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A few years
ago I heard the sister of a friend, then a student at the school I had
attended
in Santiago many years ago, complaining vehemently against the newly
appointed
headmaster. The man in question was a shady character, imported
directly from
the vast and supercilious Arcadia of traditional English public schools and had come
to Chile greatly recommended by people in his snobbish
circle of
educators, sporting an impressive curriculum vitae jam-packed with
easily recognizable
names. He was not, however, as popular with the students as he was with
the
educational board. Far from it being the typical case of a teenager
harbouring
ill feelings towards a repressive school administration –although there
was
undoubtedly some of that too-, the girl’s resentment was aimed instead
at everything
that in her mind the man represented. Bewildered she turned around,
eyes ablaze
with amused disbelief, and proceeded to confide me with one of the
causes for
her dread: the man had been seen walking around the school wearing a
cape.
What the
girl did not know, of course, was that what in her eyes was a cape was
in fact
a gown, and that wearing one is not so much a symbol of insanity as it
is a
symbol belonging to the alien English dogma of public school status
quo.
Nevertheless, I could still understand her worry as if it were my own
–I had
attended that same school for thirteen long years, too. It would seem
out of
place (not to mention downright strange) to find a headmaster in the
remote
confines of South America trying to emulate the pomposity of British
private
education; yet, as can be seen in the magic realist metaphors of
García
Márquez, the rhetoric of Borges or the demagogy of the
dictator(s) in turn, it
is not always necessary for Latin America to make sense in order to
function.
The romantic pseudo-European characteristics permeating the continent
have
managed to preserve numerous vestiges of a colonial legacy, in which
the local
version of the British public school still remains a visible, if
waning,
anachronism.
As a child,
I grew up in a place where English was spoken inside an out of the
classroom, a
place where the politically correct stories of Peter, Jane and Pat the
dog were
read to the background tune of morning hymns sang at assembly; where
prefects
proudly held cups won at weekend rugby matches and fake tradition
blended
seamlessly with faux philosophies of fair play. This was a school for
the
elite, and it therefore accommodated a variety of elitist rituals
ranging from
the snobbish and high-minded to the cultish and the absurd. Luckily it
managed
to remain free from the fagging of Eaton lore, yet bolstered similar
preachings
of self-righteous individualism and hero worship. “What are you
doing”,
a heavy-accented English headmaster would ask from atop a wooden pulpit
carved
with the school insignia, “to uphold the reputation of the school
in the
local community?”
Outside the
school walls, however, reality knocked upon us like a maddened
Caupolicán poised
for war. Crossing the gates at four o’clock, our regimented daily
Arcadia
vanished, giving way to a chaotic world where a thick dialect of
Spanish was
spoken, people played football and covert radicals spray-painted walls
with
anti-dictatorship slogans. In this world shirts were untucked, England
was
remote and English unpronounceable. Instead of scones with jam,
afternoon tea
consisted of toasted marraquetas and butter. Outside the
school walls
England did not exist. To make up for this, immigrant
families like mine stuck religiously to the rituals and customs that
brought
them closer to their ancestral home –the ‘real’ world, as it appeared
in their
minds. Every Saturday at my grandfather’s we were indoctrinated with
protestant
values of stoic self-discipline, thrifty commerce and a romantic vision
of the
superior English way. Tea was served exactly at five, and my
grandmother’s
scones were delicious.
At the heart
of this schizophrenic relationship between country, nation and patrie,
institutions like the public school and the country club were central.
In 1904
Blest-Gana, after vigorously studying the attitudes of the spendthrift
Chilean
bourgeoisie in Paris, came to the grim conclusion that “our children, raised
amongst different people, cannot have the
aspirations rightful to their origins, but those of the society in
which they
live in.” While one might sceptically wonder as to what Blest-Gana
means by ‘different
people’, if we consider his statements only as a mobile for cultural
expectations they might start to explain the raison d’etre for
the
pseudo-aristocratic snobbery of institutions like private schools.
Furthermore,
it could be said that the social expectations borne in a school in
which
outside society is mostly shunned and replaced by an Arcadia of
self-contained
tradition, rules and romantic fantasies of heroic legends on the rugby
field
scarily resembles Blest-Gana’s appreciation of his own ilk of
transplanted
Chileans: a small elite that, in trying to fit an alien cultural ideal,
looks
at their native society with contempt. In short, they are beings that,
if not
lacking a distinct cultural identity completely, possess a flimsy one
that
discords with the reality of most other people in the country.
Naturally,
with a sense of cultural identity as foggy as the streets of
Victorian London it is institutions like the school and the country
club, then,
which provided a strong one of their own making. My grandfather would
spend
whole afternoons on the outer terrace of the Prince Of Wales Country
Club, sipping
tea and discussing tennis scores with the old chaps; nevertheless,
discussions
of politics and the ever-increasing tensions between the proletarian
masses and
the landed aristocracy were probably all but carefully avoided. This is
not to
say that they were necessarily ignored, but markedly tinted by similar
political slants and thoughtless head nodding. After all, the public
school is
a reactionary institution that, in the spirit of the Confucian “man of
culture”
as quoted by Buruma, creates administrators rather than
revolutionaries. The
key concept is moderation, coupled with elitism. By way of his
upbringing, my
grandfather was, and strived to be, a gentleman through and through:
conservative, gallant, strict –the epitome of the benevolent patriarch.
It was
an image in which a whole generation of Robbies, Archies and Geralds
would
follow suit. Aged exponents of my
grandfather’s generation can be
still seen strutting around the Prince of Wales Country Club carrying
golf
clubs and tennis racquets, muttering ta-tas and toodle-oohs to each
other,
while fancy old ladies rush to the leisure salon for their next game of
bridge.
