Melissa Benn makes an excellent and informed case for the knock-on social and educational damage inflicted on British society by the peculiar, continued fascination with our anachronistic system of private schools (How do we end the class divide?, The long read, 24 August).
But it is mystifying that she does not refer to the growing body of psychological evidence, reported in five or so books over the past decade and half, that detail the psychological harm caused to many of the children of its customers, particularly those who were sent away to board. These children’s parental attachments were deliberately broken in the name of socialisation, and many in later life become what I have called “wounded leaders”, compensating for irredeemable loss by a bogus sense of entitlement that drags our politics into the mud.
It is as if the cross-disciplinary revolution was not happening; or rather, as if psychology were still some crank subject that a classic public school teacher, living inside all our heads, would pooh pooh as “navel gazing”. It is alarming that even the left seems to be as caught up in this trance of denial as firmly as the good conservative folk of middle England. No wonder Europe seems so threatening to us, where pedagogy and civics are required study for many teenagers.
Nick Duffell
Author, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A guide to therapeutic work with boarding school survivors (with Thurstine Basset)
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