Traditional Values

Too many pupils in this country believe the principal purpose of life is shopping and whose sense of identity is located on Facebook and Twitter. Michael St John Parker asks: what has happened to traditional values?

A theme that runs insistently through the cant which passes for discourse about education in Britain today, is the notion that schools should be centres of innovation, places dedicated to the pursuit of change. We are not often given much of an indication about the objectives of all this change and innovation; there is an implication that we should deem it sufficient that our children grow up amid a constant ferment of feverish, if directionless, experimentation. But what about an alternative rationale, one that our parents would probably have seen as self-evident, namely, that schools should be transmitters of time-tested wisdom, citadels of established social values, custodians of the collective memory and guarantors of continuity?

I write this in the wake of a round of attendance at school carol services, nativity plays and general Christmas festivities - a round which I have trodden for years without number, as pupil, schoolmaster, parent, school governor, and now grandparent. All the usual cast were in evidence again this time: pale, drained Heads hoping faintly that the stillness of their exhaustion might be mistaken for Olympian calm; frantic Deputies pretending, if only to themselves, that their reflex-driven twitchings were actually expressions of a dynamic, super-competent energy; despairing music mistresses, willing to cast personal dignity to the winds in an effort to drive 2B through 'their' carol; muscle-proud P.E. masters, jockeying the supercilious grandees of the C.E. class into position in the cheerful knowledge that this charade is just the necessary prelude to a Common Room knees-up; vacantly complacent, if marginally bored fathers, given to mitigating the tedium by admiring - quite objectively, of course - the very elegant legs of the young French mistress; dewy-eyed but ferociously focussed mothers, clutching ridiculously small cameras with which to film every possible moment of young Hugo's moving performance as the Third King's Fourth Pageboy; little girls, dazzlingly bespangled, precociously composed and absurdly feminine in their dress-consciousness; little boys, with wandering eyes and awkward feet, and a disconcerting tendency to pick their noses while occupying prominent positions in the front rank of the Shepherds.

The magic, like the cast, never changes, nor does it fail. Whatever the reasons, or necessities, that first give rise to these observances, together with the other red-letter episodes that punctuate the school calendar - Speech Days, Sports Days, Remembrance Days, Bonfire Nights, Play Nights and all the other high and holy Days and Nights - the perennial reality is one of ritual, an activity which has value for the participants in and of itself. Every attendant detail, however inconsequential, has the Proustian power to become part of the mystery. The hot canvas smell of the Prizegiving tent, the frieze of faces seen in shifting, disconcerting chiaroscuro round Guy Fawkes' bonfire, the nerve-tingling pipe of the opening solo in 'Once in royal David's city...' - these are the stuff of memories, and will likely endure when the most carefully constructed lessons and the most meaningful exercises have been long forgotten.

Rituals, so the anthropologists tell us, assure the participants of their identities within a larger context; they mark the passage of time, and by the same token suggest patterns of causation; they offer intuitions of order and meaning, diminishing the menace of chaos and the dread of futility; they channel the creative impulse, and discipline the restless intellect. And these, surely, are the very things we want our children to gain from their schooling. The pattern of the day, week, term, year, is what gives productive habit to the mind and moulds the personality. For most children, the medium really is the message; the very act of 'going to school' is more powerful by far than the information which is so laboriously conveyed by the curriculum, and subsequently so joyfully discarded. The human mind judges first by appearances, remembers visually, gives primacy to perceptions of shape over analysis of content in the search for meaning.

Of course, any habitual observance, whether at school or in the larger world, must always be at risk of losing touch with its origins, and so becoming empty of meaning. The pioneer recorder of English folk-lore and folk-song, Cecil Sharp, remarked how it was possible to tell the difference between an authentic survival and a mere revival, from the expression on the participants' faces: whereas the revivalists would generally be found grinning madly, the genuine traditionalists would be wearing expressions of glum weariness as they trod their time-worn tracks. He might have gone on to observe that such glumness would often be the prelude to the extinction of that particular customary observance.

At its worst, custom that has been hollowed out over time can become oppressive and destructive, a source of fear rather than reassurance, a tool in the hands of manipulators and tyrants. In the middle of the last century it became a common matter of complaint against prep and public schools that they had fallen deep into this benighted abyss, with results that were famously exposed in accounts such as those of Alec Waugh's Loom of Youth, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and Lindsay Anderson's film If. The sad story of the Easter Islanders seemed about to be retold on the playing fields of Eton.

The reproaches of the twentieth-century critics were richly deserved at the time, even if some of them may seem, in retrospect, to have been rather generously coloured by self-pity. And whether fair or not, they may have served a salutary purpose in helping to awaken the schools to a better realisation of their place and function in a society that was changing around them. But all that is in the past - despite the attempts of Mr. Brown's Government to revive the class war. Nowadays, if there was any justice, the boot would be on the other foot; it is the state schools, bedevilled by political correctness, multiculturalism, and a host of liberal shibboleths, that are failing their pupils at least as badly by their feeble shapelessness as the public schools formerly did by their hidebound rigidity. But today's failing comprehensives attract only hand-wringing from Whitehall bureaucrats, rather than the caustic attentions of today's literary heavyweights.

The state schools' flight from traditional observances and patterns of activity is not a light matter of fashion or an unconsidered consequence of thoughtless change; it is the product of a profound crisis in the identity of our national society. We all know the story, though there is still a deep reluctance to talk about it, let alone to face up to the reality. Social structures - already enfeebled by twentieth-century wars and economic decline - have been swept aside, leaving most of our educators bewildered and uncertain about their purpose. Government attempts to supply a sense of direction have taken the form of increasingly frenzied, and counter-productive, micro-management. The lowest common denominators have come to prevail, and the objective of the schooling process seems to be satisfied by the turning out of young people who believe that the principal purpose of life is shopping, whose sense of identity, both individual and social, is located on Facebook and Twitter, and whose role models are to be found on the sports field or in the Strictly Come Dancing studio.

In circumstances such as these, the choice of a school for one's child becomes something that approaches a declaration of faith, or at least of cultural allegiance. Parents who know their own minds will search for schools that can reasonably be expected to nurture and promote the values that the family upholds. They will seek schools that operate systems of rewards and sanctions which positively promote virtue as they perceive it, and actively discourage vice - eschewing false egalitarianism and relativist morality. They will support schools offering patterns of activity that strengthen self-respect and stimulate a sense of social responsibility. And they will applaud customs and traditions which enshrine shared values and consolidate the collective identity.

So let's hear it for prep schools as the guardians of the sacred flame!

Michael St. John Parker is a Contributing Editor of Attain. He was formerly Headmaster of Abingdon and is a Fellow of Winchester.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Attain.