ME AND MY GIRL Si,—Sillier pieces than Kate Wharton's in
defence of the English boarding school system may have been written. But not, I would think, often.
Like Eleanor Whitour (whose Twentieth Century article on home versus boarding school has brought Mrs. Wharton out swinging) I am American too. I have lived in England ten years. And solidly, for those ten years, I too have been appalled by (a) how brief and little pleasure the English seem to get from their children, (b) how dimly they understand child- hood, or children's wants and needs, and (c) the unseemly eagerness with which the English will near- bankrupt themselves to send their children off to school. Any old school—so long as it's away.
If they were honest about it, fine. If they said: we find our children noisy bores. They have muddy, clumpy feet, and muddy, clumpy friends. We send them to boarding school to save the parquet. And because, segregated from the h-dropping peasants in the free school system, they will get a better educa- tion, get to know an Hon. or two, stand a better chance of getting into a good university and, there- fore, of Doing Well in Later Life.
lf they would say this, neither Mrs. Wintour nor I nor anyone would argue. Not with their reasons, anyway. But they won't be honest. And we get instead the tiresome LP of how much their children like boarding school. How much better it is for them to have yummy institution stodge and healthful hockey fields. How the parents don't really want to do it but, as Kate Wharton puts it about her daughter, 'para- doxically . . . she would be better off at boarding school.'
If I felt that about my own daughter, I would be able to reach only one honest conclusion: that there was something gravely wrong with me as a mother.
With generosity that, were it valour, would most certainly win me the VC, 1 am assuming that NI rs. Wharton's sentence beginning, 'Rather it strikes me that so anxious arc we to get on well without (sic) offspring . . .' was meant to rcad 'with our off- spring.' But was this a simple proof-reader's error? Or the give-away Freudian slip of the week?
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