The Hidden Curriculum

9 Sept

Superiority, Shame, and the Brutality of Boarding School

Preface

This is a personal reflection on my experience of attending one of South Africa’s most prestigious Church of England boarding schools during the apartheid era. It examines the contradictions between liberal Christian values and institutional cruelty. It considers how the humiliation we endured as boys may have reflected the wider violence of a society founded on colonialism, racial and class domination.

Now, as a psychotherapist, I reflect on that culture, not to accuse or seek retribution, but to understand how shame, superiority, and silence influence our lives and institutions. This piece is part of a broader exploration into decolonising the self, the psyche, and the practices we inherit.

Brutality, Superiority and the Shaming

I was educated at one of the most respected schools in Johannesburg, St John’s College, a Church of England institution renowned for its academic excellence, grandeur, and moral integrity. It was, and continues to be, among the most expensive private schools in South Africa. Behind its cloistered walls, we were taught the values of Christian decency, fairness, and discipline. Chapel was compulsory every day. On Sundays, we attended morning mass and returned in the evening for evensong, dutifully singing of grace, mercy, and love.

Beneath this veneer of holiness and high standards lay another form of education, more powerful, more personal, and more scarring. In the boarding house, a brutal hierarchy prevailed. As junior boys, we were often beaten by the older boys, supposedly to maintain order, but in reality, as a ritualised form of domination. The violence was physical, psychological, and sometimes sexual, hidden behind what were called “games,” but filled with cruelty and shame, always conforming to the heterosexual norms of the time. There was no tenderness, no security. It was a system meant to humiliate, and it succeeded.

The masters were no better. Canings were common, often leaving welts so severe that we could not sit down properly. The punishments were framed as moral instruction, a necessary correction. The message was clear: pain was character-building, authority must not be questioned, and the strong had the right to discipline the weak.

Paradoxically, or perhaps inevitably, we were taught that we were the best. Not just the best boys in the country, but the rightful stewards of the nation. We considered ourselves superior, not only to Black and Coloured South Africans but also to other white communities, especially Afrikaners. This was not expressed with the crude language of apartheid’s architects but with a more insidious tone of liberal Christian righteousness. We were, after all, the good ones. We read Shakespeare. We debated in English. We gave to charity. We knew the right way to be.

This is where shame and superiority start to blend. Looking back now, I wonder if the humiliations we faced as boys, including public beatings, private shame, and silent complicities, were a psychological echo of the very system we supported. Was our brutality an unconscious response to the violence our world imposed outside the school walls? Did our small, frightened bodies carry some displaced guilt for what was done daily to others in our name?

What happens to boys raised to believe that being good means dominating? Is suffering in silence noble? Is doubting the system disloyal? What effect does this have on a country when its future leaders are moulded in such harsh environments?

This is the hidden curriculum of colonial superiority. It teaches mastery through humiliation. Those of us who experienced it, especially those of us who endured it with a badge of pride or an armour of shame, still carry its legacy.

Legacy and Aftermath: The Long Reach of a Colonial Education

I left St John’s carrying not just my school blazer and a polished sense of privilege but also a deep well of shame, confusion, and a fractured sense of self. On the surface, I appeared to be articulate, capable, and respectable. Inside, I bore the marks of humiliation, the kind that blurs discipline with worthlessness, strength with cruelty, and authority with moral truth.

For years, I didn’t fully grasp the depth of this wound. Like many men from similar backgrounds, I worked hard, sought success, and took pride in my independence. I learned to appear competent and confident. But beneath it all was a sort of ache, a dislocation within the nervous system. Something in me recoiled from intimacy and bristled at the thought of vulnerability. I knew how to dominate a therapy room, but I didn't know how to be genuinely held in it.

Eventually, the suffering that had been hidden beneath the surface started to emerge. It guided me, initially cautiously and then with growing urgency, towards psychotherapy, meditation, and the slow, patient process of disentangling the internalised narratives I had been fed. The journey was not swift. The system I was raised in had deeply embedded its software, with shame as the guiding principle and superiority as the interface.

It wasn’t just personal; it was structural. Colonial superiority, especially in its liberal Christian form, doesn’t simply claim you are better than others. It convinces you that your way is the correct one. That your values are universal. That you are being kind, even when you are controlling. That you are being just, even as you sustain injustice. It’s a system that makes domination appear virtuous, and that makes it particularly difficult to recognise, let alone unlearn.

In my psychotherapy practice today, I often meet others who have inherited this double bind, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly and across generations. These individuals were raised with prestige and privilege, yet also in deep disconnection. They hold power in the world but struggle to access their tenderness. They long for belonging but only know how to perform, conform, or rebel.

I also encounter those on the receiving end of the same system: Black, Brown, working-class, queer, neurodiverse individuals whose lives were shaped by the shadow of this so-called superiority. The cruelty passed down through “good” intentions. The trauma that entered families via policy, economics, schooling, and silence. The survival strategies are born not only from violence but also from being constantly misrecognised.

I’ve come to believe that decolonising ourselves is not only a political or ethical necessity but also a profoundly personal act of healing. It involves examining the stories that have shaped us, especially those that taught us to dominate ourselves or others in the name of virtue. It requires questioning the traditions we have inherited, regardless of how sacred they may appear. It entails learning to dwell in what the Buddha called “not-knowing,” a humility that dissolves the need to be right.

In Buddhist practice, we speak of liberation not as a lofty ideal but as a release from the patterns that bind us. The same can be said of psychotherapy at its best. It’s not just about feeling better; it’s about becoming freer; freer from the internalised voices of dominance and shame, freer from the superiority that masks insecurity, and freer from the stories we were told about who we are and what makes us worthy.

St John’s taught me many lessons. Some were practical. Others were beautiful. The most enduring lessons were not in the syllabus. They lay in the contradictions between prayer and punishment, between virtue and violence, between Christian love and colonial power.

This blog is not a reckoning. It’s a beginning, a way of making visible what was once hidden, and of offering that visibility as a small contribution to collective healing. I believe that healing begins when we stop pretending that harm is virtue. When we allow ourselves to feel what we were taught to numb, and honour the possibility that there is another way to be, one rooted not in superiority, but in shared vulnerability.

Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.

Memoir and Testimony

George Monbiot (1995) Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey Through Indonesia. Penguin.
Not strictly a memoir of boarding, but Monbiot has written movingly elsewhere (essays and interviews) about the impact of his own boarding school experience — how it shaped his sensitivity to cruelty and injustice.

Charles Spencer (2018) Charles: The Heart of a King. Harper.
Alongside his historical work, Spencer has spoken about his painful years at boarding school, revealing the toll of institutionalised loneliness and bullying.

Nigel Nicolson (1974) Portrait of a Marriage. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Part family memoir, part autobiography, it includes reflections on his own schooling and the silences inherited from such institutions.

Tim Burkitt (2018) Boarding School Syndrome: A Survivor’s Story. (Self-published).
A raw, personal account from a former boarder, explicitly linking his experiences to the patterns Schaverien and Duffell describe.

VulnerabilityFearShameDecolonising therapyBoarding SchoolPrivilegePowerOppressionWhite Supremacy

Rory Singer https://newroadpsychotherapy.com