SOME SUGGESTIONS: THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO MORALS
The ardent idealists with their thousand pretty schemes for the
regeneration of mankind, find no difficulty in allotting a few panaceas
to the Public School. We hear of the 'new world' and of the 'new
spirit,' and there is glib talk about the phoenix and the ashes. A few
laws have to be passed, a few peasants educated and there will be an end
of competition. 'The strong will support the weak, the clever work
unselfishly for the general good. Wealth and intellect will be placed at
the service of the state. The relations of the sexes will be ordered by
eugenics.'
It is all very jolly, and unless to-day one subscribes unfalteringly to
this belief in a new world, one is called a reactionary and a
materialist. The millennium, we are told, is round the corner. The
finest intellects of thirty centuries may have failed to find it, but
the farm labourer has only to spend a few half-hours with an English
grammar to discover it at his feet. It must be very nice to believe all
that, to be able to comfort oneself in dark moments with the assurance
that for one's children's children life will be a happy hunting ground.
It must be a drug more potent than laudanum, more sweet than hashish.
But it is of small avail in the dust and traffic of humanity. In the
case of the Public Schools we shall do well to examine what is at hand
and prescribe what cures we may, without the indulgence of distant
speculation.
The four main objects of criticism, then, are the moral question, the
evil of athleticism, the false scale of values that is inculcated at a
Public School, and the subsequent conspiracy of silence. On the moral
question the advanced idealists have talked more and to less purpose
than on any other phase of school life. They have written of the
discovery of the soul, of the unfolding of the flower. They have
maintained that through art and literature the boy's emotional nature
will be directed to a higher, a nobler conception of life. The
psycho-analyst speaks of 'sublimation,' and they have fastened on to
this cliché. Was not this what they had been saying so long, in other
words--the sublimation of the sexual impulse?
Now, in the case of a celibate priest or a maiden lady it is, no doubt,
highly desirable and perhaps possible to sublimate an impulse which has
been and in all probability will be, denied natural satisfaction. But it
is a pretty hopeless job to sublimate an impulse that has every hope and
prospect of complete, direct, and natural realisation; and that is the
task that the advocates of flowers and poetry and the dawn have set
themselves. If we are to change the moral tone of a Public School we
shall have to find either an alternative system, or we shall have to
modify in some way the existing system.
Two alternatives are offered: co-education and the day school. In
neither case should immorality be general or serious, and the number of
romantic friendships correspondingly slight. It seems hardly possible
that a normal healthy boy would be attracted by a smaller boy when, at a
school like Bedales, he would be constantly in the company of young and
charming scholars. And though the day boarder lives for the greater part
of his day in a monastic society, he spends the majority of his spare
time outside it. And during the week-ends he has full opportunity to
continue any romance on which he may have embarked during the previous
holidays. Although it is only possible for me to speak here from
second-hand information, it can be assumed, I think, that at the
co-educational and day school the moral question must sink to
comparative unimportance. It has to be considered, however, whether this
relegation compensates for the consequent disadvantages.
Co-education is, of course, a new game, and it is difficult to write of
it with confidence. At a lecture that I gave about three years ago, a
young woman rose from the back of the hall and asked 'what Mr. Waugh
thought about co-education?' I had, as a matter of fact, thought about
it very little, but I felt that I could hardly confess as much. I said,
therefore, something about 'co-education being excellent for delicate
and sensitive boys who would find Public Schools too rough for them.'
The young woman then indignantly demanded what the girls had done to
deserve the companionship of only delicate and sensitive boys. It was an
unanswerable protest, but having since then thought the matter over more
carefully, I believe that, if the same question were put to me to-day I
should make the same reply. It may be that such a reply would be based
only on prejudice and a preconceived idea. But, after all, the evil that
one knows is better than the evil that one does not know. And who would
wish away his school days.
