Adult Boy at Traditional School

It’s Monday, so my day started with an early-morning Latin test. I obtained a mark of 24 out of 25; and so far from being conceitedly pleased by that result, I am ashamed of my failure – for which I shall be appropriately punished. If anyone should find it strange that I am not merely accepting the imposition of a Latin test but also accepting punishment for any lost marks, the point is easily explained: I am merely a young boy, only just eleven years old, so of course I accept such things. And I am at school, so such things are not just accepted but expected. (But isn’t this the middle of the school holidays? Not in my case, no: I don’t have school holidays – I don’t deserve them, don’t need them, and wouldn’t know what to do with them.) Now, since this blog is intended to tell the truth – and the strict truth, too – as boys should always be required to do, I had better add that I am in fact fully adult and fully consenting to the life I am required to live: it is required of myse...

In former times (so my memory and general lore tell me), it was generally taken as a self-evident fact that boys needed punishment; today, of course, ideas are very different. For my own purposes, as an adult boy, I favour the old-fashioned view. However, I am not for a moment wanting to campaign for applying 'traditional' treatment to child boys living in the world of today. I am myself an adult boy, still (psychologically) living in the world as it was in about 1960, so different standards apply. My own need for punishment is radically different from what most people (including myself) would recommend for children now– but is interestingly similar to, though probably rather more extreme than, the general practice decades ago, when I was a child boy myself. I have become intrigued by the realisation that my attitude to punishment as an adult schoolboy reflects the sort of attitudes that were, at least implicitly, still current when I was a child boy, but which were increasin...