Anyone else who hated being at CH ?

[rockfreak]

Any lingering doubts about the unearned privileges of the private school system can be laid to rest by the piece in today's Guardian by Robert Verkaik, an expert and author on the English schooling system, who retreads the figure that I've heard before which is that up to four times the amount of money follows a child through the private school sector than through the state. Happily a newly formed Parliamentary group is about to look at this scandal with a view to phasing out the private schools. Hopefully Christ's Hospital as well with its output of smug and self-satisfied pupils. Tory grandee Rab Butler wanted to do it in 1944 when charged with reforming education but was talked out of it by the Old Harrovian Churchill.

[harryh]

"With its output of smug, self-satisfied pupils"....

GIVE IT A REST!

[Avon]

So here’s my problem: the massive discordance between this post...

I'm interested in Avon's attitude because, after all this time, he and I seem to me to be coming from exactly the same place! When I mentioned our "stardust" I was using it in a sardonic way. We don't sprinkle our supposed stardust over the rest of the unlettered plebs and expect great national results precisely because in many cases we don't have stardust to sprinkle. People of ability and talent and character come into national life from all over the place these days, whatever the situation may have been in 1960 when I left the school.

...and this one.

Happily a newly formed Parliamentary group is about to look at this scandal with a view to phasing out the private schools. Hopefully Christ's Hospital as well with its output of smug and self-satisfied pupils.

Are we to conclude that you just don’t care for consistency in your views, or have you some form of condition we should be aware of?

[Pe.A]

sejintenej - Oh I'm all the better for going and am a firm believer that you have to take opportunities, some of them pay off and some of them don't. Either way it will be an experience. I'm very fortunate that in my career i've been offered opportunities and although hard work, have got me to a place, that my 16, 18, 20 or even 30 year old self would have thought unobtainable. I always say to people it's about opportunities. Although luck does play a part, hard work and perseverance also plays a big part. My drive has been to prove people who thought that I wouldn't achieve anything, wrong.

I don't regret going at all, however just didn't like my Senior house.

Just out of interest, what was wrong with your senior house...?

[Pe.A]

Any lingering doubts about the unearned privileges of the private school system can be laid to rest by the piece in today's Guardian by Robert Verkaik, an expert and author on the English schooling system, who retreads the figure that I've heard before which is that up to four times the amount of money follows a child through the private school sector than through the state. Happily a newly formed Parliamentary group is about to look at this scandal with a view to phasing out the private schools. Hopefully Christ's Hospital as well with its output of smug and self-satisfied pupils. Tory grandee Rab Butler wanted to do it in 1944 when charged with reforming education but was talked out of it by the Old Harrovian Churchill.

You really have got a bee in your bonnet (or elsewhere) about something. I want to find out from what and where it's itching. Is it really just about money? Can't richer parents just pay for additional private tutoring etc? What are your views of grammar schools (in theory, rather than how they were implemented 50 odd years ago)? As for the smug and self satisfied bit, from where are you getting that...? Are you just laying on the stereotypes and trying to get rise out of people, and in effect acting like a mischievous public schoolboy...?

[michael scuffil]

Tory grandee Rab Butler wanted to [abolish private education] in 1944 when charged with reforming education but was talked out of it by the Old Harrovian Churchill.

Rab went to Marlborough and Churchill famously hated Harrow. I think there was more to it than that...

[Avon]

Are you just laying on the stereotypes and trying to get rise out of people, and in effect acting like a mischievous public schoolboy...?

We know it can't be sarcasm, it doesn't do sarcasm:

...sarcasm is one of the stocks in trade people often pick up at boarding school. For many it's a substitute for intelligence.