If you were to ask a small boy of thirteen whether he would prefer to go
to Uppingham or Bedales, he would promptly reply 'Uppingham.' If, two
years later, you were to say to him: 'Would you rather have gone to
Bedales than Uppingham?' he would reply: 'Lord, no.' If at the end of
his last term, when it was all over, you were to ask him whether he
regretted his choice, he would say: 'Good God, no!' And, twenty years
afterwards, when the time had come for him to decide where he should
send his son, were you to ask him yet again: 'Bedales or Uppingham?' he
would reply without hesitation, 'Uppingham.'
Why, after all, should he depart from an old allegiance. He knows
nothing of Bedales, nothing of the troubles and adversities that his son
will have to face there. He will be unable to help him, he will be
denied that greatest privilege of fatherhood, the unquestioning trust
of the son who knows that his father has trod every inch of the way
before him. Father and son rarely come so close to one another as they
do during those five years at a Public School. They are living
practically the same life; the father finds his lost youth in the son.
Is it likely that he will abandon such a certainty for a supposed and
uncertain good. The public school system was formed round certain
distinct traits in the British character. It is the expression of the
national temperament. Nearly every one is happy at a Public School. It
is the manner of life that we enjoy, that is in sympathy with our tastes
and customs. The reformers may say what they will. You cannot turn a dog
from the food it loves. This attitude to co-education may be illogical,
it may be prejudiced, it may be reactionary--I do not know. One can only
restate the fact that we are content to be old-fashioned people.
The case of the day school cannot be so summarily dismissed. At a first
sight indeed it appears to possess all the advantages and none of the
disadvantages of a Public School. A boy acquires _esprit de corps_, but
is saved from wild partisanship. He strengthens the qualities of courage
and independence as fully as he would at a Public School, and the home
influence is maintained. His moral lapses, if any, are likely to be
occasioned by the attractions of the other sex. My friend, Mr. Oscar
Browning, has indeed often assured me that the day school is the only
possible solution of the difficulty, and in a symposium on the English
Public Schools he wrote that 'House rivalries and the overwhelming
importance of house matches cannot exist in day schools where boys live
with their families, nor is school life likely to be so communal.' Many
other educational authorities, whose testimony one must respect, have
expressed their faith in day schools. Certainly the claim of the day
school must be carefully examined. And it is with diffidence that I
approach the task.
At most boarding schools the day boy is looked down upon. For some
obscure reason the day boy always seems to be inferior to the boarder.
He is rarely prominent in games or work. One ceases, indeed, to regard
him as a member of the school. He comes into form, he writes his prose,
he attends corp parade, he plays his games. But, at six o'clock, when
the bell rings for tea and the intimate life of the day begins, he
collects his books and hurries across the courts and passes into another
life.
The period between lock-up and lights out is in retrospect the most
charming part of the day. The troubles of the day are over. Lessons have
to be prepared in prep., but they will not be heard till the next
morning. Time enough to worry about that after breakfast. It is after
tea that one packs twelve people into a study measuring eight feet by
four and discusses the prospects of the house in the Two Cock, the
'latest case,' and Evans's chance of getting into the Fifteen. Prep. is
but a pause in the discussions of these momentous trivialities. After
prayers there is an hour in which to brew coffee and renew the
endlessly attractive conversation. These are the times of friendship and
good feeling, and they are lost to the day boarder. Like the new boy, he
is outside the life of the school. He moves in a different environment;
he has different interests, he cannot enter into the eager loyalties and
aversions of house politics. In a school such as Clifton, where there
are a large number of day boys, the position is, of course, different.
The day boy there occupies a definite social status. Instead of being
attached to a house for games, he is grouped into that sector of the
town in which he happens to live. His friends are leading much the same
life as he is. But it can scarcely be denied that the day boarder loses
a great deal of the charm of a communal life.
What does he gain to compensate for that loss?
He is protected to a large extent from the moral lapses peculiar to a
Public School. He will develop through normal channels. Though, as he
will in chapel and in his school listen to addresses that are based on
the accepted official attitude, it is a little doubtful whether he will
find himself in this respect much more satisfactorily educated than the
boarder. At any rate he should be saved the disquieting experiences of a
romantic friendship, and he will be less of a slave to the partisanship
and house feeling. But does he gain anything else?
