Stockholm Syndrome among Old Blues

[rockfreak]

Stockholm Syndrome is described as a theory which claims to show why hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors. This got me thinking about boarding schools. I note from this site that even some who found the school rugged, loveless, tolerant of bullying, etc, still make excuses for it. It was the making of me. I survived. Life is tough anyway. I can stand on my own two feet. You must take the rough with the smooth (sex abuse and good education in one jolly package). No modern theory of child development recommends sending children away from home at a young (or even youngish) age to be brought up by complete strangers. And no other country in western Europe (with whom we might compare ourselves) seems to need this system - boarding is usually a last resort in these cases (parents peripatetic for instance) than a chosen option here for the Tory-voting, Telegraph-reading brigade or those less well-off who see Christ's Hospital as an opportunity to ape the Etons and Harrows of this world.

[MrEd]

Is your only purpose in life to come on here and patronise your fellow OBs? Asking for a friend.

[SandysJ]

Sexual Abuse and Bullying are so wrong in any environment or establishment, but to liken boarding schools to a kidnap victim's relationship, with their captor(s), is right off the mark, offensive and too broad a damning judgement.
I have every sympathy with all the victims and the fact that CH has taken 40 or 50 years to make a formal acknowledgement of it's failings towards those that suffered.
I thought the bullying I received, at CH, was serious stuff till I read, on this forum, how much more some had suffered.
But a big majority of Old Blues (and pupils at other boarding schools) have enjoyed their education, come out the better and don't have regrets, let alone Stockholm Syndrome.

[sejintenej]

And no other country in western Europe (with whom we might compare ourselves) seems to need this system - boarding is usually a last resort in these cases (parents peripatetic for instance) than a chosen option here for the Tory-voting, Telegraph-reading brigade or those less well-off who see Christ's Hospital as an opportunity to ape the Etons and Harrows of this world.

We have had this before. Taking Western Europe into account (as freaky has) boarding at school is well established in at least France; indeed one past contributor was a master at a school local to where I lived for 19 years. I know the school (but not the girls) well and from his description it was almost a brothel.Over there distances are such that boarding is common because daily transport is simply not available.
I gave the example of the daughter of a close friend who had the choice of only two schools in the entire European France which taught "her subject". The schools are in Toulouse and outside Paris and she lives about 90 minutes drive from Toulouse if you break the speed limit. (Incidentally she captained "Les Bleus" on a tour of England.. .
Of course that is an extreme example but our tiny town had a large dormitory block which was usually occupied five days a week. Incidentally the entire school would move for two weeks a year to the mountains for the skiing. (I never saw any evidence near the school itself of any sporting facilities.)

I would like to read the learned and oft quoted treatise which provides the unassailable evidence of parents choosing CH simply because they couldn't afford Eton and Harrow. One reason could be why some parents want their children to go to CH - simply because they "got somewhere" as a result of having been there. What did not appear to be common knowledge was that a housemaster was court martialled prior to D-Day; not a desirable advert for CH. I do know of one boy who was set on fire (his entire back was a massive scar 50 years later) at one of rockfreak's named schools but sent his sons there; his close prison-camp friend also sent his boys to the same school; of the four only one did anything useful in life..

[rockfreak]

I posted my thoughts onto the Boarding School Action site and ex-boarder, psychologist and author Simon Partridge replied. He reminded me that boarding schools are total institutions (along with monasteries, military barracks and mental hospitals). OK, so we were not actually restrained at CH but we were effectively kid (at age 11) napped, although 9 in my case. We might have felt like absconding but didn't want to disappoint our parents who had set so much store by our place at this school, although they might have thought differently if they'd known the dangers of being exposed to sadists and pervs. But of course pomposity, grandiosity and dishonesty has always been the stock in trade of these schools. So I stick by my point. It doesn't have to be the Symbionese Liberation Army. I wonder if anyone remembers this episode? Respectable white middle America had a nervous breakdown. There was the Hearst heiress in league with these black dudes, robbing a bank.

