Figure 1.--Many preparatory schools had billard tables and they were popular with the boys. Often they were the original tables in the stately homes that were turned into prep schools.� |
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W elcome to the Apertures Press E-Book: British Preparatory Schools. Of course it is just the beginning of the book, but we will gradually load new pages and new images. Apertures has received quite a few inquiries about the book. As a result, we have decided to compile another E-book. This is a follow up on our traditionally published book. Boys Preparatory Schools. Rather this will permit readers to follow our process by viewing draft pages and pages in progress as we create them. Besides giving readers the opportunity to follow progress on the book as it develops, it gives our British friends the opportunity to review and comment on the various pages--allowing HBC to incorporate a much wider range of ideas and experiences than would otherwise have been possible.
The authors, two amateur photographers, set out to create a photographic essay of Britain. It soon occurred to us that this had been done before by more talented photographers than ourselves. One of the subjects we found interesting was the many wonderful parish churches throghout Britain and the graveyards nearby with tombstones dating back centuries. The churches often had huge books with the names of parishoners who died in the two world wars, especially World War I. Often the vicar would be nearby to tell us about his church. During one of these to a church in Devon , a nearby prep school attended a church service and the headmaster who we met afterwards invited us to their afternoon fete. We were fascinated by the event and the hradmaster invited us to photograph the school. It soon occurred to us that this was something unique. There are large numbers of school photographs, but most are formal portraits of the whole school or indivisual classes. Some photographs were taken in classrooms, but usually very stiffly done photographs of the children sitting in their desks often with their hands folded on their desks. Some schools even cleared the children out of the way and took photographs of empty classrooms and dormitories. We decided to compile photographic ssays of British schools, realistically depicting school life. We eventually visited about 100 different schools throughout Britain. We are extremely grateful for the headmasters and teachers who agreed to participate in our project. Most of all we are grateful to the many prep school children who enthusiastically participated in and contributed to our project. We hope that theu will be pleased with the final project.
We are organizing our British Preparatory Schools E-book into separate volumes of E-Books. All are based on a series of visits to the schools in the 1970s 80s, and 90s. The photographs we took provide a historical view of the operation of the schools all over the United Kingdom. We hope you will find the series of interest. Volume I is the topical treatment of the British Preparatory School with details on the organization, program, and the people involved. Here there is extensive discussion of the schools and preparatory school program. Included with our assessment are numerous insights offered by the staff at the various schools we visited. Volume II will be more of a photo essay organized roughly along the school's daily schedule. Here we will include along with our explanatory text some of the work by the children describing their schools and school experiences. Volume II is still in progress, but some of the early pages can be viewed at this time. Volume III is under consideration. We are also assessing the possibility of a Volume III is readers show sufficient interest. It would use some of the poems and written work of the children as we used in the published volume.
Britain has some of the best known schools in the world, especially its public schools which are really elite private fee-paying schools schools. Some of the public schools date to the 16th century. Some have even older origins. Quite a number, however, date to the 19th century when Britain was expanding its educational system to train administrators and technicials for its huge overseas empire. It was at this time that preparatory schools began to appear. Public schools originzlly taught boys of varying age, some quite young. Public schools could be very rough places, especially for younger boys. Educators by the early 19th century increasing realized that the educational needs of the younger boys required a school specifical suited for their needs. Thus the preparatory school was created, a school designed to prepare boys for the public schools.
The prep schools are a part of the much larger story of British education. Education in Britain, especially state-funded education, was controversial from the start. The history of British education is a fascinating account. There are many different types of schools that have comd and gone in Britain. The prep schools and related public schools are just two of these different types of schools. Some objected to the cost. Others objected to the social consequences of an educated working class. As a result, state-funded education in Britain lagged behind that in many other European countries and America. Today in the British welfare state, it is the private schools that are controversial. One of the many controversies surrounding British education.
