Interesting, there seems to be a wave of people speaking out about the horrors of boarding schools at the moment. A couple of months ago I watched an interview with Richard Beard, who wrote a...
Interesting, there seems to be a wave of people speaking out about the horrors of boarding schools at the moment. A couple of months ago I watched an interview with Richard Beard, who wrote a similar book detailing his experiences, 'Sad Little Men'.
What a horror this is. I found it interesting that he does tie it to the social apathy of the ruling class, as in this is not exclusively a personal or familial problem, but one that has possibly...
What a horror this is. I found it interesting that he does tie it to the social apathy of the ruling class, as in this is not exclusively a personal or familial problem, but one that has possibly echoed in the state of British politics.
Aside: in my previous job, I (socially) engaged with a lot of British men who had been through the private school system, though I don’t remember names beyond Eton. Over lunch with one, he made a comment, a little offhand, a little rude in the way some people are unaware (or unconcerned?) they are rude. My coworker jokingly said, “Oh, if you’d said that in front of my mother, she’d have taken a switch to your backside!”
She laughed, everyone else laughed; I probably laughed too. But before the man laughed too, he had this look of total, human horror that haunts me now still, some dozen or so years later. I don’t think until reading this now I really understood what it was he may have remembered in that moment.
I once read that attending a private boarding school in the UK is something of a (terrible) tradition that goes like this: "I had an absolutely horrible time at boarding school, where it's a toxic...
I once read that attending a private boarding school in the UK is something of a (terrible) tradition that goes like this: "I had an absolutely horrible time at boarding school, where it's a toxic environment that I finally got out of. Now I'm going to send my kids there!"
At this point it feels more like a horrendous rite of passage so that parents can say to their kids, "Now we have a common experience and you understand why I'm this way".
Interesting, there seems to be a wave of people speaking out about the horrors of boarding schools at the moment. A couple of months ago I watched an interview with Richard Beard, who wrote a similar book detailing his experiences, 'Sad Little Men'.
What a horror this is. I found it interesting that he does tie it to the social apathy of the ruling class, as in this is not exclusively a personal or familial problem, but one that has possibly echoed in the state of British politics.
Aside: in my previous job, I (socially) engaged with a lot of British men who had been through the private school system, though I don’t remember names beyond Eton. Over lunch with one, he made a comment, a little offhand, a little rude in the way some people are unaware (or unconcerned?) they are rude. My coworker jokingly said, “Oh, if you’d said that in front of my mother, she’d have taken a switch to your backside!”
She laughed, everyone else laughed; I probably laughed too. But before the man laughed too, he had this look of total, human horror that haunts me now still, some dozen or so years later. I don’t think until reading this now I really understood what it was he may have remembered in that moment.
I once read that attending a private boarding school in the UK is something of a (terrible) tradition that goes like this: "I had an absolutely horrible time at boarding school, where it's a toxic environment that I finally got out of. Now I'm going to send my kids there!"
At this point it feels more like a horrendous rite of passage so that parents can say to their kids, "Now we have a common experience and you understand why I'm this way".