My Only Story - A Response
(The post below will only really make sense once you have listened to Season 2 of the My Only Story podcast. In brief - it addresses the issue of school leadership failing in their duty of care to all students.)″‘Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.‘”
‘Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.’
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
When the story around Thomas Kruger started breaking, I tried to maintain an aloof distance. This was yet another exposé of an inappropriate teacher. My jaded self was happy that another one might be caught, but I did not have the time or energy to follow proceedings too closely. But my daughter followed the podcasts closely and kept on giving me feedback. Friends kept on asking: “How does this happen?” Then, I read the open letter of a previous victim of teacher abuse. And I thought about my own experiences as a pupil and now as a Head of a school.
I forced myself to listen to all three episodes (at the time of writing) and look back at the media reports. This is my response.
My first reaction to all of this is to point a very definite finger at the very idea of Boarding Schools in general and Monastic Boys’ Boarding Schools in particular. Especially in the case of the elite “good” boarding schools, they have become not dissimilar to the Catholic Church in their culture of covering up anything that might reflect badly on the school. They appropriated the original ideas behind a Prussian Military School of two centuries ago, and ended up keeping only the military barracks culture. (A VERY sweeping statement, but like many generalisations, with more than a kernel of truth.) While this "barracks culture" is not policy at the vast majority of schools any longer, it is still very much part of the student experience.
Sidenote: While the context here is around a sexual predator and how he was able to get away with his actions, my focus is on the broader underlying systemic and cultural failure of these schools which contribute to the environment within which this can happen.
First, a caveat: These schools do many wonderful things. There are excellent, caring teachers at all of them. Many boys can tell wonderful stories about what these schools meant to them. They offer wonderful opportunities. These schools can (and should) be real beacons of excellence and positive impact.
But.
While there are excellent teachers who take their duty of care of the individual students seriously and who sincerely attempt to make a real connection with each individual student, as entities, these schools exist primarily with the purpose of perpetuating their own myth. The identity, culture, heritage, history of The School is sacrosanct, and nothing that threatens it can be tolerated. And the “threats” exist as they are perceived by the custodians of the image and heritage of The School. This, by the way, is also why these schools struggle to transform in any meaningful way. All transformation efforts must still be in service of The School, as determined by its historical custodians, and not, finally, in the service of anything greater than The School.
At Management and Leadership level this is tacitly understood. The marketing machine attached to these organisations go out there and sell something that is so unattainably perfect that just maintaining the glittering facade becomes the primary goal. Anything less than perfect must be hidden and dealt with in the background. And this usually means getting rid of the problem, not solving it.
When it comes to getting rid of problematic teachers, we see the same process at play that we saw in the Catholic Church when it came to addressing cases of child molestation. The guilty party would merely be passed on to another parish. In the case of schools (and this goes much broader than just The Schools under discussion), the teacher would usually leave before a full hearing or investigation could be conducted. And, as was the case with David Mackenzie, they would soon be employed elsewhere.
The events described in the podcast are almost laughably typical: The pressure to act becomes so big that a disciplinary process is begun. The accused party bolts. Everybody gives a sigh of relief. Not our problem anymore. Dodged THAT bullet. Let’s move on.
Because I am now also a Head of a school, I initially resisted my daughter’s breathless insistence that The School had mismanaged this process to an almost criminal degree. I knew the complexities involved in building a case that could be prosecuted. I knew how incredibly cunning and insidious a sexual groomer can be. I have had to deal with this in my school, too.
However, when you actually place your duty of care of the individual student first and reputational management of The School second, certain things do become less “difficult”.
When you have the actual WhatsApp messages indicating inappropriate conduct, you call your lawyers in and start building a case. You don’t call in an HR Consultant to help with damage control. You immediately suspend the suspect pending an investigation. You believe your Housemasters and parents who point out the red flags, uncomfortable as that might be.