We hear a great deal about the value of home influence, but what does
home mean for the day boy? He rushes home at the end of the day, has
his tea, and then settles down to prepare his lessons. By the time he
has finished them it is time for him to go to bed. He has had little
opportunity for talking either to his father or his mother. In the
morning he has only time to rush his breakfast and hurry off to school.
It must be remembered also that the parents who send their sons to day
schools are usually not particularly well off. It is one thing to come
home at the end of a hard day to the quiet seclusion of a warm and cosy
study where everything will be quiet and undisturbed. It is another
thing to come back to a house that is making strenuous efforts to get
things straight before the master of the house returns. Middle-aged
business men expect to find things made snug for them; they do not want
schoolboys kicking about the place at the end of the day.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than breakfast in the average suburban
family. There is the flutter over the post, the opening and shutting of
the paper, the constant glances at the clock. There is a banging of
doors, and running up of stairs, and the shouting over banisters. A sigh
of relief is heard when the front door closes behind the wage-earner.
In a large, well-run house the domestic machinery moves so smoothly that
it is unnoticed. In a small suburban villa these moments of arrival and
departure provide constant friction, and it is from the small suburban
villa that the majority of day boarders are recruited.
In consequence the day boy starts his day's work at a disadvantage. It
is like playing a cricket match on an opponent's ground. One arrives a
little jaded. The boarder is on the spot. He has twenty-five minutes'
leisure between chapel and breakfast. It is possible, of course, that he
will pass these twenty-five minutes in a feverish attempt to prepare the
'con' for which he had been allotted an hour on the time-table of the
previous night. But that is his own fault. He has every chance of
starting the day fresh.
I cannot think that the rush of getting off in the morning and the
journey to school can be good for a boy of fifteen. It is a strain for a
full-grown man. That twenty minutes' jolt in tubes and lifts is
exhausting. No one arrives at the office perfectly fresh. By the time
one gets back at night one is really tired. The tube journey at the end
of a hard day completes one's weariness. And on top of that weariness
the day boarder has to do an hour and a half's preparation. It is not
the ideal setting for successful work.
The day boy is also leading two lives at the same time. He cannot shut
them away in watertight compartments. They overlap. It is, no doubt, for
the business man a great privilege and a great relief to be able to
return at the end of the day to a quiet evening in his wife's company.
But then he has not got to work at home, and work implies friction. The
worker wants an absence of outside influences. He wants the company of
quiet folk who make no particular demands on his energy and patience,
with whom his relations are superficial and for whom he does not
particularly care.
Many writers make a failure of marriage because they put their study too
near their nursery. The imaginative worker wants to be alone, not only
while he is working, but for an hour before he starts working and for an
hour after he has finished working. In many ways the army is the ideal
career for a writer. He can do his two hours' writing after tea, have
his bath and change, and go down to the ante-room, where he can read his
paper quietly and chat superficially with people who make no demands on
him. Wherever there is an intimate relationship there is friction. The
proper adjustment of his work to his personal life is the most delicate
task a man has to tackle. It is beyond the compass of a small boy. For
the very reason that a boy loves his parents there will be friction; a
strain will be placed, that is to say, upon his energy and patience. The
boarder has fewer worries and, in consequence, is happier than the day
boy.
The advocates of 'home influence' must also remember that the day boy
takes his home for granted. We cannot appreciate the value of anything
till we have either lost it, or become separated from it. Home means a
great deal to the boarder. Holidays mark for him a complete change of
life, to the day boy holidays mean little save the pleasurable cessation
of certain irksome duties. He can stay in bed longer in the morning, he
has not got to hurry his breakfast, a free day lies in front of him. He
will not have to waste his time over Latin Prose and Thucydides. During
the term-time he has, except during week-ends, very few opportunities of
intimate conversation with his parents, and because he has come to
regard their presence as a natural environment he does not, during the
holidays, make, as the boarder does, special efforts to see as much of
them as possible. The influence of a place need be no more effective
because one happens to live in it than the influence of a person because
one happens to be in his, or her, company. It depends on the value set
on the place or person. The boarder values his home more highly than the
day boy. The influence of home is more likely to be felt by him than by
the day boy. Letters from home are an event in the boarder's life. They
mean more than a walk on Sunday morning, and the hours are counted to
the half-term visit.
