One of my more thoughtful regular readers emails to ask whether I accept that the commercial schools criticised here yesterday inculcate traditional values and are centres of social conservatism.
On the contrary, at least where those which have boarders are concerned, they are just about the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the premise that children should be brought up with as little parental contact as possible except when it comes to paying the bills, and organised towards the acting out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments.
No wonder that their products, stalwart defenders, and users as parents, gave us Thatcher's Children Act. No wonder that they cheered on as the economic basis of paternal authority was destroyed - initially in working-class families and communities, but then very rapidly throughout society as a whole - by their heroine, who had left her own small children to hired help while she pursued first her legal and then her political ambitions.
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Great post. I knew a good number of boarding school kids in college, and they usually had bad relationships with their parents. At best, they had a respectful, but cold relationship. For somebody who grew up in a typical, loud but warm Italian family, this struck me as rather unfortunate.
ReplyDeleteAnd extremely unconservative, both in itself and in its effects.
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