Politician Behaviour
Chums: Simon Kuper: 2022: Profile Books Ltd
I found in this a disturbing and depressing recognition of the next stage in the empowerment of people damaged by the public school system that distorted my own perception of myself, other people and the planet. It describes the metamorphosis of the school bred nymph form into the unfeeling adult arsehole…
Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power: Sasha Swire: 2020: Little, Brown
I hated reading this. I felt I had been slimed by becoming party to the unfeeling, unempathetic, privileged, corrupt conversations between these inept Dunning-Kruger aficionados at the top of the pile. On the other hand, it makes the perfect backdrop for TWAL…
Why We Get the Wrong Politicians: Isabel Hardman: 2018: Atlantic Books
She does point out that there are many MPs who are very human and who work hard for the common good. However, it does seem they are not amongst those who rise to the top…
Boarding School Damage
Raising public awareness about boarding; offering therapeutic help for adult ex-boarders; providing specialist training for therapists
The Making Of Them: The British Attitude To Children And The Boarding School System: Nick Duffell: 2000 Lone Arrow Press.
Why do the British still send their children away to boarding school? What are the attitudes underpinning this practice which mystifies foreigners? What does it mean for a child to be sent away from home and immediately have to survive in an unfamiliar custom-ridden world, without love, family life or privacy? Will it be ”the making of him”, or will it be a trauma from which he may never recover?
Richly illustrated with pictures and the narratives of adult ex-boarders in psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how some forms of enduring distress in adult life may be traced back to the early losses of home and family. Developed from clinical research and informed by attachment and child development theories ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ is a new term that offers a theoretical framework on which the psychotherapeutic treatment of ex-boarders may build.
Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class: Alex Renton: 2017: W&N
Leaving aside other torments, the psychological damage wrought by separation from parental, and particularly maternal, love is clearly life-long in many cases. Renton quotes individuals who, long into adulthood, are incapable of forming loving or trusting bonds with anyone. But he also describes a culture that makes light of it all, through shared jokes, class-based rituals and a kind of snobbish pride.
Private schools are institutions that children who are already privileged attend and have those privileges further entrenched, almost certainly for life, through a high-quality, richly-resourced education… a society that mouths the virtues of equality of opportunity, of fairness and of social cohesion, the continuation of this educational apartheid amounts to an act of national self-harm that does all of us serious damage.
Articles
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/20/damage-boarding-school-sexual-abuse-children
“He had no stand-out trauma. Just unhappiness. He was never buggered, or anything. It’s just that he left home at eight. And that’s why I feel so strongly about this subject – I just think that this is an enormous wrong to do to a child. Private school has contributed so much to social and educational injustice in Britain, and boarding school has had a particularly powerful effect – it has made an elite that is not empathetic, that believes hardship is good for you. That finds situations that should inspire sympathy deeply uncomfortable.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/30/politicians-admitting-wrong-brexit-trump
“They play for high stakes – but never their own,” raged the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde in an article about British parliamentarians’ allergy to accountability. “It’s the sort of system-milking demonised in a benefits office in Grimsby but regarded as career progression in Westminster. It makes it appear there’s no glass ceiling in modern political life, just a reinforced lead floor. Once you’re in, you basically have to die to stop earning rewards.”
The elite tradition is to send children away at a young age to be educated. But future politicians who suffer this ‘privileged abandonment’ often turn out as bullies or bumblers. A psychotherapist explains why…
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/aug/29/boarding-schools-produce-wounded-leaders
Those who go to private schools compensate for irredeemable loss by a bogus sense of entitlement that drags our politics into the mud…
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/24/the-only-way-to-end-the-class-divide-the-case-for-abolishing-private-schools The continuing gap between state and private education is reinforcing privilege and harming the prospects of another generation. The only solution is integration.