Politics
Schools that teach children to lie
Published 09 October 2000
Hywel Williams, a former master at Rugby, marvels at the hypocrisies, ancient and modern, that continue to sustain the English public schools
From obscure East Anglian Framlingham to vulgarly gin-and-tonic-belt Charterhouse, from rugged Rossall and its hockey on the Lancashire sands to cloistered Winchester, brooding over its medieval enchantments, the public school year is now under way - and, as always, rather later than the calendar dates observed by the "maintained". The Headmasters Conference - the only teachers' association whose members can get away from school in term time - has just held its annual meeting. Even chronology conspires to confirm England's great divide.
Elsewhere in Europe, private education is for the Catholic or the thick (or both). Here, opting out from the state sector is a consuming passion, one that squeezes the disposable income, postpones the conservatory and defers the gratification of the kitchen extension. Self-serving rhetoric of "choice", "variety" and "diversity" keeps a very old show on the road - one whose chief characteristics are uniformity and conformity.
The division is ancient. England is an ancien regime state which came to public education late and unwillingly. The French had something like a national curriculum in the 17th century. Prussia had its edict of 1711. Here, we had education acts from the late 19th century onwards only because there was a labour force that needed just enough education to kick-start an industrial revolution running out of steam.
This is the only European country to have both a thriving private sector in education and a weak state one. The abolition of public schools was once a necessity for the left - here was a clear example of a freedom to choose whose exercise diminished the greater freedoms of the greater number.
Towards the end of the 1945 Labour government, R H Tawney said that the failure to abolish public schools would undermine everything the Labour movement had achieved in other areas. It was the one reform that mattered - the profound one from which all other changes in the way the English treated each other and looked at the world would flow. Yet the system that inhibits conversation between the English is still here. Even the question mark over "charitable status" - that major market distortion - has gone. The rather sad gesture of sharing playing fields with "local" schools, much trumpeted a few years ago, is long since forgotten.
The residual liberal guilt among the system's defenders has also disappeared. No longer is there a need for a frontman to supply a smooth ratiocination, as John Rae, then headmaster of Westminster, did in the 1970s. The Headmasters' Conference is an anonymous organisation that knows it is on to a very good thing, and keeps mum. Smugness is all. Once, the regime produced decent agonisers, men of liberal culture and conscience who struggled awkwardly to justify the unjustifiable - as Robert Birley did at Eton, and John Dancy at Marlborough. Now, their heirs attract criticism only if their schools slide down the league table of exam results and fail the test of market share.
What weird quirk of the national psyche explains this survival, its easy toleration and seeming immunity from the case for the prosecution? As with many Establishment successes, this one has been artfully packaged. The "public" in "public school" seemed too obvious an in-your-face paradox for so privatised a world, and thus the weaselly worded "independent school" came into its own.
The social Darwinism of the 1980s helped, too. Public schools started to compete against each other in arenas other than the cricket field. The new competition made for some turf wars, swagger and conceit. Eton rose and then fell; Rugby stumbled and then rose. Accelerating crises in state education made for a boom time, with convenient new reasons for signing cheques. The disappearance of grammar schools helped to rationalise gut instincts. Those halfway houses replicated the paraphernalia of house systems and mottos of arduous endeavour in the same way that public schools had aped the antiquity of Oxbridge college customs.
The rather revolting Radley was the school of the decade - and a fine example of the bogus antiquity that is so important in a country where no institution has arrived until it is thought to be very old. Manicured lawns, tolling bells, baronial halls, liturgical solemnity: all combined to give this 19th-century institution an authentic medieval touch.
But there is a deeper reason behind the public school success story. It survives because it teaches how to lie and get away with it. Lying is not on the curriculum - but it does not need to be, because it is in the very air that you breathe. The experience is a good preparation for what passes for English adult life, because it combines a de facto individualism with superficial observance of the rules. Surrounded by people, all of whom you have to tolerate, some of whom you like and quite a few you hate, it is necessary to lie in order to survive. And that's just the teachers.
An awful lot of ethics is bandied about - English schooling has specialised in the avoidance of education by pursuing morality. Once, it was Thomas Arnold's mission statement: the production of Christians first, gentlemen second and scholars third. The conceit of providing "leadership" for a benighted world persists without any sense that public schools might be the cause of the darkness in which people dwell. It is heard in the dreadful chapel sermons, which reinforce pride by telling people how privileged they are. It is seen in the limply ethical two hours of "social service", which are an alternative to the brutish fantasies of the cadet corps.
Uplift is a regular strain in English education - the reflection of a powerfully anti-intellectual strain that values character, but finds the mind a bit dodgy. Public schools "prepare for life" in the very narrow sense that the public school mind still shapes English institutional life. Their most characteristic product is the bullshitter - sometimes amiable, sometimes just a shit, but always purposeful and a good liar. This product's ability to talk a good game means that an Oxbridge interview system suits its improvisational skills as it shapes the arabesques on thin ice.
"I've run this house for 12 years," a Rugby colleague told me when I taught there in the Eighties, "and I think all I've done is teach boys how to lie." Lying is a pretty congenital childhood condition, the response to a world of arbitrary and odd adults. But in a public school world run by men with often a very weird light about them, it acquires an added imperative.
Authority is precariously maintained in that Hobbesian condition, which lasts for three months at a stretch and is often brutish. The separate boarding houses make both disorder and its cover-up possible. The food fight in the hall and the bullying in the dorm are over quickly, and a housemaster with some credibility to maintain can easily avoid their investigation. So he lies to a suspicious head, who knows he is lying, but has to accept it, as we are all in this thing together.
But the price is paid in Danegeld. The successfully manipulative public school boy understands and benefits from an institution that he despises. The relationship is rather like the one between our Old Fettesian Prime Minister and the Labour Party.
The leader of the public school gang has charm and a plausible manner. He is greeted with some relief by the housemaster on the run because he promises that he can cut a deal with the local rough trade. Power is then delegated without too many questions being asked. Housemaster and local chieftain are bound by an implicit pact that sustains the public credibility of both.
When you are locked away for months, lying becomes a way of telling an interesting story about yourself in a very dull and constrained environment. It is even exciting to see how far you can get away with it. How many cars, wives, houses did you say your father had? It is a natural response to an unnatural environment.
There is lying about theft, which goes through cycles of epidemic proportions. There is lying about being clever. The ultimate public school scholastic prize is to be thought dim but actually be cleverer than the opposition. And then there is the lying about sex. Public schools have acquired a bogus progressivist aura by accepting girls. It has been a neat exercise in liberal accommodation. It also means that a large number of boys and girls have sex. This has been difficult for management to take on board, given the official line. It seems cruel, in a country that is already hypocritical enough in this area, to add another level of hypocrisy at so tender an age - but at least it's another fine preparation for English life. It also makes for a new public school oligarchy, as Carthusian and Carthusienne tendrils intertwine and Marlburians decide there is no need to look beyond Marlborough for a life.
But candour about sex is foolish. "Do you mean to tell me, headmaster," asked one member of Rugby's governing body when the errant employee declared he was gay, "that there are men walking the streets of London who can say, 'I have slept with the headmaster of Rugby'?" Dismissal followed.
The idea that public schools are about "academic values" is the biggest lie. A "public school intellectual" is always a contradiction in terms. What matters is how you reconcile yourself to an environment of soulless gregariousness. It may seem strange that the English, a race who value their privacy, are still in thrall to a system whose values are shaped by the hatreds bred out of enforced intimacy. But this is a show with no relief in sight.
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