And you do not allow that teacher to teach again. When a case of sexual molestation was exposed at my current school after the guilty teacher had already left, we immediately supported the parents to lay criminal charges and reported the matter to SACE so that his registration could be revoked. In spite of this, he managed to find two other teaching positions before all the processes caught up with him. Because, as was the case with Mackenzie, schools do not always practice due diligence when hiring. I was phoned for feedback on this teacher only after he was accused of molesting students at the school he went to after leaving us. But the point is still: Unless the school acts decisively on any misconduct and follows through on disciplinary action, these teachers will remain in the system.
I have my own stories in this regard, too.
Like Lucas-Bull, I also formally flagged concerning behaviour in the boarding house of a school where I taught. I was on the Senior Management Team at the time and, in 2015, wrote a letter to one of the Housemasters and the Head of School expressing my concerns over a culture of “breaking down” the Grade 8s in order to build them up again into “dogs” worthy of the House. (All the preceding terminology was used by the Student Head of the House at their end of year dinner.) I was told in no uncertain terms that I was overreacting. In 2017 this School, too, had a monstrous event of consistent bullying exposed.
What worries me even more, is that it would appear that the problem is getting worse, and not just because there is more exposure due to social media.
I started this piece with a quote from Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield has been the poster boy for the outsider in the elite School for decades now. But Holden really was an outsider. A misfit. And people who didn’t “get” him found it easy to dismiss him.
However, all the victims at St Andrew’s were boys who really wanted to be there. Who arrived with all the correct credentials. They did all the right things, participated in the right sports. And still, they didn’t “make” it. Why?
I certainly don’t have the answers. Just some questions that we might want to look into.
As the educational space becomes ever more commercialised, are we keeping our focus on the well-being of our students first and foremost? The rich Schools will immediately point to the psychologists, wellness programmes, Sanatorium staff, etc. that they employ to this end. But clearly, this is not the answer. I would suggest that we actually go to the trouble of doing a proper analysis of the load that our core teaching and boarding staff is supposed to carry. My sense is that they are so overwhelmed by the increasing demands of parents and Councils and accountants that they do not have any “bandwidth” left with which to provide the deep level of “parental” care that comes with being an educator - especially in a boarding school. This provides the space for predators like Mackenzie to insinuate themselves into the lives of students without us even noticing. In fact, they get away with it because so many pupils and staff see them as that “special” person who truly “understands” the children.
It has almost become a cliché in online teachers’ forums to complain about things being added to what teachers are supposed to do, without anything ever being taken away. Maybe we should listen to this?
But in the end, Councils, Governing Bodies and School Leadership need to face this question honestly: Are we still about the children or are we about The School? And note: I use the term “children” deliberately. They are not “young adults”. We use that term when it suits us to get away with either expecting too much of them or when in dereliction of our duty of care. The conservative answer will be: Without The School, there is nothing for the children. Our Roots and Traditions create a safe space. It gives the students a sense of belonging. They need the structures that we provide. Etc. Ad Nauseam. I call bullshit.
If schools cannot meet the needs of the students that they serve, they need to stop existing. Maintaining a Prussian ideal of military structure in a modern-day school is ludicrous. Imposing these systems on students have done untold (pun intended) harm to thousands of students.
This last point highlights two issues:
Our expectation that military-style discipline is the answer to all behavioural problems.
The romanticization of suffering.
I don’t think that I need to spend too much time on the first point. I suspect that even supporters of this would by now be able to point to its failings. But, in essence, this is still the premise that all boarding discipline is built on. And until schools sincerely start looking at alternatives, the iniquity will continue and Seniors will terrorise Juniors.
The second issue is more challenging.
There is a survival mechanism in the male psyche that appears to trivialise and make light of suffering once the immediate danger is over. I caught myself doing this shortly after the end of my 2-year conscription to the SADF in the 1980s. You would meet your friends in a bar and reminisce about the “fun” you had. And even the really awful, dehumanising days where you wanted to die rather than carry on get added to the “fun”. I am now 54 years old. Thinking back to my time as a conscript, I still remember some good days. Humans cannot survive two years of just bad. But did the process make me “a man” as society claimed it would? No. It made me a lesser human. Which, I suppose, is what a man is supposed to be when toxic notions of masculinity are allowed to thrive.