The day boy also comes far less into contact with masters than the
boarder does. Indeed the head master of a school can only have a
superficial knowledge of the boys that are entrusted to him. He sees
them in the form room and on the cricket field. But he does not watch
the development of the boy's character through his reactions towards and
away from the intrigues, romances, and jealousies of house politics.
There is no constant theme, only a few uncertain _motifs_. The head
master has not sufficient material upon which to work. The discovery of
so many clues is denied to him. Every boy at some time or other must
pause and wonder how much his head master really knows about him. It is
a subject, for most of us, of disquieting conjecture. But the day boy
can dismiss it with an easy conscience. School for him is a place in
which he works and plays, but does not live. Indeed he is a child of no
man's land, passing between two countries, a true citizen of neither.
There are those who say that parents are the only people who understand
their children, and will maintain that it is criminal to take young boys
away from their parents at an impressionable age and place them in
charge of schoolmasters who can know nothing about them. But parents
are, as a matter of fact, as likely to make mistakes as any one else.
We find in anything what we bring to it. And parents expecting their
sons to be brave, truthful, obedient, clever, find them so. An outside
opinion is of extreme value, and a house master or a head master is the
ideal person to give it. When a house master and a father meet on equal
grounds and discuss the son's welfare honestly, the auspices could
hardly be more fortunate. They so rarely meet, because parents and
schoolmasters do not trust each other, because they have adopted the
false position of buyer and seller; the combination remains, however,
none the less ideal.
I do not myself see what advantages the day school possesses over the
boarding school, save those that are concerned with a particular facet
of morality, and beyond the weakening of a partisanship that is inclined
to put a boy in blinkers. There are some very fine day schools in the
country, but the day school, especially of recent years, has tended to
become an alternative for parents with large families who cannot afford
to send their sons to expensive boarding schools. And, after all, the
suggestion that day schools should be generally substituted for boarding
schools is obviously impracticable.
Many of the finest Public Schools are situated in remote parts of the
country, others in small towns that were once honoured with a monastery.
How are these venerable institutions to be converted into day schools. A
few retired colonels might possibly form a colony in Shoreham and send
their sons to Lancing. A convenient train would take them to Brighton,
where they might walk on the promenade and recall the reckless
adventures of their youth. But civilisation draws us to big towns for
our livelihood. However much the stockbroker might wish to send his son
as a day boarder to Shrewsbury, he would find it quite impossible to do
so. The town of Shrewsbury would provide no scope for his activities. He
could not possibly settle there. A scheme that would involve the
complete alteration of the public school system can only be called a
revolution. A reformer has to work on his existing material. He cannot
say--wash it out and start again. He cannot put back the clock.
Mr. Oscar Browning has said that when he went to Eton in 1851 only five
schools could lay claim to the dignity of being called a Public School.
There must be at least fifty first-class Public Schools to-day; they are
nearly all boarding schools, and every few years a comparatively unknown
school proves itself a worthy competitor to older foundations. It is not
the slightest use to say, even if we believed it, that day schools are
better than boarding schools and leave the matter there. A politician
might with equal ability draw up an elaborate defence of the feudal
system. It may very well be that we should be all more happy if we could
reconstruct society on a feudal basis: we might just as well express a
belief that our efficiency would be increased were a kindly providence
to dower us with wings. It may be, though I doubt it, that the advocates
of the day school are in the right, that under such a system of
education immorality and the blood system would pass. But it is for us
to discover some method by which the existing system may be so modified
as to produce of itself the required change.
