The boarding school is a particularly British institution. Even though child welfare is taken seriously now and schools try to stop bullying, the old horrors of boarding have still not been banished, and there is a “surge” of criminal cases against boarding schools, whether for past or current misdemeanors is not clear.
Even if you manage to eliminate sexual abuse, bullying and cruel punishments, the fact remains that cutting young children off from their families and creating emotional isolation (the boarding school syndrome) creates all sorts of difficulties in later life. It means for so many adults that they never learn how to love, or how to accept love, either.
Boarding schools in Britain are the principal bastion of the privileged class. In fact, they mostly do a very good job in the classroom and are very successful in getting pupils into top universities ( albeit this is sometimes owing to personal connections). It would be a shame to do anything to lower academic achievement, but is seems that some of the old culture of sporting hero worship, cruelty and bullying still goes on.
Epicurus would probably have advocated the idea that the school inspectors investigate these issues in addition to the teaching, and close down any school where these things were rife.
I was sent to a boarding school at seven years old. The problems stemmed from two pieces of the culture: senior boys were given too much power by semi-detached teachers, and, without training or restraint, abused their powers. It was they who beat, and often they who bullied, younger boys. And because the school was run by hearties, sport was more important than school work, which created two classes of child- those who excelled at rugby and those who didn’t.
Secondly, the school had a monastic tradition that had never changed. if you were seen, at say 17 years old, so much as talking to a girl you were expelled. Seventeen is not a good age to be punished for the natural urge to chase girls. The result was that normal, heterosexual lads acted out as you might expect.
All this was truly stupid and harmful. Maybe it stood you in good stead as a District Officer in India, but scarcely equipped you for ordinary 20th Century life
By the way, nowadays some 24,000 of the UK’s 68,000 boarding school pupils are foreign nationals. I don’t know what they make of it all.
The corrosive qualities that you described–sports as the measure of almost everything, bullying, etc.–were displayed in the English boarding school where it was intra-class boorishness. Those qualities in the men who staffed the British Empire, even with the externals of good manners, wouldn’t be softened in the heat of Uttar Pradesh, they’d be exaggerated, if anything.
It doesn’t seem as dire as you suggest. The strange thing is that in later life my school mates seem very gentlemanly, lacking the right-wing indifference to those less fortunate than themselves. Behaviour of the British in India, for instance, must have varied hugely, but the thing public schools drummed into yoa is to be calm and unemotional – and fair. So the district officers in general might have lacked some ordinary emotion but hoped to be seen to dispense justice.
The problem s really came when the missionaries went out there, disapproving of cohabitation with local women. English girls were then sent out and the British as a result enclosed themselves in cantonments, separated from the greater population and losing touch with it. From then on the independence movement took off. Sigh! Religion once again!