There have been many mentions recently on the blog and elsewhere about the influence of English ‘public schools’ on the Church and the nation.  These schools emerged in the 19^th century for the purpose of producing a class of leaders able to run the British Empire.  By charging fees, which exceed the annual salary of most working people, these schools have now become the abode of the wealthy and privileged.  Their influence on the whole of British society remains powerful through their alumni occupying important roles in church and state.  There is a great deal to be said about this influence for good and for ill in British society.  What follows is a personal reflection based on my experience of a school run as a public school even though half the boys were there on foundationships which paid most of the fees.  I wrote these words several months ago and perhaps they provide an indirect commentary on the imminent General Election as well as the new revelations about Iwerne camps.

Among the many words that have been written about the system of English public schools, some comment has been made about the emotional health of boys who leave their parents at a young age to prepare to go through this system of education.  The claim made by various commentators, especially one in a book by Nick Duffell called Wounded Leaders, is that emotional damage is likely common among many former boarding school pupils.  Being away at school, apart from their parents, is bound to affect children in some way at the level of their emotions.  Even though weekly boarding has alleviated the pain suffered by many boys going through this system, many ex-pupils, now mature adults, still carry the pain that their schools have inflicted on them in the past.  Nick Duffell claims that many ex-public-school boys have got through the system by developing a kind of ‘survival personality’.  This coping mechanism allowed them mostly to succeed in terms of passing exams and obtaining good jobs.  They now, however, allegedly often lack the full range of emotional responses that would enable them to function well in making relationships and enjoying the colour and depth of the feeling world.   Emotional intelligence, as it is now called, enables the individual to feel the emotional temperature of situations.  It enables also an appreciation of other people’s needs, in particular the ability to understand the power of community.  An emotionally illiterate person will lack these abilities.  He or she will function far better at promoting self-interest than in dealing with others.  In short the survival personality which has been named as a feature of public-school ‘survivors’ is quite close to what is described as the narcissistic personality.

The speculations in the Press about the ability or not of Boris Johnson to be a good leader, while carrying the wounds of a boarding school past, can be left for now to one side.  I do in fact have much sympathy with the view that says he is more style than substance.  Going further than this is not an immediate part of this blog’s concerns.  What I can bring to bear in this discussion is my own experience at a minor public school aided by some written reflections I made at the time about my experiences soon after leaving the school.

 My attendance at three boarding schools between the ages of 7 ½ and 18 naturally left its mark on me.  I observed and, to some extent, suffered many of the things being discussed today in the writing about Boris Johnson and other ex-public-school leaders, including our Archbishop of Canterbury.  The ‘survival mode’ that is spoken about in current discussions on the topic is not an expression that I would have used to talk about my experience.  I did however notice the chronic lack of privacy in these institutions in every sense of the word.  A lack of personal space meant that it was hard to explore and become aware of a personal life.  Emotion and feeling did not play much part in the over-organised daily routine.    Some people have suggested that these institutions formed a good preparation for prison-life, thanks to the highly organised routine and the constant requirement for instant obedience to masters and more senior boys.  Of course, we trust that things have moved on in 60 years.  But I suspect that there will still be many of the same fundamental realities that were around in the early 60s.

One of the main things I remember vividly from my time at school were the value systems in operation.  The first seemed to centre around sport.  To achieve at sport was to achieve a recognisable status within the system.  Thus, one’s place in the pecking order was physically articulated by the stripes on your tie or the colour of your blazer.  Achieving at sport likely also elevated you, eventually, to a second valued rank, the status of prefect.  Once again, your prefect status was marked by special privileges involved through the fagging system or access to parts of the school from which everyone else was banned.  Both forms of achievement were deemed important in the formation of a cadre of leaders which many boys were expected to join after leaving school.   I am pleased to say that, in spite of the assumptions about the supreme importance of sport and the leadership training that the role of prefect was supposed to provide, I early on spotted how empty these artificial hierarchies were.  Strutting around constantly reminding the world that you were good at sport seemed ultimately rather futile and pretentious.  I early on became proud of my stubbornly black tie.  Boys who rose to the top of the public-school hierarchies were of course strong on self-confidence and assertive power but they were weak in other areas.  This was especially true of their emotional life and what we broadly describe as sensitivity.  To summarise in another way, the chief custodians of public-school ‘values’ seemed the shallowest in terms of an aesthetic/spiritual dimension.  From a personal point of view my complete opting out of the attempt to climb the hierarchies valued by the system meant that I was more easily able to preserve my emotional life and the life of the spirit.  When I speak about this emotional life, it included for me the cultivation of aesthetic experience. In my case this was activated through the medium of music and the visual arts. When I wrote a reflection on my school days while still at university, I came to realise that through aesthetic experience I had held on to an incredibly precious part of life.  I had retained the ability to feel.  I then called this (after John McMurray, the philosopher) the education of the emotions.  I now wonder whether this is something similar to the emotional intelligence spoken about today.

Throughout my ministry as a clergyman I have valued this survival of my early emotional/spiritual life even though the culture of my school had done precious little to encourage it.  Today I suspect that elitist leadership models, based on self-confidence and achievements on the sports field, are still alive and well.  Leadership and self-confidence are fine as far they go but if such values are linked to a shallow emotional life then they become problematic.  Failures of empathy among our leaders in church and state will always be a serious draw-back.     The efficient management techniques, so highly valued today, seem to emerge from the traditional public-school leadership traditions.   But we are also witnessing, alongside the emphasis on efficient management in our church, a toleration of horrific bullying and the humiliation of abuse survivors by some of our bishops.  Because bullying is so antithetical to Christian values, we might be surprised to hear of bishops tolerating the cruel methods of ‘reputation management’ companies.  But then then we have to remember that the public-school values which protect that system at all costs, discard, when necessary, feelings, emotion and any trace of empathy.  Of course, there are individual bishops who buck this trend, but life is made difficult for them if this elitist management style has penetrated the culture of the upper ranks of the church.   There is of course a story to be told about the way a hard Calvinism taught at Iwerne camps and reflecting the elitism of public schools, has penetrated the thinking and attitudes of many who operate at the very senior level.  If I am right, elitist and insensitive styles of management have made their home in the Church of England.   It is up to the rest of us who recognise cruelty and injustice, to go on opposing the bullying that continues to mark and harm the courageous survivors of past church abuse.