Three Cs and a D

A new fast-selling book in England last week cracked an angry whip at the public (i.e., private) school system. Called George Brown's Schooldays, and written by Bruce Marshall, * it parodies Thomas Hughes's preachy, sentimental story of life at Rugby, Tom Brown's School Days (1857). The new novel rips the hide from the hidebound educational philosophy that has produced many great men and even more numerous small ones.

At a public school known as Dunmere, students learn what the self-righteous Headmaster calls "the three Cs: Christianity, the cold bath and cricket." They notably fail to learn a big D: democracy. Even among themselves, these young sons of bishops and colonels and bank directors practice an exquisite snobbishness. A boy's standing depends largely on whether his "pater" has "tons of tin" and what expensive delicacies stock his "grub box." The healthy mind in a healthy body, classic goal of public schools, degenerates into a mens corrupted by smut and a corpus battered by flogging.

Marshall dates his book 1912-14 and in a prefatory note says carefully: "I understand that the abuses so common thirty years ago no longer exist." But Schooldays reminded its readers that the Government's Fleming Report (TIME, Aug. 7, 1944), urging that public schools admit Judy O'Grady's kids too, was still gathering dust.

* Author of U.S. best-selling The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, and a public school boy himself.

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