Now it is very tempting for a controversialist, when he has completed
the arraignment of his enemies, to slip hastily over the policy he
himself proposes to adopt. I wonder how many letters have been addressed
to the press during the last seven years in which the writer, having
stated in strong terms the calamities to which a certain line of thought
or policy has reduced the country, has demanded in a final paragraph
that 'something should be done before it is too late.' He suggests
perhaps a 'change of spirit.'
It is a good weapon that 'change of spirit.' We can all of us, when
occasion demands, indulge in spirited invective; we can all detect
numberless flaws and inequalities in the existing social system. Why,
for instance, does our income run to three instead of to four figures.
Why are we paying away a third of that small sum in income-tax? The flow
of indignation is swift, and by the time we have written our 950 words,
it is not hard to devote the remaining '50' to a general appeal for
'some one to do something before it is too late.' Every contributor to
the press has saved his argument like that some time or another. And, in
the case of Public Schools, the trouble is that we can do little save
repeat the parrot cry of 'a change of spirit.' For it is 'a change of
spirit' more than anything else that is needed.
We are kept wondering, however, how that change is to be effected. S. P.
B. Mais used to say that 'Literature would save us.' But literature is
only a part of life, one channel of self-expression, and in the case of
Mr. Mais one is troubled by the knowledge that he, himself, is in many
ways the ideal schoolmaster. He has a genius for teaching. He happens to
have taught literature and mathematics, and because he taught them so
successfully he has imagined that they are the panacea. He is too modest
to realise any subject that he taught would have assumed the qualities
of a panacea, that it was he and not his subject that was important. He
could rouse his form, if he wished, to a high pitch of enthusiasm by a
lecture on the properties of Cherry Boot Polish. But 'he is alone, the
Arabian Bird.'
Martin Browne suggests religion. And, no doubt, for the truly religious
boy many of the difficulties of school life would be smoothed out.
Unfortunately, however, religion plays, and will play, a small part in a
boy's life at school. A boy has been told to believe certain things by
his parents, and he has accepted these beliefs unquestioningly and
without enthusiasm. They have not been tested by experience. They are
not real to him. Religion, in its truest form, rises out of the conflict
of a man's life. Faith is subconscious thought. I do not think you can
expect the average small boy to be deeply influenced by religion. His
religion, if he has one, is an unswerving devotion to his house and
school. He would be ready to sacrifice himself for what he considered to
be the school's service.
Forty years ago a captain of my old house died after a kick on the head
received in the Three Cock, the big house match of the year. The brass
on the chapel wall which is dedicated to his memory,--
'Te duce, care Puer, pueri cum lusimus olim
Optimus in cursu quem sequeremur eras
Caelestem exacto tetigisti limite metam;
Fratribus ab, fratrem detur ad astra sequi.'
appealed far more to our imagination than the story of early martyrs.
Action rather than contemplation is the essence of school life.
I am aware that many will disagree with this assertion. Both Martin
Browne and Jack Hood made in their books a great point of religious
teaching and early confirmation, but I cannot help feeling that in this
respect they are exceptional; certainly if they had not been exceptional
they would not have written books; religion has meant a lot to them, and
they feel that it should do the same for others. It is a mistake we all
make in our different spheres. The poet thinks he will reform the world
by placing the poems of Shelley in the hands of trade union officials;
and the small craftsman sees life redeemed by hand weaving and hand
pottery. We all think that the prop that has supported us will support
others. It is part of our egotism. For the many, to whom faith is not
intuitive, religion needs a solid foundation of experience.
A change of spirit requires a change of setting, and I am inclined to
think that this would be provided were boys to leave school at seventeen
instead of nineteen.
It would not, perhaps, from the point of view of the moral question,
cause a very great diminution in the actual immorality between boys of
the same age and the same social position. But it certainly would
improve matters. As things are at present, the boy of fifteen and a
half occupies a pleasantly irresponsible position. He has left behind
him the anxieties of the day room, and the responsibilities of seniority
are still far distant. His peccadilloes are not taken seriously. He can
rag in form and smash windows in the studies without prejudice to his
future. He has imbibed the example of Prince Hal. For a while he may
rollick with Falstaff at the Boar's Head. Time enough to settle down
when the privileges of power draw nearer him. For a good year and a half
he may make merry.
