Metamorphosis

Abstract

In his report to EXCO in September 1957, Snell summarised the situation: ‘In general the process of metamorphosis into a Public School continues normally, and the omens are good.’ By the end of the year he was able to list the achievements of the building organisation which between 1953 and the beginning of 1958 would have completed the major works which translated ‘Peterhouse’ into a fullyequipped school.

School is a place of initiations, discoveries, loneliness, sociability, tests and failures, full of dramatic possibility – where friends are made (and betrayed), and all too easily enemies, where bullies and victims abound, where rules of appalling artificiality circumscribe our every move, just waiting to be broken, and where a few teachers loom large in our consciousness as ogres or objects of worship. Schools are places of protection from the adult world – and prisons from which we escape into the adult world. They are places where we grow up, or fail to.

Philip Home, ‘Lessons in how to live’, Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2002