The Social Aims of an Independent School

This paper presents some preliminary and tentative observations selected from a more ambitious study of the social aims of an Australian independent (i.e. non‐govemment) school. While religion is claimed to underlie the whole structure of the school's aims, a survey of the attitudes of boys, parents, teachers, and old boys clearly demonstrated that learning about formal religion, at least, was regarded as one of the least important of the school's tasks. There was also some evidence that the school had not succeeded in fostering the Christian belief in charity by way of service rather than by way of money. Further, although it is often claimed that in the independent school teachers are parent surrogates and consequently responsible for boys' ethical problems, very few boys said that they would approach teachers with problems of a personal nature. Independent schools were established as a protest against the secularization of education. In such schools religion should become the workshop‐laboratory for reasoning about, and discussion of boys' problems, and should be the core of the individual's self‐realization.