Features
Schools’ House System
They sought to transform their suburban living to my address; one mother even intent on inserting my Colombo 3 address in the birth certificate of her infant to get the child into Royal, failing which they’d settle for one of the other two proximate boys’ schools. Cheating was not and is not in my living style. My reluctance to cheat was incomprehensible to the new breed of parents. When my elder son had to enter college, we moved well before he was five to an annexe proximate to Royal College giving up spacious living in Ratmalana.
I got diverted: cheating is a practice that is total anathema to me, as it is to other older persons. We were bred and nurtured at home and school in a different way to most of those who now occupy center stage in our country. And that directly impinges on the subject of my article this Sunday – which is healthy competition and fair play, embedded and nurtured by the House System in the schools we attended.
Most schools now have their houses with set colours and probably mottoes and distinctive flags. I am blown up with righteous pride as I write about school houses since my school – Girls High School, Kandy – was the first girls’ school to adopt the house system. The school, now more familiarly named as Kandy High (KHS), was founded in 1879 by Rev Samuel Langdon with his wife. the first principal.
The house system was introduced in 1921. This is a first among others like adopting a school song, hymm, school uniform, badge and tie, Guiding and Brownies, which KHS is proud of. Recorded with happy memories interrupted with nail biting competitiveness is that we almost died for the House we belonged to from the four: Eaton (light blue), Langdon (dark green), Lawrance (yellow) and Sansom (dark blue). Names were of principals of the period 1879 to 1920; colours were from the school crest of a yellow sun against a pale blue sky shining over a dark blue mountain with a grassy stretch of land in the foreground.
Origin of the House System
Being within the British Empire when the education system of Ceylon was greatly enlarged and enhanced, missionary schools opened here copied customs, systems and ways of running schools from Britain, and the best in Britain.
The house system began in boarding schools where students ate, drank and slept; i.e. lived in individual houses during school terms. My reference reading did not indicate whether these houses were owned by outside-school individuals or the school itself at the very beginning. Soon enough the ‘houses’ came within the school premises and administration, and each was referred to as a ‘boarding house’. The schools thus became boarding schools where a ‘house’ referred to a boarding dormitory in the school, and students were distributed among the four (or more or less) houses. A housemaster or housemistress was assigned to each house in loco parentis. Houses competed with one another at sports and maybe in other ways, thus providing a focus for group loyalty.
The house system is associated with public schools in England termed boarding schools. In day schools the word house is likely to refer to a grouping of pupils rather than to a particular building. The house system still operates in boarding schools such as Harrow, Eton and Winchester Colleges, copied exactly by Trinity College, Kandy. Maybe by other large colleges in Colombo and other cities.
In Trinity College the dormitories and thus houses were named Fraser, Napier, Alison and Ryde. Boarders were assigned their Houses which system prevailed for sports events and meets. The less number of day students were all in Garret House. An Old Boy of TCK told me that this system prevails no more, with the transformation of a purely boarding school to one with more day scholars.
Hillwood College was a boarding school which had very few day students. The school had its four Houses but the hostels were divided according to age of inmates: the youngest were in Netherwood, the pre-teens in Middlewood, those in their mid-teens in a much smaller place down below called Cave Memorial Hostel, and the seniors in the dorm named Hillwood, adjacent to the principal’s office, admin office and senior classrooms. High School which had only around 32 hostelers who were in different dormitories, un-named; Houses were within the school system.
Houses may be named after saints, more often with names of outstanding managers or principals of the school. Kingswood went even further than Trinity College and named its four Houses – Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Winchester.
Buddhist schools usually revered persons in Buddhist history, by borrowing their names. A few schools prosaically select names of colours. Visakha Vidyalaya has Dias, Dawes, Jayatillake, Pulimood, Motwani and Weerasooria recording its woman founder, managers and principals. Leelananda de Silva who I spoke with said that in Mahinda College, Galle, Dr F L Woodward, Oxford classicist, wished to retain Sri Lankan-ness and borrowed names for Mahinda’s Houses from our historical heritage by naming them Pandukabhaya, Parakrama, Gemunu and Tissa.
Benefits of the House System
No doubt the house system enhanced the aim of schools which was, is and should be the development of the personality of its students; to assist students to mould their characters so they become well balanced members of society; useful citizens to their country. How is this done? Mainly by fostering the quality of loyalty and willingness to give the best of themselves for the good of the House they belong to. Also character building through clean competitiveness which connotes fair play and acceptance of victory or defeat in the correct spirit. Thus inter-house sports meets in almost every school, whether urban or rural.
Visions of girlhood
The final verse of the KHS School Song has these lines:
“When we look back and forgetfully wonder
What we were like in our work and our play
Then it may be there will often come o’er us.
Visions of girlhood shall float then before us”
The song mentions netball matches played, dancing, debates and exams.
Remembered are our sports meets which meant the world to us. Tradition in the 1950s was that the sports meet was organized entirely by the Games Captain with the School Captain, supervised by Games Teachers. Hence when I was Games Cap, Carmen de Zylva and I did the shopping for prizes and made all arrangements. Remembered is that we had races for Old Girls, Teachers, and even the men servers in the school, each appropriated to a House. Remembered is that we took Banda who rang the school bell at the beginning of school and end, and after each period, to Sansom House while Suppiah and the other two were in the other houses. Best remembered with a missed heartbeat still, are netball matches with the formidable Hillwood team dressed in full Kandyan sari against our divided skirts. They invariably won!
Those were the days, my friend, of loyalty, keen, clean competition and playing the game as it should be played, to win or lose, fair and square.