Attachment, Power & the Hidden Cost of Boarding Schools with Simon Partridge – S&H Podcast – Ep 70
Watch or listen to this episode via YouTube HERE
Watch or listen to this episode via Spotify HERE
In this second conversation with Simon Partridge, Chris and Simon explore the connections between attachment, boarding school, class, family culture and the ways institutions can shape the people who pass through them.
Simon reflects on his own experience of being sent to boarding school from the age of six, and how it took many years before he was able to understand and make sense of some of those early experiences. He discusses discovering the work of John Bowlby, attending Nick Duffell’s workshops and beginning to write about boarding school and its psychological and cultural consequences.
A major focus of the conversation is Simon’s exploration of the boarding school family and what he describes as the relationship between early separation, boarding school and pathways into positions of influence. He discusses his ideas around the “triple lock”, including separation through nannies or wet nurses, boarding school itself, and the networks and opportunities that can follow from that experience.
Simon and Chris also explore the relationship between attachment and class, including the question of whether the effects of separation and institutional upbringing can be understood beyond social class. They discuss generational boarding, family patterns and the difficulty of bringing these different perspectives together.
The conversation then turns to the work of social historian Gathorne Hardy, whose writing Simon discovered while exploring these questions. Simon discusses Hardy’s ideas around the “extruded family” and “extruded class”, and the way children can be separated from the nuclear family and incorporated into larger institutional and social groups.
Simon describes “extrusion” as a useful way of thinking about what institutions do: taking people out of one environment and shaping them within another. Chris develops this idea through the analogy of an extrusion process, exploring how educational and other institutions can shape people into recognisable forms while leaving their own mark on them.
The discussion also considers Bowlby’s ideas about the environments human beings are adapted to, the challenges of large institutions and modern society, and what might be lost when family and cultural patterns are repeatedly disrupted.
Simon has also provided a graphic, The Environments of Adaptedness, which accompanies this discussion and explores the relationship between family, boarding school and British upper-class culture. The graphic identifies the concepts of “Family Boarding School”, “Stiff Upper Lip”, “Other Class Cultures” and the “British Upper-Class Culture of Adaptedness.”
Links:
Outside the Whale: The End of the Road for the British Public School? A Review of The Public School Phenomenon by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
Background to this podcast – https://seenheard.org.uk/blog/end-of-the-british-public-school/
Simon Partridge – Seen & Heard Podcast, Episode 20
Simon and Chris’s first conversation, which provides useful background to Simon’s life, work and thinking. https://seenheard.org.uk/blog/seen-heard-podcast-episode-20-simon-partridge/
The Science of Power in the body – https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Science-of-Power-in-the-Body_final.pdf
More information about Henry Morris and his schools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morris_(education)
https://henrymorris.org/about-henry-morris/
Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) website – https://pep-web.org/search?q=Simon+Partridge
London Access Hub – https://www.londonaceshub.org
Simon Partridge can be contacted at: simonpartridge846@btinternet.com
#BoardingSchool #BoardingSchoolSurvivors #Attachment #JohnBowlby #BoardingSchoolSyndrome #InstitutionalTrauma #GenerationalTrauma #MentalHealth #Safeguarding #SimonPartridge
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:27 Simon’s experience of boarding school
06:43 Discovering Bowlby and attachment
08:40 Discovering Joy Schaverien and Nick Duffell
12:15 Simon’s writing and the development of his ideas
14:45 The “triple lock”
17:00 Boarding school, class and attachment
20:00 Generational patterns and boarding families
31:38 Bowlby and the environments of evolutionary adaptedness
33:58 Boarding schools, class culture and Gathorne Hardy
36:00 Who was Gathorne Hardy?
49:00 The idea of the “extruded family”
52:00 Institutions as an extrusion process
54:00 What is lost through institutional shaping
56:00 Healing and recovering the self
End Reflections and future conversations
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Chris is an emotional health coach following a 20-year career in business and marketing, working for SMEs and some of the world’s largest food companies.
In 2024, he co-founded Seen & Heard, whose mission is to support the wellbeing of past and present pupils of boarding and independent day schools, and their families.
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