The lowering of the age limit would telescope events; it would reduce
the period of revelry to a couple of months. No sooner would a boy have
ceased to be a fag than he would be under the eye of authority as a
candidate for responsibility. A display of rhodomontade would prejudice
his future. He would play for safety; and such considerations would
certainly place a check on his moral lapses. He would think twice. If he
was discovered he would have no time to recover his position by
subsequent good behaviour. He would be passed over in the struggle for
promotion.
To a certain extent the lowering of the age limit would prevent that
type of immorality that takes place between boys of the same age and
same position, but only to a certain extent. There always will be such
misconduct in schools; it will never be possible to stamp it out
entirely, but it is possible to overrate its seriousness. Certainly the
romantic friendship is more important, and it is because of the
romantic friendship that I advocate so strongly the lowering of the age
limit.
I have said that the romantic friendship is the natural growth of an
unnatural system; but even a natural growth develops soon or late,
according to the soil in which it is planted and the climate by which it
is nourished. The presence of boys of 18 to 19, by their example, force
this growth like a hot-house atmosphere. In a boy of eighteen the sexual
impulse has become defined. He understands the implications of its
symptoms. He is old enough to be married. But the boy of sixteen is not
so sure of himself. In him the impulse is wavering and undetermined. He
does not understand the nature of the emotions that are moving him. And
he only comes to understand it through the example of elder boys. If a
boy were told nothing of the existence of romantic friendships, of their
technique, of the complicated moral code that allows this and denies
that, if his curiosity were not continually quickened by stray
references in sermons and addresses, I believe that he would not, at the
age of seventeen, have realised that the friendship he felt for a
smaller boy was essentially different from that which he was feeling for
his contemporaries. It would be a deeper, an intenser friendship, but he
would not see that it possessed a different nature. Why should he? The
schoolboy has read _The Hill_. He expects every Verney to find a
Desmond. So much has been written about the lasting friendships of
school life. Every boy must have his 'special friend.' Why should he be
any different from his fellows? There would be moments when he might
wish to caress his friend, but he would immediately smother such a wish,
feeling it to be foolish, girlish, unworthy of him. He would be too
young, he would not have the intellectual independence to be able to say
to himself: 'This is what I want. And what I want is natural to me. Damn
anything else!' Shadowy imaginings would haunt his reveries, but they
would never become defined in action.
For a boy of eighteen it is different. His impulses are strong; he knows
now exactly what he wants. And he is prepared to get what he wants. He
knows that the emotions he feels for a small boy are of a different
nature altogether from the friendship that he feels for his
contemporaries, and the fact that there are boys in the school old
enough to have defined these emotions, provides a hot-house atmosphere
for the development of younger boys.
To most people life comes at second hand. They learn from books,
cinemas, and plays what are the appropriate emotions and the correct
procedure for any given situation. The public school boy is no less
conventional than his elders. He allows his inclinations to be directed
into the accepted course. He is surprised, in the first place, by a
delightful and unexpected emotion; but the surprise soon passes. He has
formed just such another attachment as has been formed by practically
every senior boy in his house. He exchanges confidences, he seeks the
advice of some older boy, and follows the convention. If there were no
senior boys, no example, and no convention, the first surprise of
charmed bewilderment would endure. In the course of time it might very
well be that out of that first romantic story would grow a deep, mutual,
and lasting friendship. But such a development is hardly possible in an
unnatural society where children and fully grown men are herded
indiscriminately together.
The example of elder boys, moreover, not only defines the nature of
half-perceived emotions; it also forces emotions that would otherwise
remain a long while in bud. There are many who consider it is the blood
thing to have a _jeune ami_; that such a relationship is the privilege
of a house colour. They want to be talked about. They have themselves
spoken when juniors with bated breath of supposed 'cases.' They would
like to be spoken of like that themselves, to feel themselves moving in
an atmosphere of conjecture and intrigue, to gather an added sense of
their own importance.
