Public schools: the facts of life
Sir: It was disappointing to see a writer of Simon Raven's stature lending his authority to the myth of the public schoolboy's prerogative in the art of living. This old lie has as much validity as the claimed ability of a blustering and ignorant army officer, whose every order has been shored up by military discipline and the Army Acts, to handle men in the context of modern personnel rela- tions.
Every person learns through his experiences and those of the developing years may be particularly intense and influential, but they are not derived exclusively from specific institutions. Social rela- tions and struggles for power are as much the stuff of local scout troops or street corner gangs, as elec- tions to 'Pop' at Eton.
Indeed, if knowledge so gained is to have a wider application, it would seem the purer and more elemental the microcosm of life the better. The en- tirely artificial atmosphere of a boarding school, with limited access to the companionship of the opposite sex, and with an institutionalised elite- structure much more protective than 'Mummy's loving kiss,' cannot but distort such experience.
Withdrawal and the indoctrination of a system of values suitable to a world of imperial domina- tion and unshakable authority were ideal training for thousands of predictable and thus interchange- able administrators to underpin a global structure of absentee government. However, in this new age of sophisticated communications, precarious inter- national relations, technological innovation, and ceaseless and quickening change, education must produce a more imaginative, aware and flexible person.
The socially divisive influence of public schools is not to be gainsaid when it can be suggested that grammar school boys subsist on an unvaried diet of baked beans. The mind that can produce such patronising impertinence is part way to racist abuse.
For the record, as a pretty junior boy at my grammar school I was frequently subjected to the intimate attentions of prefects in the lavatories; a bed would have been more comfortable but would not have altered the nature of the experience.
I can only charitably conclude that Simon Raven adopted the current ironic mode, and that he would join me in hoping the cold war may yet be won on the playing fields of Kidbrooke Comprehensive. Rhiditin Brynmor Jones 30 Cygnet House, Belsize Road, London NW6
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