Books: Schools for Scandal and Virtue

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THE OLD SCHOOL TIE by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy; Viking; 480 pages; $17.95

Those who know that English public schools are in fact private may go to the head of the class. You are clearly ready for a longer lesson in paradox. Open your copies of The Old School Tie and begin studying a system of education that has been bullying and beloved, tyrannical and anarchic, rigorous and howlingly inept. Memorize the ways in which a relatively insignificant number of masters and students created an ethos that spread, via the British Empire, worldwide. Questions will be asked later, and laggards can expect a caning.

Social Historian Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is interested in how his countrymen got to be the way they are, i.e., typically British. His previous look at this process, The Unnatural History of the English Nanny, uncovered early influences on the children of the upper and middle classes. What happened to the boys when they left home is a more complicated subject, because the schools to which they were exiled at around age eight have a history dating back some 14 centuries. That is a daunting span for any single book to cover, but the author attacks it with zest.

The story he spins out is not a tribute to the human imagination. The germinal public schools were founded in the Dark Ages, and then stayed rooted there well into this century. Originally extensions of churches and monasteries, set up to train some boys as choristers and others as clergy, the schools were anachronistic by the 16th century. Their curriculum consisted of little but the classics, drilled by rote into chilled, hungry, stupefied boys.

Behavior inside these prisons was scandalous and unchecked. In the 1540s, while headmaster of Eton, Nicholas Udall was convicted of sodomy. He was later released from prison—and made headmaster of Westminster. Discipline was ferocious and sometimes fatal. An 18th century legal tract noted: "Where a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occasion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter." Dr. John Keate, a notorious Eton headmaster from 1809 to 1834, once publicly flogged 100 students in a single afternoon.

Gathorne-Hardy devotes most of his book to the past 150 years, the period of the public schools' greatest influence and eventual decline. Masters like Dr. Thomas Arnold injected Victorian moral earnestness into the system. Schools became molders of character and soul. Students who had been forced to memorize the Aeneid still graduated unable to write their native tongue, but the harrowing, evangelical zeal drummed into them for years helped them become high-minded gentlemen, trained to follow their superiors and lead the lower classes. Rabid athleticism flourished. So did sex.