Paper 1: The Unlearning, by George Monbiot George Monbiot’s article, initially published in
The Guardian in November 2019 and republished on his website, is an essay that argues
that British boarding schools are a ‘form of abuse’ that have a negative impact on boarding
school students and ‘those they grow up to dominate’. Monbiot’s key claim is that boarding
schools, particularly when attended from a young age, are harmful for individuals, wider
society, and that there is a societal imperative to understand the emotional harm that
boarding schools cause. Monbiot makes his argument in a variety of ways. Often his lexis
has a dramatic quality, suggesting that the problem of boarding schools is serious and
urgent. Monbiot expresses his ideas without equivocation and many, if not all, of his
sentences are declarative. He uses a range of rhetorical features such as listing and
contrasting. And, at times, Monbiot is ironic, using idiomatic expressions in untypical ways
that, in so doing, add ethos to his argument. Monbiot’s headline, ‘The Unlearning’ provides
an immediate and succinct hook into his essay. It is unclear, initially, what Monbiot is
referring to, and it does not become fully apparent until the penultimate paragraph. Thus, the
headline provides an element of suspense. The reader knows, through Monbiot’s use of the
definite article, ‘the’, that he is highlighting something specific. Although the reader is not
clear what ‘unlearning’ Monbiot is referring to, she can infer from prior knowledge that the
essay will be about addressing error or mistake. Monbiot’s first single-sentence paragraph
functions as a lead that underscores his key idea: Boarding schools are harmful for those
who attend them and, ultimately, to those in society who are ruled by those who attended
boarding school. He uses the noun ‘abuse’ in his initial paragraph, a word he repeats several
times, to highlight the significance and seriousness of the problem as he sees it. The
outcome of this ‘abuse’ is that it has ‘devastating impacts’ on those affected. The adjective,
‘devastating’, in the noun phrase, confirms the magnitude of the problem. Like his initial
paragraph, the first sentence in Monbiot’s second paragraph is a declarative sentence. The
modality is unmarked and high, signalled by the verb ‘are’, suggesting to the reader that
there is nothing questionable or controversial in what he argues. The apparently indisputable
nature of Monbiot’s claims is reinforced through the use of the noun ‘facts’, a word that
confirms Monbiot’s claim to truth. The preceding adjective, ‘stark’ seems to suggest not only
that Monbiot is making uncontested claims, but that the claims are also strong and obvious.
Monbiot’s initial claim is that British life is controlled by an ‘unrepresentative elite’ (many of
whom, readers later discover, attended boarding schools). His second claim arises from his
first and is made in the form of a three-part-list, where he suggests that the ‘unrepresentative
elite’ have a ‘disastrous set of traits: dishonesty, class loyalty, and an absence of principle’.
He takes the British Prime Minister as an example of the unrepresentative elite. He then
asks the reader two reasonably open-ended questions, before finally stating that ‘we
urgently need to understand a system that has poisoned the life of this nation for over a
century’. This assertion suggests that the problem is long-standing and pressing. The
adjective ‘poisoned’ is a further example of Monbiot’s dramatic and urgent vocabulary, where
‘poisoned’ has connotations of deliberate and malicious wrongdoing. The personal pronoun,
‘we’, works as a form of synthetic personalisation, inviting the reader to adopt or collude with
Monbiot’s stance. The fourth paragraph seems to answer the questions asked in the
previous one. In the fourth paragraph, Monbiot shifts from a third-person form of address to
talk about himself in the firstperson. The repetition of the pronoun ‘I’ perhaps surprises the
reader who is told that ‘two stark facts about British politics’ introduced in the second
paragraph can be explained by boarding schools, which Monbiot attended as very young,
and where, Monbiot repeats, a ‘particularly British form of abuse’ takes place. In the next
three paragraphs, Monbiot explains the abusive nature of boarding schools. Using examples
form his own childhood and the experiences of Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister,
Monbiot goes on to detail that the abuse he is referring to is carried out by both staff and
students, and that some of the abuse is sexual. Readers may or may not be surprised by 2
© David McIntyre, InThinking http://www.thinkib.net/englishalanglit what Monbiot describes,
but they will almost certainly be horrified by his claims and may, in turn, further empathise
with Monbiot. Monbiot uses the accessed voices of others, including ‘the journalist Alex
Renton’ and cites a ‘current independent argument’. Later, he includes the perspective of
‘psychotherapist Joy Shaverien’ who ‘lists a set of symptoms that she calls Boarding School
Syndrome’. The effect of other voices is important; without such accessed voices readers
would need to accept Monbiot’s credibility. However, the additional voices are expert,
institutional, and credible. This, again, elevates the ethos of Monbiot’s claims and contributes
to persuading the reader. The perversity of boarding schools and the emotional damage
inflicted by attending them is something Monbiot frequently describes, and this is often
embedded in the ways Monbiot employs defamiliarizing idioms. For example, expressions
such as ‘this improbable feat’ and ‘added twist’ are more typically used in ways that connote
positivity, but Monbiot uses such expressions in ways that suggest the opposite, apparently
confirming the ultimate irony of boarding schools; that is, children are sent to boarding
schools by parents who aim to improve their lives when, in fact, they destroy the lives of
those children. As Monbiot states, ‘this terrible thing is being done for your own good’. The
tension between what boarding schools hope to cultivate and what, ultimately, they destroy
is also made apparent in Monbiot’s syntactic patterning. Using a rhetorical strategy of claim
and rebuttal, Monbiot suggests that ‘the justification of early boarding is … that emotional
hardship must make you emotionally tough’. This relatively long, complex sentence is
followed by Monbiot’s next simple and immediate sentence: ‘It does the opposite’. This blunt
assertion has the probable effect of halting the reader, providing a momentary opportunity for
reflection, before Monbiot continues with two further, longer sentences that outline the actual
effect of boarding schools. In the paragraphs that follow, Monbiot elaborates on his own
boarding school experiences. His emotional inner life is expressed, for example, in the
three-part list where he suggests he was ‘shocked, frightened and intensely homesick’. The
outcome of enduring bullying and abuse, Monbiot tells readers, is his that children ‘develop a
shell’. This metaphor, conveying a sense of exterior hardness that disguises inner
vulnerability, suggests part of the response to a culture that is both perverse and cruel. In
addition, as Monbiot argues in a subsequent alliterative and memorable sentence,
‘repressed people repress people’. This, for Monbiot, is the logical outcome of abuse
sustained in boarding school. This claims takes the reader back to Monbiot’s suggestion that
since Britain’s elite often spent a childhood in boarding schools where abuse is widespread,
and in turn become inclined to abuse others, the effect of boarding schools at a societal level
is that the governed become the victims of an uncaring ‘damaged caste’ of governors.
Interestingly, Monbiot, while clearly critical of boarding schools, does not advocate their
abolition, but he does suggest that, for people like him, it is important to unlearn. That is, he
suggests that those who attended boarding schools, must question the nature of such
schools rather than ‘justifying and reproducing its cruelties’. Only in this way will it become
possible to create a kinder (British) society. Monbiot’s arguments are convincing and
persuasive. However, oppositional readings are possible. The apparent certainty and
absence of equivocation are, as noted, features of his essay. There is little if any doubt.
Although his argument is consolidated by other authoritative voices, they may not be a
representative sample of opinions. In addition, the opinions offered are selected to reinforce
Monbiot’s own claims. It is entirely possible that Monbiot’s experience, which is central to this
cathartic essay, is untypical. If people exist who benefitted or claim to have benefitted from
attending a British boarding school, there perspective is not included in Monbiot’s article