The new public schoolboy
John Thorn
You will hear it said, wherever long-serving Public school masters gather: the boys are much 'easier' than they were a few years back. They now do what you say, most of the time. They cut their hair somewhat Shorter and don't particularly mind if you tell them to cut it shorter still. If they dress in a slovenly way, it is more likely. to be through indifference than in a spirit of rebellion against the bourgeoisie. They eschew left-wing politics — indeed any politics at all— and believe in God, though not much in the formal observances of His church. They love their parents again and cicia't 'drop out'. They want respectable' well-paid jobs and know they must pass exams to get them. So they work hard. And in their leisure hours they like cricket again. Oh Yes. They are easier. Those horrid Sixties and early Seventies are behind us, and ,he Pendulum, as predicted, has swung pack.
So runs the conversation. And from its drift few dissent. To adapt what certain cavalry officers are reputed to have said When the First World War ended: now we can get back to real schoolmastering again. It isn't, I think, quite as simple as that. Certainly, those late Sixties and early Seventies were difficult. I came to Winchester in the middle of them from a Midland school still largely unaffected by the new strident youth culture of Southern England. The Beatles had reached Repton, of Fourse, as had Bob Dylan. But cannabis and Its ugly sisters hadn't. Prefects still wielded authority with some toughness. 150 miles to the south, Winchester had gone rather further along the road of 'liberation'. Disaffected groups were not insignificant in size and were exploring areas of experience foreign to middle-aged schoolmasters. Dylan's Tambourine Man and the Beatles' LtfoY in the Sky with Diamonds were songs about the new world of psychedelic drugs. ft's a Hard Rain and Blowin' in the Wind ‘nre pacifist and revolutionary songs which Many knew by heart. The Vietnam war was hotting up. The universities, to which most ykehamists were going, were ablaze. I remember visiting the Warden of All Souls °lie day in 1969. It seemed like a Mercian Monastery in the midst of the Danish invasions. John Sparrow was enjoying it of course, as he 'patrolled the perimeter' and rioted misquotations from Blake on the Walls; but it was rather disturbing. Oxford is quieter now. So are Nanterre, Berkeley even East Anglia. And so is Wine, bester. In places of learning, quieter means easier'. What has happened to make it so? It Will be a long time before we know. There are hundreds of investigations to be made and social history books to be written. All we can do now is make a few guesses. The swinging pendulum model of history has never pleased me much. Pendulums swing back and forth in the same plane, occupy the same bit of space all the time. A Hegelian model may help more: culture — counter-culture — new counter-counter culture, or something like that. These, for the present, quieter young men have not actually rejected Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles. They have absorbed them. And in the wildly popular Saturday Night Fever the Bee-Gees are back singing much the same music they played and sang many years ago. The most widely read weekly in the school at the moment is not The Economist. it is probably Melody Maker, with its horrifying tales of Sid Vicious and his doings in Manhattan, his drugs, his anarchic politics, and his dead girl Nancy. When it is verbally articulate, the Punk Rock movement is far more subversive than John Lennon and Bob Dylan ever were. In the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, or Water,gate, they preached quietist non-violence. Eleanor Rigby, one of the Beatles' greatest songs, is a compassionate plea for the muddled and the lonely, John Lennon's Imagine an attack on Nixonian corruption in the name of honesty and integrity. But the Punks are not interested in such causes. They are anarchy and vandalism in sound, latter-day dadaists. And they are popular now — or were last week — when their schoolboy fans are 'easier'.
However misguided their elders thought them, however troublesome they found them, the young radicals of 1968 were idealists. When they consciously eschewed an accent which might be thought upper class and slipped into a Midland midAtlantic hybrid, when they clamoured to be allowed jeans and sandals, they were looking.for a breakdown of class barriers, for a freer and more egalitarian society than that for which their schools seemed to stand.
But now the young are indeed easier, and this in spite of the violence hurled at them, by Sex Pistols, by Starsky and Hutch, by football crowds. They pay more attention now to the niceties of manners. In dress, we even have some dandies about again. The more difficult boys or girls are more apt to be isolated phenomena than members of different groups. Are the causes of this economic? It is easy to think so. The hyperinflation of 1974-5, which was accompanied by no rise in tax thresholds, made greater the sacrifices parents had to make to send their children to boarding-schools at all. And the rise in unemployment which accompanied the subsequent lowering of the inflation rate has made adolescent dropping out a rare and not much admired luxury. Now, in 1978, more Wykehamists than in 1970 are thinking of how best to achieve a reasonable income level when they are twenty-five, and fewer are moved by the Great Causes — the Third World, Conservation, Pacifism. Their aims now are more familiar, and more comfortable. They are the bourgeois values of 'getting on' which over a hundred years ago John Stuart Mill feared must lead to dull conformity, to the withering of originality.
It remains mysterious, this change, and thus interesting. Times are easier. But providing a comfortable ride for schoolmasters is not what education should be about. Have we lost more than we have gained?
This article, by the headmaster of Winchester College, recently appeared in The Trusty Servant, the Old Wykehamist magazine.
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