Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have mixed feelings about this book, and perhaps for that reason I took so long to read it.
It's a school story about three teenage schoolboys at a boarding school in North Devon in England, where Rudyard Kipling himself went to school. These three, Beetle, Turkey (M'Turk) and the eponymous Stalky himself are rebels in the school, rebelling against the teachers, the prefects, and the system of authority. Since the school is in the same area, and shares many of the characteristics of the school that Kipling himself attended, it probably reflects Kipling's own response to his schooling, and his thoughts on education, authority and discipline.
Many of the pupils at the school are children of British army officers, and, since it is set in the late 19th century, it was at the height of British imperialism, so most of the boys were born outside the UK, and many of them plan to have careers in the army.
The school also appears to be run on the lines of a neo-liberal dream, except that it was probably the economic proto-liberalism that neo-liberalism is nostalgically trying to bring back, and which was satirised by its contemporaries, Gilbert and Sullivan in their comic opera Utopia Limited. So the school pays a dividend of 4% to its sharefolders.
I myself went to a school like that, though it wasn't a high school, it was Mountain Lodge Preparatory School in Magaliesberg, which was private not just in the sense of not being run by the government, but privately run for profit. It came to an end in 1952 when the "Bursar" Mr Burnford absconded with the funds.
One thing I liked about the book is that though many schools of that kind are run on authoritarian lines, and are calculated to foster an authoritarian outlook in their pupils, the three heroes of the story cock a snook at authority and put down authoritarian teachers and prefects. What I didn't much like about it was the sadistic and vengeful manner in which they often did so, and most especially Kipling's evident approval of this.
At Mountain Lodge we had some similar rebellions against authority, though, since we were all pre-teens, they were not as sophisticated and planned as those in Stalky & Co. On one occasion the whole school went on strike over an authoritarian teacher. And, rather as in the book, the whole school was caned, but the following term that teacher did not return.
Kipling makes the point, which I think is a good one, that much of the learning in school actually takes place in extra-curricular activities and is quite unplanned. This would go right against the idea of the Outcomes-Based Education that was recently tried in South African schools with not much success. The outcomes in Stalky and Co are without exception unplanned and unexpected, at least by the school authorities. That too, as been part of my own experience, though mo0re at the level of tertiary education than secondary. Most of the real learning takes place outside the classroom.
The last chapter shows some of the main characters, with the exception of Stalky himself, meeting again after having been out of school for some years, having all seen military service in India, and they share some of their experiences and rumours of Stalky, who has been disciplined by the army as he had been at school. It appears that he had been a military success, but in an unconventional way. Kipling's idea of a good army officer is an irregular and unconventional one. Perhaps Kipling's ideal military leader would be a guerrilla leader, like Che Guevara, or a mercenary leader, like Mad Mike Hoare.
Nearly sixty years later, in 1968, someone made a film with a similar theme. The film was called If, and it is now nearly sixty years since it was made, so Stalky & Co is about life in a school more than 120 years ago, and much of the contemporary schoolboy slang is difficult to follow, but education and its problems seem to continue, regardless of period. The most recent school stories I have read are the Harry Potter books, and even they are now 20-25 years old -- do the current crop of school children still read them, or perhaps they have them set as compulsory boring texts. But some things persist, regardless of period, like Zemblanity in eduction.
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