Boarding schools have always been places where a military-style discipline structure is imposed. This structure is enforced to a large part by the students themselves. Expecting immature teenagers to practice self-control when offered - tacitly or overtly - almost unchecked power is asking for trouble. Yet, the entire system is built on this premise. For generations now, boys who have attended boarding schools have lived through this process of institutionalised violence. Yet, even those fathers who had a very hard time themselves keep on sending their sons back for more.
My theory is that - because of our romanticization of the suffering - we look past the real harm. We justify the bullying and dehumanisation as part of a process of growing up and “becoming a man”. And if we ourselves had a really hard time and did not necessarily feel that we grew from the process, we tell ourselves that surely, by now, things must be better and my own child will not have to suffer all the indignities that I had to? Sidenote: The "Spud" series of books can be read as a good example of this process in action.
Holden refers to the “hot-shots” in the quote above.
There are layers of experience in a boarding environment. There are Holden’s “hot-shots” who excel at almost everything. These are the poster boys for the boarding establishment. Everyone is measured against them. These lucky few are the ones who maintain the dream of what The School represents. Most (but not all) of them actually do have a wonderful time. When they themselves end up as teachers or Heads of these schools, they sincerely believe in the marketing and the myth of The School. They are not bad people, but they often have a real blind spot for the different experiences that others might have had of the same space that they inhabited.
Secondly, there are those who do not necessarily excel at the recognised sports, but they have created a niche of excellence for themselves in something. If they don’t rock the boat and their excellence in their field is appreciated, they can go through the system without too much hassle.
Thirdly, you have the bulk of the footsoldiers. Normal, average students who want to be part of the bigger whole and will accept the structures and get on with their lives. They accept the structures as “part of life”, put their heads down and try to get on with it. The low-level anxiety present all the time is what you need to manage, along with the occasional incidents of real conflict. They buy into the “this is how things are supposed to be” narrative. This is also the group that does most of the romanticisation after leaving.
Lastly, you have the outcasts. The ones who either cannot or will not fit in. They are perceived as weak and must therefore be targeted for exclusion at best, elimination at worst. This is done physically and emotionally by the boys and structurally by The School.
And it is into this space that characters like Mackenzie insinuate themselves to create off-shoots of hierarchy that provide a home to those boys who might not feel that they have found their real home in The School yet. They have always done this. What might be making it worse now?
Part of the reason I already alluded to: The good teachers and Housemasters (and they are the majority) simply have less and less time to engage sufficiently with all the students. It is crucial that we train all staff to recognise predatory and grooming behaviour, but also that we ensure that they have the bandwidth to do so. (Added on 18 October 2021: Listen to Episode 4 of Season 2 of My only Story for an excellent explanation of the grooming process.)
But mostly it is a leadership issue. School leaders at elite schools are expected to first and foremost protect the image and legacy of The School. The students are there to provide the money for the business to continue and be the marketing cattle with which to sell the Myth. This might sound harsh, but if you as a leader make any concessions in your duty of care to each individual student in an attempt to limit negative publicity, this is essentially what you are doing.
And until Boards, Councils, and Old Boys do not acknowledge this, Heads will continue to do it because that is what is expected of them. Until we are very intentional about truly being about every child first before anything else, we are selling a fake idea of school. Until we are intentional about meeting the needs of the children today, not the mythological child of 1950 or 1850, we are selling a fake idea of school. And until we are intentional about breaking the cycle of violence in our boarding establishments, we are lying to ourselves and our parents. And this does not mean expelling the odd boy for going too far in the system that we helped put in place. This means re-examining everything we think we know about discipline, school structures, hierarchy - everything.
