ABSTRACT

Some of the elements of the public school image were suggested in the last chapter—the concentration on team games, the stress on chivalry and the knightly life, the ideal of self-sacrifice for the empire and on the field of battle. The positive side of this was a loyalty, hardihood, and common feeling which deeply affected men's work in the world. The negative side was a tendency to press boys into a common mould, the surrender of freedom and spontaneity to a mask of good form, a narrowness of sympathy towards those who did not belong to the elite group. The public school ideal was in many ways totalitarian, yet it maintained its influence in a society which was not at all totalitarian and which was affected by many other currents—liberal, egalitarian, socialist—of many different kinds. It says something for public school training that its products were sufficiently adaptable to preserve their influence in a rapidly changing world.