Britain has some of the most famous schools in the world. This is especially true of the public (elite private) schools which are secondary schools. Most people have hard of schools loke Eton and Rugby. The prep schools are less well known, but some are familiar to Britons, especially on a local basis. Many have interesting histories and their list of famous former pupils. Of course just because a school is well known does not mean that it is the best school and especially does not mean that it is the best school for any given child and most suitable for a child's individual needs. There are many less well-known prep schools that offer an excellent educational program. Family Tradition is another factor to be considered. Commonly parents, I think especially fathers, want their children to attend the same school that they attended. Children differe from their parents. Simply because a family member previously attended any particular school does not mean that it is the most appropriate school for a child. In addition schools change. The headmaster plays a major in the success or failure of a school. This is especially true of small private schools. Often the headmaster at a school is not the same person thete when the parent attended.
I came to this project with a rather negative view about British private schools. My impression based on books I had read was that they were rather dreary, strictly disciplined places where unhappy children went about memorizing Latin comjugations and playing games in the afternoon. There are of course more happy depictions in British literature, but on the whole, British writers often describe rather unhappy school experiences. We think this is in part because before World war II that many of these schools weee rather unhappy places. We also think that many of the most unhappy children were those that were academically rarher than sports oriented and that these tend to be the boys as adults who tend to write books. What I found was very different. We found happy, enthusiastic, and polite children going about the business og getting a good education as ell as having fun with friends. Now there were exceptions, but for the most part we found that the modern prep school is very different to that often depicted and were friendly and caring places for the children. I was less surprised about the quality of the education provided. We found well-spoken children who were acquiring a solid grounding in basic academic skills, and were enthuiastic about learning.
The popular image is that children attending private schools were pampered and had access to much better facilities than children attending state schools. Private schools varied greatly in the facilities they offered any many had more limited facilties than those offered at state schools. We were indeed surprised at the limited facilities and often very stark living facilities at many school. This had begun to change in the 1980s, but classroom facilities and dorimotory accomodations at many schools were not infrequently stark. Many children had nothing more than an army cot and battered chair in dormitories with beds lined up in a row. This had begun to change. There were schools with much more comfortable facilities. One factors here were the girls. Mothers often insisted in more comfortable dormitories and the schools could not very well provide facilities to the girls that were not provided the boys. At the school here, girls had just been accepted and they had brand new dormitories. The school had not yet ypgraded the facilities for the boys who were complining about the inequity of the situation. Notice how stark the accomodations were. Here we do not mean to suggest that this was not a good school achieving excellent results. It does, however illustrate, the attitude toward dormitory facilities thar were once widespread among preparatory schools.
Click here to have a look at the various sections of British Preparatory Schools, another E-Book released by Apertures Press. This is composed of an illustrated written essay desribing New Zealand education and the different types of schools, essays on going to school in New Zealand, and a series of photo essays on different aspects of the school experience. Interspersed with the photographs are short excerpts written by the children themselves or a variety of releases and publications provided by the different schools. As time goes by we will add several other features.
By British Preparatory schools we are talking about the prep schools in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is composed of four different countries: England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. All of Ireland was once part of the United Kingdom, but all but the northern colonies (Ulster) separated in the 1920s and formally created the Irish Republic in the 1930s. There are preparatory schools in all four countries. The academic program and uniforms at the preparatory schools in each of the different countries. There are some differences, but for the most part it is impossible to determine where the schools are located from aby examining the available images. There are some destinctive features of Scottish preparatory schools, but even here it is very difficult to tell from photographs. The major difference is in the accents of the children.
The photographs here were taken by the authors, except for the historical photographs in the chronological section. You may notice that many of the photographs are not technically perfect. Here the choice was between technical perfection and realism. We are sure that teachers and former pupils will see this and our other schoolnpublications as very realistic depictions of school life. This is in large measure because the idea of the project was take candid photographs showing the children and teachers going about their normal everyday activities. By candid we do not mean that the children were unaware of us, but that the photographs were not formal portaits in which the children were especially dressed up and posed. Setting up photographs in classrooms would have not only been disruptive, but would not shown class activities as they actually occurred. The same is essentially the case of the freetime photographs, only here we had a little more flexibility to make minor changes so that we were not, for example, shooting into the sun. The children were very interested in our project and anxious to be photographed. Here we did a little posing to get interesting backgrounds or to take photographs in small groups. Also the children may many suggestions to us about where to take photographs of interesting activities or good views of the school, grounds, and facilities. We found that the children especially liked to be photographed with friends so we often took smll group rather than single photographs. Even with the free time photographs, however, the photographs are primarily candid shots. Thus what you see here are the schools as they were operating on a normal day.