Besides this itch, a natural one, to occupy the limelight by copying the
customs of the great, there is the subtle influence of indirect example.
In the same way that a boy who goes often to the theatre and the cinema
and observes there the charming processes of love, begins to long for
tenderness, and caresses, and endearments, so does the schoolboy who
hears on all sides romantic confidences, find himself drawn into the
glittering circle. This lure would at least be removed by the lowering
of the age limit. That it would solve all the difficulties I would not
for a moment maintain.
We cannot imagine a world in which men and women will not desert or
betray each other; in which husbands will remain faithful and the
unmarried chaste. Why should we expect school life, which is the world
in little, to be so startlingly different. Parents refuse to believe
that their own children are mortal: 'These things,' they say, 'may
happen to our neighbour's children. They do not happen to our own.' And
schoolmasters are only too anxious to reassure them. Parents have such
faith in their sons that they will believe in the most superficial
testimonials. They are so anxious to be deceived.
For this reason I believe that a mere statement of facts has value.
There is much clamour to-day for reconstruction, and the
controversialist who has not a cut and dried scheme for regenerating the
world is looked on with disfavour. But on sex questions, which are after
all intensely personal questions, which concern the individual in the
first place and society in the second, only the superficial will
dogmatise.
I cannot do better than quote from Havelock Ellis's General Preface to
_The Psychology of Sex_:--
'A resolve slowly grew up within me,' he writes, 'one main part of
my life-work should be to make clear the problem of sex. That was
more than twenty years ago. Since then I can honestly say that in
all that I have done that resolve has never been far from my
thoughts.... Now that I have, at length, reached the time for
beginning to publish my results, these results scarcely seem to me
large. As a youth I had hoped to settle problems for those that
came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state
them. For even that, I now think, is much. It is, at least, the
half of knowledge. In this particular field the evil of ignorance
is magnified by our efforts to suppress that which can never be
suppressed, though in the effort of suppression it may become
perverted.'
If this is the conclusion at the end of his work and of his life, of
perhaps the greatest living authority on sex, by what right does the
amateur produce cheerful remedies.
In the case of the Public School it is indeed something to state the
problems. There is so much ignorance to dispel; the ignorance of
mothers, the ignorance of fathers who have themselves not been to a
Public School, the conspiracy of silence of boys, old boys and masters.
Too much and, at the same time, too little, is made of immorality.
Schoolmasters assure us that its appearance is occasional, but their
attitude to it is that of a doctor who suspects that his patient is
suffering from a malignant disease and watches all the time for signs of
it to appear. The schoolmaster is always afraid lest he may be sitting
on a volcano. He encourages the athletic cult as a preventative, in the
belief that the boy who is keen on games will not wish to endanger his
health, and that the boy who has played football all the afternoon and
has boxed between tea and lock-up will be too tired to embark on any
further adventures. It does not occur to him that the boy will be
equally too tired to do his prep.
Such encouragement of the athletic cult is a confession of failure. It
is as though the master were to say: 'I know I cannot interest you in
your work. I know that unless I look after you, you will land yourself
in all manner of mischief. A man must have a god of sorts, therefore
make unto yourself whatsoever manner of god you choose, and I will see
that it receives a fitting reverence.'
The public school code of honour, the majority of the standards, indeed,
of school life are dependent on the athletic worship, and the athletic
worship is in its turn largely dependent, not so much on the moral
question, as on the official attitude to the moral question. Too much
energy has been devoted to the damming of trickles, while on another
side of the hill the main stream has passed into the valley, laying
waste the plains.
Greater honesty between boys, parents, and masters would undoubtedly
achieve much. But more than a change of spirit is required. If no boy
was allowed to stay on at school after the term in which he became
seventeen years old, I believe that the moral question would, to a large
extent, simplify itself.