ABSTRACT
In an essay on ‘Affection in Education’ published in the 1899 volume of the International Journal of Ethics, Edward Carpenter defended the utility for personal development of strong same-sex attachments that might ‘sometimes take quite intense and romantic forms’, either between older boys and younger boys in the same school, or between teachers and their pupils. Since ‘it is beginning to be seen that the affections have an immense deal to say in the building up of the brain and the body’, he declared, the ‘evolution and organization’ of the affections was ‘probably going to become an important part of school management’ (Carpenter, 1899, pp. 482–483). Such relationships between schoolboys, Carpenter argued, were beneficial on both sides. ‘The younger boy looks on the other as a hero’, ‘thrills with pleasure at his words of praise or kindness’, and ‘contracts habits’ from him, while the ‘elder one, touched, becomes protector and helper; the unselfish side of his nature is drawn out, and he develops a real affection and tenderness towards the younger’. Similarly affectionate relationships between pupils and their teachers could also be valuable for the former. Carpenter described the case of ‘rather a wild, “naughty” boy’ of eleven or twelve who had ‘given his parents (working-class folk) a good deal of trouble’, but who came to feel ‘the strongest affection’ for his teacher at ‘some sort of night-school or evening class’, with ‘most favorable’ results for his development (p. 484). The ‘unformed mind’, Carpenter remarked, ‘requires an ideal of itself, as it were, to which it can cling or towards which it can grow’; and whether things turned out well ‘depend immensely on the character of the elder one, on the self-restraint and tenderness of which he is capable, and on the ideal of life which he has in his mind’ (p. 485).
