He studied at Cambridge, at the Open University, and with Malcolm Bradbury on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. He has worked as a P.E. teacher, as Secretary to Mathilda, Duchess of Argyll, and as an employee of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the Mendip Hills Richard Beard looked after Brookleaze, a house owned by the Royal Society of Literature, and lived for three years in Japan as Professor of British Studies at the University of Tokyo. I assumed this was going to be primarily a book of political analysis, with the context of Private School Boarding. Whilst it does have lots of this, it also has a slight memoir feel to it. Not just in Beard’s personal experiences of Boarding School, but in his time researching/writing this book. Although his personal experiences of Boarding School provided vital supporting evidence, I felt the rest of his present-day ruminations were written almost defensively. At times feeling like that meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other (as is often the case with any sort of privileged person defending their privilege, whilst simultaneously distancing themselves from it). Yet, his points are valid, and the system can only change if those who have been through it break it. Which he is clearly trying to do. The subtitle of this book lets the reader know what to expect. The author wrote this during the pandemic & in the time he was writing it he spent a lot of time walking through the school he attended. The notion of sending a child away from the ages of seven to eighteen (one of the most impressionable time of a person's life) is an extremely strange one to many cultures. The ones Richard Beard is mostly concerned with are the ones where names need to be put down at birth, the schools which are considered to the best. The likes of David Cameron & Boris Johnson are the products of these institutions and this book explains an awful lot! This was a very interesting perspective & very topical. It feels like this was a cathartic book for Beard to write, and I'm pleased for him if that's the case. Probably it might make cathartic reading for traumatised/repressed English public school old boys. It presents little of substance most people (surely, deep down) didn't know already, so I can appreciate it more as a work of extended autobiography than as history or polemic or whatever else. Its arguments are strained and subjective enough that it probably won't convince someone who is pro-boarding school, or even sympathetic or nostalgic about the concept. It seems a very nice place indeed,” observed Nat, feeling that he must respond to these amiable young persons.

Tommy nodded, and said, sooner than one would have imagined possible under the circumstances, “Oh, don’t he, though? and we dance sometimes, and do gymnastics to music. I like a drum myself, and mean to learn as soon as ever I can.” In 1975, as a child, Richard Beard was sent away from his home to sleep in a dormitory. So were David Cameron and Boris Johnson. I’ll do the best I can, ma’am,” was all he said; and then drew the bow across the strings, as if eager to hear the dear notes again. Disappointing, really. I can get behind the premise and Beard is writing from personal experience, but he's got his nose squished right up against his subject (literally: he's wandering around the grounds of his own school during a pandemic mismanaged by his braying contemporaries who are undoubtedly proving his point on a national scale). It's of course biased, and also very repetitive; the research is hard to take seriously (frequent references to a few documentary films and the 1972 biopic Young Winston, thought there is a bibliography), the tone is aggrieved throughout, organisation is scant and the syntax is sloppy. It might have been better as primarily a memoir with a bit of theorising, or as a proper investigation with some psychological, educational or other expert evidence. It's not a particularly pleasant or even juicy read and I don't find that he offers anything new.

Navigation menu

A hearty round of applause rewarded him better than a shower of pennies, when he stopped and glanced about him, as if to say— It doesn’t really explain what the attraction of these toffs like Boris are to the populace as ‘characters’ nor does it mention the Royal family as part of the structural problem of class in the UK, which seems to me a weird omission.

Nat held her hand fast in his, but had not a word to say, and let his grateful eyes speak for him, as Mrs. Bhaer led him up to a big room, where they found a stout German woman with a face so round and cheery, that it looked like a sort of sun, with the wide frill of her cap for rays. Oh, that’s Stuffy Cole. His name is George, but we call him Stuffy ’cause he eats so much. The little fellow next Father Bhaer is his boy Rob, and then there’s big Franz his nephew; he teaches some, and kind of sees to us.” I’m glad; now come to Aunt Jo.” And Daisy took him by the hand with a pretty protecting air, which made Nat feel at home at once. Plumfield becomes an ideal model of a combined home and school, where Alcott's characters grow into adulthood, and their learning "outcomes are inflected not only by class and gender but also, most important, by the students' preexisting values and moral leanings." [33] Adaptations [ edit ] Film [ edit ] As she talked, Mrs. Bhaer had whipped off Rob’s clothes and popped him into a long bath-tub in the little room opening into the nursery.These first steps toward a cure were hardly completed, when a great bell rang, and a loud tramping through the hall announced supper. Bashful Nat quaked at the thought of meeting many strange boys, but Mrs. Bhaer held out her hand to him, and Rob said, patronizingly, “Don’t be ’fraid; I’ll take care of you.”

This argument is far from original; lambasting public schools for tormenting their inmates and ruining the country is one of Britain’s oldest traditions. (In England and Wales private schools are confusingly known as “public schools”; they themselves prefer “independent schools”.) Thomas Macaulay, a Victorian historian and politician, avoided them after a family friend told his mother that “throwing boys headlong into those great public schools always puts me in mind of the practice of the Scythian mothers, who threw their new-born infants into the river.” In those days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that show.Miss Jo March, the beloved character from Little Women—now Mrs. Jo Bhaer—fills her home at Plumfield with boys in need of guidance, an education, and, above all, affection. The children are full of mischievous and amusing lards in each chapter. Discover with the Plumfield household how, despite some disastrous events, “love is a flower that grows in any soil [and] works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow.”