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Sun Aug 8, 2021, 10:06 AM

EM Forster said it best...



Could there be a better quote to describe the rottenness at the heart of the 'ruling' class? Fat, a bit stupid and heartless - could almost be describing the PM!?!?!. Heh. Oh my. 👀 (For Americans - Public Schools in the UK are fee paying schools. State Schools are what in America you would call Public Schools)

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Reply EM Forster said it best... (Original post)
Soph0571 Aug 2021 OP
abqtommy Aug 2021 #1
muriel_volestrangler Aug 2021 #2
jmbar2 Aug 2021 #3
muriel_volestrangler Aug 2021 #4
jmbar2 Aug 2021 #5

Response to Soph0571 (Original post)

Sun Aug 8, 2021, 10:22 AM

1. Thanks for schooling us in the differences between schools here and there. Unfortunately,

too many people wind up becoming "just another brick in the wall"* no matter the country.

* to Pink Floyd

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Response to Soph0571 (Original post)

Sun Aug 8, 2021, 10:56 AM

2. A comment on the Observer piece today?

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets, toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us. So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed. Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a collective narrowing of vision.

In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up “the right habits for life”. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip. We could be ourselves – homesick, vulnerable, lovelorn and frightened – or, with practice at putting up a front, we could pretend to embody the idealised national character. We could perform being loyal and robust and self-reliant. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the “hardness of heart of the educated”, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class.

This wasn’t healthy. In her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien describes a condition now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, ingrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.
...
In the early 80s, Radley’s non-teaching staff were known as College Servants. We had cleaners, chefs, groundsmen, bit-part players and comic mechanicals. They represented the proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, the townies and the crusties (a term Johnson continued to use 40 years later). Our special language had its range of words to set these unfamiliar animals apart, meaning people not like us, and if you didn’t know the language you were probably one of them. As Orwell doubles-down in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The proles are not human beings.”

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard

He also talks of the racism and cruel targets of jokes that were part of private schools then, but the 70s and 80s weren't exactly an enlightened time in state schools either, so I think that would need proper study to see if fee-paying schools were significantly worse than state ones in that respect.

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Response to Soph0571 (Original post)

Sun Aug 8, 2021, 12:06 PM

3. To be clear...

"Public School" in UK refers to the upper crust boarding schools of the elite, right? The equivalent of 'private schools" in the US?

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Response to jmbar2 (Reply #3)

Sun Aug 8, 2021, 01:16 PM

4. Yes, what would probably be called a "prep school" in the USA

The long-established, usually boarding, fee-paying schools for those up to 18. Called "public schools" before there was general provision of education by the state; "public" in the sense of "communal, and open to anyone who can pay" (rather than being privately tutored in one's own mansion), like a "public house" allows anyone to come in and buy drinks to consume there.

Just to confuse things more, "prep school" in the UK would mean a school that "prepares" a pupil for going to a "public school" - normally prep school up to age 13, and then public school to 18.

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Response to muriel_volestrangler (Reply #4)

Mon Aug 9, 2021, 08:43 AM

5. Thanks for the explanation

It sounds very complicated to British and upper class, or aspiring toward upper class status. Sounds dreadful to actually get there.

BTW, I've always loved your pen name - LOL.

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