[SandysJ]

So an 11 year old who hasn't given consent to a specific journey, trip away, visit etc and taken anywhere by their parents is 'kidnap'?
So many things, in everybody's lives, could be re-interpretated as victimisation.
Donald Trump is alive and well!

Hey, but most of us Old Blues did visit CH before becoming pupils and some of us were eager to go.

[marty]

OK, so we were not actually restrained at CH but we were effectively kid (at age 11) napped, although 9 in my case.

Suggest you watch The Program on Netflix (if you haven't already) for a genuine example of kidnapping. Truly terrifying stuff.

[rockfreak]

John Sandys said that we gave our consent at 11. But how did we know what we were giving our consent to? At that age we tend to give our consent to anything that our parents suggest will be good for us, whether we think it a good idea or not. Education for several years by strangers of whom we know nothing seems a bit more important in the scheme of things than trips out with mum and dad.

[SandysJ]

I didn't actually say we gave our consent at 11 years old.
I said I visited CH and was eager to become a pupil.
I didn't give a verbal or written actual consent but I did pass an entrance exam.
Bearing in mind it was 54 years ago (for me), I was a child and all children had decisions made for them, by parents, social services, courts, schools etc.
I believe that would still be the legal situation today, and it would still be accepted that children have decisions made for them, by the adult world.
'Kidnap', by Rockfreaks definition, is happening constantly, everyday, everywhere to millions of kids.
My Grandchildren would claim they didn't give consent yo go anywhere especially school!
I'll stick with the generally recognised definition of an "illegal act of stealing people".

[sejintenej]

I didn't actually say we gave our consent at 11 years old.
I said I visited CH and was eager to become a pupil.
I didn't give a verbal or written actual consent but I did pass an entrance exam.
Bearing in mind it was 54 years ago (for me), I was a child and all children had decisions made for them, by parents, social services, courts, schools etc.

I accept this post in the circumstances which applied to him.

In my case I was nine and had already gone through three ways of using language; snooty in Windsor growing up as a baby, semi Irish in Belfast not even in school, a ****** form of Devonian in Devon. Coming to whoresham was an impossibility because of the words and accents for which the housemaster gave me hell. (like "never pass forward" so I threw the ball over my head and got hell - any any excuse for him to give his usual hell)

Choice? - no way at all - dem be funny folk up thar. Far from "ule"

Education - because of geographic and weather difficulties most education stopped at age 11 because nobody could physically get to secondary school That said of my two "mates" from that era one became school headmaster in Weston super Mare and the other owns an estate agency in one of the extremely expensive towns in Britain!

Verbal permission? - it was a condition of my widow mother's employment!

For me there was no real entry exam - I had to be healthy but I don't think I even had to hold a pen.

Regrets ; definitely - I learned from the prep onwards to avoid people like the proverbial plague and even now I hate company. I did have to be with people but perhaps my two major public successes were alone (rear page of the FT) and with just one friend (Front page of the FT)

[Winkie]

I agree entirely with Rockfreak. I'm so glad my children never had to undergo the madness of boarding-schools, though I acknowledge that CH is no doubt a much more humane place now than in the 1960s, not least because it has gone co-ed.

[keibat]

