Prefect beatings and fagging under threat by modernisers
The Daily Mirror, a newspaper aimed at working people, has some fun with a report in 1968 that said elite public school needed to reform and stop prefects beating younger boys.
No
more
of
those
Eton
suits
*
No
more fagging
*
AND
..
I
say
you
chaps,
GIRLS
in
the
Remove
No more sounds of whacking echoing down the cloistered
corridors. No more cries of “Fag!” from Brown Major’s study.
But – I say, chaps, what a turn up! – the sound of
girlish voices coming from the Remove common room.
The old school tradition gets a knockout blow in the
Newsom Report ... and some revolutionary changes may be on the way.
The Newsom commission would banish completely the
caning of junior boys by senior boys
Wrong
The “beating of boys by boys” is quite wrong, the
report decides.
Fagging, too is “undesirable.”
The report goes on: “There is nothing to be said for
boys having to run messages, clean shoes or sweep out studies for the sole
benefit of senior boys.
Personal fagging, like beating by prefects is a type
of excessive authority which would be deeply resented by the vast majority of
children in the maintained sector (the new influx of pupils) and their
parents.”
The report suggests that girls be boarders at some
public [elite] schools on a co-educational basis.
Aid
This, it is suggested, will be a greater educational
aid to girls than some of their own closed-world schools where ...”the clear
tones of the distinctive upper-class accent echo down the corridors.”
The report also takes a mild swipe at public schools
which jealously guard their “uniforms” – like the Eton collar and the Harrow
boater.
On this point the report says: “There are still
schools at which the uniform is not only deliberately eccentric or archaic but
also flaunts class differences.”
As published in Daily
Mirror, 23 July 1968.
Picture credit: Hotspur.
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Traditional
School Discipline
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