Denouncing private schools for ruining the country and tormenting their inmates is one of Britain's oldest traditions. In “Sad Little Men”, Richard Beard updates the criticism
This argument is far from original; lambasting public schools for tormenting their inmates and ruining the country is one of Britain’s oldest traditions. Thomas Macaulay, a Victorian historian and politician, avoided them after a family friend told his mother that “throwing boys headlong into those great public schools always puts me in mind of the practice of the Scythian mothers, who threw their new-born infants into the river.
Updating these criticisms, Mr Beard makes some striking points about the way “total institutions” can reconstruct the human personality. The aim of public schools is to make people fit in effortlessly with the changing rules and rituals of the tribe. They do this by removing children from their natural environments, then forcing them to play a succession of different roles. “We were post-modernism come to life,” he writes.
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