Clearly, there have been many whose experience of CH was traumatic, whether because of bullying, sexual abuse, or more simply the impact of a highly hierarchical society. Like Rockfreak, I started at CH aged 9 (nearly 10), in the Prep for a year before moving up to a proper house; and I stayed on into the Grecians, leaving at Christmas in my final year only because I'd got a university place by then and had been invited to go and live with family friends in California for half a year. I loved my time at CH; thoroughly enjoyed the academic, dramatic and musical opportunities (even back then in the late 50s early 60s) which have led to lifelong choir activities, and the many friendships that were formed.
Yes, boarding schools are 'total institutions', listed along with the other ones mentioned by Rockfreak in Erving Goffman's brilliant book Asylums (1961); and different from the others in that the inmates are children (no longer true in monasteries in the West, but still also applies to Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayan societies at least), and therefore more open to mental and emotional socialization.
BUT: in my days, in a single-sex boarding school, there were of course sexual tensions (as in any institution dealing with young people through the puberty phase), and we were aware of that. I never suffered or was involved in anything that could be called abuse. From some of the comments that are made, both here on the Forum and more widely, you could get the impression that CH, and all boarding schools, were virtually brothels – but that is gross and distorting exaggeration of the abuse that does occur (as it also does in day schools).
Like many in my generation, the main reason I was there was because my father had been killed in the War, and my mother was concerned about the potential risks for a single child growing up with a single parent. Ironically, that is far more widespread now, without war casualties on that scale. She believed that CH would offer me a more healthy environment. I'm far from convinced that this was true, but I know that this was her motivation. Did it have something to do with a general public assumption that 'public schools' were an admirable form of education? Yes, of course it did. Was CH a backdoor alternative to a fully fee paying school? No, that was never an option. If I hadn't gone to CH, I would have carried on at a local grammar school, and my experiences would have been different, better in some ways and more constrained in others.
I'm glad CH went back to its historical state of coeducation, and I have strong reservations about the privileged opportunities that private schools have in relation to the state schools; but that's not because I'm reacting against a bad education, or abuse, but against privilege.
I'm sad that there are as many people as there are who have bad memories of the school. I also come across people who have terrible memories of their day schools. I know that some of my school friends came to escape from really bad family situations.
Generalizations are generally misleading.

[rockfreak]

So how much does go on in day schools? The Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse is in no doubt. Summarising its findings it said: "Children in residential schools are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse as a result of their isolation from their families and carers and the involvement of staff in their intimate personal care."

The ex-boarder and researcher Alex Renton is in no doubt as to the disproportionate nature of offending, After all, the boarding schools only occupy 1% of schools. Over the 20 or so years that my three daughters were in secondary education there wasn't a whiff of scandal in our locality. I think most parents would agree that you can usually discern unhappiness when your kids come home at night.

[sejintenej]

Reading back is just infuriating. I was dumped at the gate after nearly a full day travelling in a place where they didn't speak proper English. I knew Devonian perhaps, a bit of Breton perhaps, I don't know but that the housemaster had been to our town but didn't understand that our patois was not englsh - imho he was garblin chinese. As a different example some time later we were instructed that we must nevcer pass/ throw forward. Absolutely no reason. I told you to do this so do it - demigod. Simple, I turned around and threw the ball over my shoulder and got a talking to in googlespeakfor throwing "backwards". Then there were the lights in the sky coming at me. coming straight for me - was I scaresd!!!!1 No, I had never seen an airypane, didn't know what the hell he was talking a bout. . On top of that everyone spoke a queer unintelligible language. There was nothing ule about that place.

Much much later, as Trades Mon I had to accompany the worse victim to the sicker for treament. Got back to the house and was informed "Kit wants you - now!" Go into his study especting trouble and got it. "David your mother died this mornings, The Bevans are coming to collect you this afternoon. You can stay in here if you wish" and he walked out. Cold! So I am an orphan without family and my mothers' emploers are collecting me but I do have a tent.. Lots of questions like where will I live, what happens now ......... none answered. In the event, you will have seen "Upstairs, Downstairs" - I moved "upstairs" but they were even more fussy about everything than the TV. The comments by someone from France and a professional language teacher about my French teacher were "interesting".
This followed soon after another boy Wade, was away for a while - I suspect that Kit had a similar talk about me, which helped.

Then there were the holidays. Hell. not accepted because I had been with those strange folk who invade for a few weeks in the year. So, school is hell, holidays are d i f f i c u l t. I was even deprived of the possible pleasure of going up to the altar to get my bible. Yes, I got it from a grudging Seaman in his house and as for going around to say goodbye - just one ma

Thinking back hoiw interested were the masters/mistressess. Kit governed by terror. The French master was described aspecialistFrench man/teacher as noy having the first idea. I coukld never even pretend to have any idea. In a more modern world my grandaughter got a B then went with he friend chatting to Frenc kids for 4 evenings - she learned more in that time than in all the lessons. ound in the language I got to be able to hiold my own on meetings in carioce after perhaps 40 hours hard work.

[dsm]

No comprendo!