ABSTRACT
Many societies have dealt with the problems of changing from child to adult, puberty and its consequences, by the seclusion of children. There are boys' and girls' dormitories or training camps outside the village in many parts of the world. The public school, which traditionally dealt with the period around puberty and the emergence of the adult, can be seen as a form of this institution. Throughout these five years, certainly until the dramatic drop in the age of puberty, it was dealing with small children who remained children throughout the period of seclusion. Kathryn Tidrick suggests that the mechanism was a powerful mix of a Darwinian struggle for survival in an almost Hobbesian world of "a war of all against all," a tribal gerontocratic system whereby the beaten would finally become the beater, and a toughening and cauterization caused by the deprivation of love.
