Figure 1.-- Gone are the days when these schools were bastions of snobbery teaching upper-class etiquette, although in the public mind this image persits. Many schools have significantly shifted their educational aims and the atmosphere at the schools. We saw none of this among the children we visited, and certainly no effort by the schools to inculcate this kind of thinking. |
Many in Britain see preparatory schools as a bastion of privlige and old fashioned methods and objectives. Many Britons had their views of prep schools indelibaly set by the BBC documentary "7 Up" where three little prep school boys who had not yet learned disgression openly discussed their school in an extrodinarily prigish manner.
We suspect that this was not an uncommon attitude at the time. As far as we can tell, there have been substantail changes at most prep schools. Gone are the days when these schools were bastions of snobbery teaching upper-class etiquette, although in the public mind this image persits. Many schools have significantly shifted their educational aims and the atmosphere at the schools. We saw none of this among the children we visited, and certainly no effort by the schools to inculcate this kind of thinking. The headmaster at Harecroft reports that, "To those outside what goes in a prep school is often something of an enigma, even to the people living right on our doorstep. So many feel that schools such as ours are for the surpassingly intelligent only; that we are populated entirely by whizz-kids from the professional classes; that we are exclusive; that we still attach supreme importance to Latin, Greek, fagging and corporal punishment; and that we look
inwards' and backwards; rather then upwards and forwards."