This is not
to say that the school remained so flagrantly anachronistic
through the decades, as even institutions that pride themselves on
tradition still
require a certain amount of change in order to keep coexisting with
reality. Both
my father and my grandfather attended the same place, yet our
experiences varied
greatly according to the times and the events taking place on the other
side of
the school fence. But it was my grandfather’s generation which suffered
the
full blast of English old-school snobbery in the form of caps, boxing,
Latin
and caning –the latter with a malicious blast of its own. (In those
times the
place was still a boarding school, and teachers thought it better for
discipline to be handed out in painful bouts of questionable pedagogy).
Here
was a perfect little island of reaction brought straight out from a
Thomas Hughes
novel, a breeding ground for a schizophrenic elite that, half-Chilean
and
half-British, could still not amount to a real whole in their defective
halves.
As time
passed and the number of matriculations grew, names of children with
different
family backgrounds –and by that I mean, non-British families- started
popping
up in the role call lists. Soon, the schoolboy days of Archie and Giles
would
be over. By the time my father graduated in 1973, the school had
undergone a
variety of changes that would determine its fate in years to come.
After a
reluctant but cunning merger with a private girls school in order to
evade the
educational reforms being set out by Allende’s UP government, a
non-denominational, gender-inclusive approach to their unique brand of
elitism
was adopted. It was a time of great social upheavals, but the school
managed to
weather the tempest by retreating into the long-standing rituals that
had
separated it from the outside world ever since it was founded some
forty-five
years before. Even days before the September 11th coup
d’etat,
morning assembly was held religiously and everyone cheered for the
winner of
the annual obstacle race.
With
Pinochet at home, Reagan above and Thatcher overseas, a new era of
private education ensued. This time, however, it
was not so
much Blest-Gana’s appreciation of a self-hating elite what came to mind
as it
was the proto-fascist urges of an ultra nationalist right, comprised
mostly by
a wealthy bourgeoisie and therefore the bulk of the families in the
school. More and more tradition
had to blend in with the
pressures of a growing non-British population, and enough social
transformation
had occurred for younger generations of immigrant families to adopt
Chile as
their nation instead of their place of exile. Every morning the Chilean
flag
was raised, as we ourselves raised our voices in chorus to the words of
“God
Save the Queen” in a manner that would seem almost facetious to an
outside
spectator. These contradictions would remain all the way up to
graduation day:
divisions of houses without actual houses, prefects with no real power,
muscularly Christian laicism, Chileans speaking English, Britons
speaking
Spanish, draconian laws regulating every single aspect of our lives and
haughty
inspectors turning a blind eye to political harassment. The arcadia of
my
grandfather had been lost; in its place a different one emerged – a
smudge of
meaningless traditions, removed from their origin but maintained
through a
romantic ideal of Britain. Thatcherism had found its way out of Britain
and in
here, an institution that in valuing appearance over substance became a
perfect
niche for the highbrow dreams of a social-climbing bourgeoisie trying
to feed
its dreams of aristocratic glory.
Taking the repercussions
of worlwide colonialism into consideration and following the concept of
a societ whose history has for centuries looked outwards in order to
define itself –Said's Orientalism applied to Latin America-, I dare say
that it is natural for people whose sense of past is uncertain to year
for arcadia. Likewise, change is
rarely
welcomed,
especially when one’s sense of identity, feeble as it may be, becomes
jeopardised. Tradition in this
instance
reflects the elitism of yore, but with a wicked twist. Archie did not
want to
be Chilean, and neither did he consider himself to be one. If he was
better, it
was only due to his superior English ways –or so the credo went. That
Hobsbawm
would blame the traditional public school model for the decline of
Britain’s
economic and political prowess is beside the point. The school I
attended made
no show of hiding its Chilean origins, yet still respected the
traditions
reflecting a supposed English superiority. In their new form, the elite
believes itself to be innately Chilean and somehow better than Chileans
at the
same time. Discipline and a closely-knit group identity separate them,
not
necessarily through ethnicity or nationality, but rather through
experience,
wealth and nepotism. (After all, a Confucian Man of Culture is
compelled
to look after his guanxi, just like everyone else).
As
I looked into the eyes of my friend’s sister, I could tell that
her despise for the new school administration was founded on something
more
than angsty rebellion. The Headmaster’s cape was an attempt to revive
the
explicit snobbishness of yore and the reasons for this sudden change in
direction were not without suspicion –especially in today’s context,
when Chile
is finally starting to open up from its overly conservative past. But
we must
remember that inherently reactionary institutions like these will cling
to
arcadia to avoid change. And just like in the times of my grandfather,
my
father and myself, it will not work. While elitism is the natural
outcome of a
society that harbours power for the rich, we cannot overlook the fact
that Chile has been slowly striving to become
a more
egalitarian society, even despite the protests of the wealthy upper
class.
Symbols can be recreated and rehashed, destroyed and overwritten or
ignored and
undermined, but like all human reality, society is highly inconstant
and
thus it
cannot be dealt with except by adaptation. Citing Buruma,
“Arcadia
never existed, and Utopia never will”, and institutions like elitist
public
schools must learn to desist from creating bubbles to fragment reality
and
inspire bogus feelings of superiority –social, racial, monetary or
whatnot- in
their communities.
Clad
in her grey school skirt and a navy-blue blazer, the girl
looked at me again.
- “Can you believe”,
she said, “that they’re thinking of making us wear caps?”
- “Who knows” I
replied. “If you’re lucky perhaps caning might follow.”