their children. And her greatest love was for her nanny, a tiny, gentle woman who was sacked when Evelyn was seven...

[In her own words:] I felt “as it were in a cage with no knowledge of the world or the real behaviour of others.”

[She became a Bright Young Thing – no wonder they were so aimless and self-destructive and amoral. After her two divorces, her sister cut her off almost entirely.]

The four Johnson children mostly just had each other. They read constantly. Rachel can’t remember any playdates. It sounds as if the parenting regime was one of benign neglect, which is perhaps why all the Johnsons so crave attention now. “Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives,” is how she puts it. (Times on Rachel Johnson, June 2015)

Middle class neglect is always called “benign neglect”. There’s nothing benign about it.

It’s a Tory trope at the moment that children must be taught to “take responsibility”, otherwise they’ll grow up to be “victims”. Apparently there are no perpetrators, only people who think they are victims, when actually their plight is ENTIRELY their own fault. (If this is true, why aren’t assault victims prosecuted and sent to jail, while their attackers go free? And when someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff, why don’t you just turn yourself in?)


More here.

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.