Why a Boarding School?
Yes – it seems an extraordinary thing to do, to send your children away from you for eight or nine months of the year. Even those of us who are used to working in boarding schools often wonder how parents can bear to do it. How can it be justified?
Let it be said straight away that home life and a day school are the right experiences for your child if……
if he is not an “only one”.
if you have room for a home workshop, a place in which he can make a mess to his heart’s content; and if you are not a house-proud mother who can’t bear a thing to be dirty or out of place.
if you have a garden in which he can dig holes, build huts and use a hose-pipe.
if he is not an “only one” and there are other children, lots of them, with whom he can play and learn the art of sharing.
if your neighbourhood has a real community sense, so that your child can grow up in it with a sense of belonging to it and a feeling of responsibility towards it.
if you, the parents, have a sense of social and political responsibility and your child can learn from you something about the practice of democracy.
if your child is not having his or her standards of value undermined by the specious attractions of the cinema and the street corner flirtation.
if the day school is a friendly, human place that does not regard a bright boy as something to be crammed and exploited for the honour of the school, or a dull boy as an inferior human being, to be treated with ill-concealed contempt.
if you are not a possessive parent, and if you can really bear your children to grow up with increasing independence, thinking and feeling honestly and sincerely for themselves.
if you can bear the wild energy of healthy children, their ear-splitting yells and their incessant demands, without losing your temper and becoming irritable.
if you are living a happy and creative married life, not divorced, separated, disillusioned, embittered or worn-out.
and lots more!
To fulfil all these conditions is pretty difficult, and when several of them cannot be fulfilled then it is not surprising that the parents begin to consider the boarding school.
It is becoming increasingly clear that modern town life is lacking in a most important quality, one of immense importance in the growth of a child’s character: a sense of a community. A community is a group of people having a direct understanding of each other, common standards of value and behaviour, the same basic principles, a feeling of responsibility for each other and a willingness to work together for the good of all. The modern town, alas, is generally just a fortuitous collection of people with no such understanding and no feeling of responsibility for each other.
A boarding school at its best can provide many of the things that parents, often hopelessly frustrated by cramped housing and the nature of the place where they have to work, cannot provide. It can give the child spacious country conditions, opportunities for becoming happily dirty without offending anyone, companionship and adventure, scope for initiative without too much danger to property. It can give him an experience of an almost self-supporting community in which he can see the pooling of a wide variety of knowledge and ability. The boarding school can bring living and learning together into a unified experience, can give the child a feeling of belonging to a group of people who stand for something both noble and practical. It can make him feel significant through what he himself contributes to its life.
But a boarding school can provide this experience only if it consciously tries to bring into its life the best qualities of the family, if love and friendship permeate its organisation, if children and adult enjoy each other and both meet the demands of their common life with eagerness. Obviously there is nothing to guarantee that a boarding school fulfils all this. At the worst, and rather too often, a boarding school is an institution utterly remote from family conditions, where the new child begins by feeling a worm. It can be a thorough-going little Fascist state, ruled by a petty dictator whose power-impulse, and sometimes brutality, are imposed on the whole organisation. It can be a place where sensitiveness and human understanding are destroyed. Not a person but a type is the product. With all this it may have an impressive facade of respectability, dignity and efficiency. Obviously this is worse than any home-and-day-school arrangement. In the latter there is a chance of escape for at least a few minutes of the day, whereas in the bad boarding school there is no escape; for the sensitive thoughtful child there can be only misery and the ultimate blunting of his qualities.
Many more parents are thinking of boarding schools than were doing so ten years ago. If you are one of them, be cautious. Don’t be taken in by external show. You are proposing to hand over your child to an immensely powerful influence. Find out, by careful observation, whether the school will safeguard and encourage those human qualities for which the safety of which the war against Fascism was fought, and that are essential in a vital democracy: sensitiveness towards others, to their needs or their suffering, responsible independent judgement, fearlessness in the defence of justice and mercy, social initiative and political awareness, the capacity to discriminate between the true discipline of life and the senseless discipline by the dictator bully.
The Ministry of Education has officially encouraged the extension of boarding school education for all classes of people. New boarding schools are being created by local authorities. The London County Council is making arrangements with a number of existing boarding schools for the reception of many new pupils whose ffes (sic) are to be provided from public funds. As far as I know, no statement has been made about the type of boarding school that is to be encouraged. In an immensely important development no principles have been stated. It is the duty of democratic citizens to voice their views, not to accept just what is offered them, but to ask for what they think is desirable in schools that are to have so much influence over the lives of their children.
KENNETH C. BARNES
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/2 document 02