Private or public

[tobyaw]

I attended Nottingham High School from the age of eight to eighteen. It is an independent fee-paying day school, founded in 1513, that occupies an entertainingly Victorian building near Nottingham city centre.

I was bemused when reading this week’s Mind Your Languages column in The Spectator, where, referring to Ed Balls, it said that he “…was born in Norwich and went to a public school, Nottingham High…”

I never thought of the school I went to as a “public school”. Sure, it is a private school, but my compadres had parents in business, trade, the professions, and the civil service. I associate public schools with being the traditional old boarding schools like Eton and Harrow, with pupils an order of magnitude posher than anyone who went anywhere near Nottingham. I guess this is just prejudice and ignorance on my part.

Looking at what defines a public school, one traditional definition is those schools covered by the Public Schools Act 1868: Charterhouse School, Eton College, Harrow School, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, St Paul’s School
Westminster School, and Winchester College. A more modern definition seems to include all the schools that are members of the Headmasters’ Conference; well over two-hundred schools would be classed as “public schools” by this definition, and would therefore include Nottingham High School.

How would you define a public school?

Comments

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I tend to use the term "independent school" myself, because it carries less of the cultural baggage associated with the term "public school": weird traditions, class distinctions, boarding, corporal punishment, etc. Whereas the nearest we had to that sort of thing at NHS was a slightly baroque scheme of school ties.

Something I didn't realise until recently is that NHS was actually a grammar school for a fair chunk of the 20th century (from 1917 until 1945, according to Adam Thomas' book on the history of the school [1]). Although it was originally founded as the "Nottingham Free Grammar School" I'd assumed it had been a fee-paying private school for centuries.

I have mixed memories of NHS. I met a number of splendid people there (yourself included) and learned much that was valuable and important. But I also learned some stuff that has taken some effort to unlearn, and also met some deeply unpleasant people. I'm not entirely sure it was, on balance, a happy time.

[1] A W Thomas, A History of Nottingham High School 1513–1953, J. & H. Bell Ltd., Nottingham (1957)

[tobyaw]

Interesting about the grammar school status. I understand that many private schools were originally based on charitable funding; I wonder how recently the concept of fee-paying schools came about.

I look back with pleasant memories of my time at NHS, but I rather suspect I was just good at ignoring the people and behaviour that I didn’t like. The defining aspect of my schooling is that I am still friends with many of the people I was best friends with back then. In fact we’ll be away next weekend for our annual get-together (with Tim et al), this year renting a big house just over the border into England. It is a pleasure that connections made as a teenager can last a lifetime.