Preparatory Schools Today [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The General Picture - What is it all about ? When I first decided to take up teaching, I was profoundly ignorant of preparatory schools; and although I had attended just such a school myself as a boy, yet I remembered strangely little about it. Even now, when I have spent most of my working life in these schools and have just helped to complete a large scale enquiry about them, I still feel I know far too little. The little I do know, however, convinces me that, though I might be able to describe the lives lived within them, I could never put into words the spirit which animates them; and it is this spirit which is the vital thing. It is easy to define what we are deahng with - schools which boys join, as a rule, at about or 8, to be prepared for entry to their public schools soon after their thirteenth birthday. Easy, too, to tell you their numbers and their age-ranges, to show you specimen time-tables and so on. But to convey the ethos, the characteristic spirit of these unique communities, that seems a task quite beyond my powers. Yet this, I believe, is precisely what people reading this book will want to be told; they would not be fooled by outward appearances, nor condemn a school simply because its outside was shabby. They want to understand the spirit of it, what a prep school really is, before reading in the rest of the book the bare facts which give the details. Perhaps it cannot be stated as an absolute, and the only hope of conveying some idea of it is to offer, through personal recollections, one man's reactions and beliefs. I do not remember being happy or unhappy as a boy at my prep school, nor do 1 remember facing, passing or failing a single examination. Had I been miserable or the exams a worry, the tenuous web of memory would surely have held some tiny relics. What is still very clear is the first school I 11