Winks

Winks is a master at Philip Carey’s school whose weary manner and misplaced faith in boys’ honesty make him a quiet emblem of the institution’s complacency. As master of the Upper Third, he presides over a classroom where pupils learn to evade work and distort the truth more readily than they learn Latin.

Identity and Position

Winks is the master of the Upper Third. He is described as weak-kneed and too tall for his strength, with drooping eyelids and slow, languid movements. His appearance gives an impression of lassitude, matched by the nickname the boys use for him. He performs his duties, but with an abstracted mind.

The other masters also hear Winks express the staff’s reaction to the new headmaster, Tom Perkins. After Perkins ranges across pedagogy, politics, classical history, German philosophy, and French fiction, Winks reduces the group’s unease to a brief judgment: Perkins is enthusiastic. In the older masters’ view, enthusiasm is ungentlemanly because it threatens familiar habits and suggests change.

Teaching and Classroom Practice

Philip spends a couple of terms in Winks’s Upper Third. Life there is easy: boys know which passages they will be asked to construe and can consult a shared crib to prepare. They keep their Latin grammars open on their knees during questioning, while Winks fails to notice that the same implausible error appears in many boys’ exercises.

Winks believes examinations are a poor measure of his pupils because they do less well in them than in class. He treats that discrepancy as disappointing but not significant, rather than as evidence that the boys have learned little. When they move up, their chief acquisition has been cheerful effrontery in distorting the truth, an education the narrator dryly suggests may serve them better later in life than reading Latin at sight.

Beliefs and Narrative Significance

Winks’s faith in boys’ honour shapes his teaching: he holds that truthfulness is encouraged by never assuming that a boy might lie. He supports this principle with the maxim, “Ask much,” he quoted, “and much shall be given to you.” In practice, however, his trust is not matched by attention to what happens in the classroom. The boys exploit that gap, and his confidence becomes part of the conditions that allow their evasions to flourish.

His response to Perkins extends the same portrait beyond teaching. Winks recognizes the new headmaster’s energy, but the staff’s shared unease turns that energy into a sign of social danger. The contrast between Perkins’s intellectual range and Winks’s weary conservatism places Winks among the guardians of an old school culture that prizes decorum over change, even as its everyday practices undermine the learning and honesty it professes to value.