Brutal English public schools

[jo]

[Leslie]

My impression is that it's only within the last 50-75 years that Western society has begun treating its children with respect for their needs and development. I'm thinking of things like the medieval practice of swaddling infants and hanging them on the wall, and not letting them move about on their own until they were about two years old.

[jo]

Swaddling went out at the end of the 18th century didn't it? It certainly wasn't a pleasant practice though.

We did treat children really quite brutally until a couple of generations ago I think. Some people would say that we've gone too far to the other extreme and there's probably something in that, but rather our system than the one Lewis endured.

[Theo]

Lewis' recollections of his public school years remind me a little of George Orwell's autobiographical essay , describing his own ghastly school days. It's well worth reading, though more than a bit depressing.

[jo]

Sounds familiar .. i skipped through it as it was rather long but it sounded like every other recollection of English public schools I've ever heard :(.

[Esther]

In some defense of Lewis's father, he did genuinely believe that he was sending his boys to a good school. It had had a good reputation for some time, but unfortunately the actual state of the school deteriorated much faster than it's good name. For some time, Albert Lewis thought that his sons' complaints were nothing more than typical school-boy dislike of classes. Only after he finally had Jack removed was the headmaster committed to an asylum.

I agree, though, that the whole process of sending children away from home, sometimes at such a young age (Lewis was sent away before he was quite ten years old), does seem rather difficult to understand.

[Leslie]

[WolfVanZandt]

Leis explained how people hoped to teach their boys to be come men in Surprised by Joy. He said that the "fagging" system was to teach respect for and submission to authority (in a way he had never seen a mature person behave). In other words, it was one of those irrational things that people did back then. Certainly there were worse things. Go back a few years from Lewis' time and you have the child labor of the industrial age.

Grade school for me was only different by degree and that I had a home to escape to. When I was in school, I was a "wimp" and I was picked on without mercy. Since I didn't care for sports and knew more than the coaches (I was rather precocious - heh), they looked the other way ("boys will be boys").

And, of course, bullying is a big issue on talk shows and TV news "magazines".

But you see the same kind of things in child abuse cases. Otherwise "good" parents and other adults do't believe children when they tell them that someone is hurting them - so they don't tell. Or believing them puts important adult ayers in inconvenient tuations, so they choose not to believe.

[jo]

The thing is that it wasn't considered child abuse back then - parents fully expected their sons to be subjected to this sort of treatment..

[Esther]

[Pindar]

[rusmeister]

[Mary]

[alecto]

[wisewoman]

I imagine they will. We've pretty much said that about every civilization before us. What makes us exempt?

The interesting thing would be which perspective they view us from. Just using the example of the treatment of children, will people continue to grow gentler towards children or will we swing in the opposite direction again? Same could probably apply for the position of women...