Public School Life: Boys, Parents, MastersWaugh, Alec
History
Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters
Waugh, Alec
Education, Secondary; Endowed public schools (Great Britain)
For this reason I believe that a mere statement of facts has value.
There is much clamour to-day for reconstruction, and the
controversialist who has not a cut and dried scheme for regenerating the
world is looked on with disfavour. But on sex questions, which are after
all intensely personal questions, which concern the individual in the
first place and society in the second, only the superficial will
dogmatise.
I cannot do better than quote from Havelock Ellis's General Preface to
_The Psychology of Sex_:--
'A resolve slowly grew up within me,' he writes, 'one main part of
my life-work should be to make clear the problem of sex. That was
more than twenty years ago. Since then I can honestly say that in
all that I have done that resolve has never been far from my
thoughts.... Now that I have, at length, reached the time for
beginning to publish my results, these results scarcely seem to me
large. As a youth I had hoped to settle problems for those that
came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state
them. For even that, I now think, is much. It is, at least, the
half of knowledge. In this particular field the evil of ignorance
is magnified by our efforts to suppress that which can never be
suppressed, though in the effort of suppression it may become
perverted.'
If this is the conclusion at the end of his work and of his life, of
perhaps the greatest living authority on sex, by what right does the
amateur produce cheerful remedies.
In the case of the Public School it is indeed something to state the
problems. There is so much ignorance to dispel; the ignorance of
mothers, the ignorance of fathers who have themselves not been to a
Public School, the conspiracy of silence of boys, old boys and masters.
Too much and, at the same time, too little, is made of immorality.
Schoolmasters assure us that its appearance is occasional, but their
attitude to it is that of a doctor who suspects that his patient is
suffering from a malignant disease and watches all the time for signs of
it to appear. The schoolmaster is always afraid lest he may be sitting
on a volcano. He encourages the athletic cult as a preventative, in the
belief that the boy who is keen on games will not wish to endanger his
health, and that the boy who has played football all the afternoon and
has boxed between tea and lock-up will be too tired to embark on any
further adventures. It does not occur to him that the boy will be
equally too tired to do his prep.
Such encouragement of the athletic cult is a confession of failure. It
is as though the master were to say: 'I know I cannot interest you in
your work. I know that unless I look after you, you will land yourself
in all manner of mischief. A man must have a god of sorts, therefore
make unto yourself whatsoever manner of god you choose, and I will see
that it receives a fitting reverence.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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