[rockfreak]

In reply to Michael Scuffil, it's difficult to say in what way there's more to it. Churchill's remedy in 1944 was to flood the public schools with bursary pupils from more varied backgrounds, thus diluting them but not entirely eliminating them, while Butler wanted to abolish them all wholesale and fold everything into a one-tier system, a comprehensive system twenty years before Harold Wilson. Churchill objected and so Butler compromised and what we got in the state system were Grammars, Secondary Moderns and Technical schools. Butler called them Gold, Silver, and Iron pupils and admitted that it was not the solution he really wanted, although the leaving age was raised to sixteen and secondary education did at least become free. As far as hating Harrow, Michael, many eminent figures have hated their public schools but have not moved to eliminate them. Apparently the Duke of Wellington hated Eton (including the playing fields where the Battle of Waterloo was supposedly won) but never moved to close it down when in office later. The system was too useful for the big landowners of the day (like the Duke) who held all the votes that the franchise comprised back then. No wonder he and his ilk were so terrified of the French revolution.

[Katharine]

A correction to that, school leaving age was raised to FIFTEEN, in 1948, I think. I was already teaching the next time ROSLA came round, I can’t remember which year in the early 70s that it became 16.

[MrEd]

Apparently the Duke of Wellington hated Eton (including the playing fields where the Battle of Waterloo was supposedly won) but never moved to close it down when in office later.

I very much doubt that it would ever have crossed the Duke's mind that he could or should (get Parliament to) close down Eton, whatever his beef with it, or any other school. The very idea would have struck him as tyrannical and preposterous. By the mid-Victorian, the idea of the State as the solution had began to take hold in British political life, and as we can see with what is attributed to Butler, by 1944 after 5 years of State regimentation of life during the War, the dictum of Mussolini had been adopted without attribution into the political sphere, pretty much where it remains today, even before Mussolini was strung up from a garage.
"Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato."

[Pe.A]

Are you just laying on the stereotypes and trying to get rise out of people, and in effect acting like a mischievous public schoolboy...?

We know it can't be sarcasm, it doesn't do sarcasm:

...sarcasm is one of the stocks in trade people often pick up at boarding school. For many it's a substitute for intelligence.

I'd say irony is more prominent in British humour than sarcasm. But sarcasm is present in all British humour. Del Boy, David Brent, Norman Fletcher etc etc etc

[sejintenej]

You really have got a bee in your bonnet (or elsewhere) about something. I want to find out from what and where it's itching. Is it really just about money? Can't richer parents just pay for additional private tutoring etc?

It is not just rich people; when the state school refused to give my dyslexic son any help ("He'll never be anything so I'm not going to waste resources. I can just sit at the back of the class and do nothing") we had to pay for private schooling. Took 14 years to get any help from the education authority by which time it was too late.
It was the same education authority who decided that people who could only show an adoption certificate (as opposed to the required birth certificate) could not be considered for checking and employment.
Evidence seem to show that the state is not a competent scholastic employer; therefore the private sector must prevail

[LongGone]

[quote=Pe.A post_id=144886 time=1556695348 user_id

It is not just rich people; when the state school refused to give my dyslexic son any help ("He'll never be anything so I'm not going to waste resources. I can just sit at the back of the class and do nothing") we had to pay for private schooling. Took 14 years to get any help from the education authority by which time it was too late.

Clearly students like your son need some expert assistance, which apparently is/was a rarity. Here in Connecticut we have gone to the other extreme. Our local elementary school, with 65 students, has 48 employees: thirty years ago it had 11. Two thirds are not teachers but psychologists (2), second language experts (3), one-on-one tutors for students with learning disabilities (19), and paraprofessionals? (9).
It is discouraging to note that over the last thirty years, test scores have steadily dropped. Everyone points the finger elsewhere, so it is hard to know what is really going on.

[Mid A 15]

Just read the whole thread and realised that I haven't commented.

In short there were times I hated being at CH and felt very alone but equally there were times I loved it too.

Bit like life generally really I feel so not peculiar to CH.

As for Rockfreak's comments I think if you scratched the surface even he might admit in a moment of reflection that he gets carried along in the slipstream of his own rhetoric sometimes. The price of being 'handy' with a pen given that he apparently earned his living through journalism.

CH, as other walks of life, has had and doubtless still has its share of bad eggs and prats or do I mean ...'smug and self-satisfied pupils?' That doesn't mean you 'throw the baby out with the bath water' because of the transgressions of a minority.

[harryh]

Very well expressed, Andy.