Manliness and Militarism by Mark Moss

Author:Mark Moss [Moss, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2014-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

The Empire Élites

Some of the most potent conveyors of both the imperialist ethos and the British ruling class tradition were to be found in Ontario’s private schools, specifically Upper Canada College (‘the Canadian Eton’) and Trinity College School. Modelled on the famous British public schools, these institutions were intended to serve as training grounds for the country’s future leaders. According to Paul Bennett, they forged ‘powerful and enduring class and gender identities’, inculcating the personality traits that were essential for the perpetuation of the ruling class and training boys for ‘male rulership’.87

Drill was introduced at private schools as early as 1865, and was a significant feature of everyday school life. The dual message of ‘love of country’ and ‘a disposition to defend it’88 was conveyed with much more force in private than in public schools. Whatever the subject—history, classics, physical education—the emphasis was on the higher sacrifice expected of those endowed with the capacities required to rule. An editorial in Upper Canada College’s The College Times leaves no doubt as to why such a high proportion of ‘old boys’ enlisted:

The school is the nursery of the state, and its duty is to train and send out boys strong and vigorous physically, as well as mentally, who will be able to perform manfully and with good heart their appointed task among life’s workers. We have no need of a school that turns out weak-backed, spectacled wonders, but we … need a school that promotes a stamp of boy whose very appearance is a guarantee that his education has been, primarily speaking, complete.… Nowhere can the great qualities of life be better learned than on the playground. The boy that has learned to ‘play the game’, be it football, cricket or hockey, in the best sense of the word, has learned a great lesson, and one that will be of life-long benefit to him. He has learned to take hard knocks like a man, to accept a superior’s decision with good grace, to be unselfish and consider the glory of his club rather than his own, to struggle against heavy odds, and if need be, to acknowledge himself beaten; in short, he has learned to be a manly boy.89

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