There are a number of advantages to our new E-book. Publishing a photographic book in full colr is a very expensive undertaking. Here you get to see the beautiful Apertures Press images in full color. Another advantage is that you get to see the book as it evolves. You also get to participate, if you wish, in the books publication as Apertures welcomes comments or submission of written work, short literary pieces, art work, and photographs. The E-book will also include many more color photography than will be feasible in the published book because of the high cost of color printing. We eventually hope to load about 200 pages and 300 images.
Apertutres Press welcomes contributions from readers to our book. We were able to visit only about 100 schools. There are of course many more preparatory schools. If you would like to contribute material about your school or your school experience, we incourage you to do so. Contrubutions can be photographs, drawings, essays, or just little written snipets--what ever you may care to contribute.
This British Preparatory Schools eBook is part of a major effort that Apertures Press has under taken to put a human face on schools around the world. The objective is to draw a realistic picture of the school experience in different countries around tge world. We have done work in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We are still in the process of preparing our photographic work and written insights for publication. We are interesting in contacting teachers, shool administrators, and photographers in other countries that would be interested in future E-books that Apertures Press could publish. Interested parties should contact Apertures Press through the E-mail link here.
We welcome reader input to our eBooks. In fact you as a reader can make an important contribution to the books. This includes both our British and non-British readers. We have added a range of observations to our eBooks an attempted to analize the images in some detail. We believe, however, that the ideas and experiences of our readers can help to add to our observations. Thus we encourage you to comment on the various pages as you read them. This includes both factual observations and questions. Questions can be just as useful. If there is something you do not understand, it is likely that others had the same experience. Thus it is a topic or photograph we need to explain better or in more detail. If it is a new topic, we will look for a new image to illustrate it.
We have relied heavily on information from British preparatory schools for the written material in our book. Inteviews and conversations with the staff and students of the various schools we visited is a primary source. We have also relied on the publications the schools gave us during our visit as well as postings on the internet.
If you have any questions about British preparatory schools, do not hesitate to send us an e-mail. We will be glad to post your queries here and attempt to answer your questions about this exciting new Apertures Press project in the innovative E-book format. Our British readers will have a better knowledge of the British school system than readers from America and other countries. We will try to find photographs to illustrate the issues you raise and our answers to them.
The concept of an E-Book is still fairly new. Many of you have asked questions about the mechanics of the book and how it is set up. Note that substantive questions about preparatory schools and British education are dealt with in the previous section "Questions" above. Here in this section we are talking about the mechanics of an E-Book. Check here for some of the most frequantly asked questions as your question may have already been asked and answered. If not, feel free to use the e-Mail link to ask us. We may eventually add your question here. There is also some information about our future plans for our E-book series.
Apertures Press has published a 125-page hard cover book depicting every-day life at British preparatory schools. The book includes about 250 never before published black and white and color photographs illustrating school life during the 1980s. There are also many older photographs to illustrate a brief historical essay providing background information on these splendid little schools. Accompanying the photographs are poems, essays, and quips by the children themselves describing their school experiences. Most of the photographs were taken in England and Scotland, but British preparatory schools in Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ulster are also shown. Please have a look at the various pages of our web site for information on Boys' Preparatory Schools.
This is just the first of several books that we have punlished. We have several different volumes available on British preparatory schools as well as several volumes on New Zealand schools. Readers who find our first volume here of interest may want to have a llok at the other volumes. Volume I was our first voume. We hope that you will find the subsequent volumes even more interesting.
