I experienced an unwelcome epiphany recently. As it turns out, I irrationally despise those who’ve received a private education. But don’t worry; I won’t be storming the gates of Eton any time soon, because I know this to be an unfair and misplaced emotional response. After all, how can I blame the parents, who are trying to give their child the best education money can buy? How can I blame the child, who has no agency over the type of school he attends? How can I blame the gifted teacher, faced with the decision between a difficult school and apathetic parents or a prestigious institution and matching home support? Quite obviously, I can’t. But who else can I blame, if not the participants of the system that most greatly perpetuates class division in our society? Perhaps I should simply lash out against the abstract machine of social injustice? Or then again, I could just save the high-horsed piety.
If this all seems a bit man-of-the-people, chip-on-the-shoulder, schoolboy-bolshevist, then let me ground my feelings in a more recent example. As a debater, in my final year of state education, I recently went to the University of Durham’s Schools Competition with three of my peers – their arsenals all equally stocked with ambition and anxiety. Before the weekend of debating started, already my cringe-reflex was near gagging. I bounded out the door to the soundtrack of an overly enthusiastic mother bellowing in my direction, “Enjoy your swansong, Sam!” She has a talent for the unintentionally ominous.
But mums aside, it was the experience of jostling through the crowds of amateur Jack Wills models and Ralph Lauren faithfuls that solidified my socialist ramblings. Whilst sitting in the once cavernous lecture theatre, now brimming with more trust fund beneficiaries than Surrey, I would often survey the 200 or so with some interest. Yet during my observations I seemed incapable of seeing the bustling mass as any sort of representation of talent, dedication or intelligence, and instead found myself gazing upon the room with an inexplicable disdain – unable to peel off the feeling that I had just finished a pilgrimage to a shrine of inherited privilege.
If I haven’t made it clear already, debating is one of those activities typically dominated by the privately – or selectively – educated. In essence, it’s quite similar to the likes of polo, croquet or High Court judging. The debating ‘circuit’ usually features the likes of Westminster, Eton, St Paul’s Boys, Dulwich, St Paul’s Girls and a host of Royal Grammar schools, in pole position. Unfortunately like most things in life, being good at debating requires a lot of time, money and just a dash of intelligence.
Don’t believe me? I can’t say I blame you – it is after all just arguing. Isn’t basic reasoning available to all? Well, I’m afraid no. You see just getting there and back, finding somewhere to stay, entrance fees, and eating out all add up to a figure that is undoubtedly out of the reach of most ordinary comprehensive schools and their pupils. The very fact I could even attend such a competition was only realised by the extraordinary dedication and enthusiasm of my headteacher. Without the external work he does we most definitely wouldn’t be able to scrape together the cash needed to haul our team around the country, competing at the various far flung universities hosting said competitions. Just to put it in perspective, our school could afford to enter two teams this year; St Pauls Girl’s entered eight.
Even if you ignore the fact these institutions (most notably Dulwich College) hire professional coaches for their teams, sheer force of numbers almost guarantees these schools a quarter or semi-final appearance at just about every competition. Speaking of quarter-finals, we didn’t make it. We did stay long enough however, to watch one of the penultimate rounds. Featuring in the semi-final we watched were four teams: two from Westminster, one from Dulwich, and one from a charity called DebateMate. DebateMate being an organisation who intensively coaches kids in debating from deprived areas in central London; Westminster and Dulwich being schools that entail a small £12,000 a term fee. I’m sure if you really work those peasant brains of yours, you can guess who I was rooting for.
You shouldn’t be too surprised to know that when the two DebateMate speakers from Hackney (also the only non-white speakers in the debate) took the podium to oppose the motion, I was fanatical. Hanging on every word uttered, my hope turned into blind faith as every syllable spoken seemed to smash at the foundations of plutocracy.
When it finished, however, the rest of my team seemed unconvinced. “I didn’t like their style” one said. “Good, well developed, but irrelevant,” commented another, in reference to a point made by the DebateMate team.
I couldn’t believe it. I genuinely couldn’t process the idea that my comprehensive poster-boys could do wrong. Every criticism from my friends rang in my ears as if it was the most heinous blasphemy. I tried to protest but I was silenced pretty quickly by the rest of the team. In all honesty they were probably right, my mates, when they said I wasn’t listening to the debate. I wasn’t. I was listening for any victory the state sector could bring, any sign that the historic grip the independents had on my hobby was slipping.
But alas, the tab (debating-speak for ‘results’) came through today. The outcome of the grand final made for depressingly typical reading: St Paul’s Girls first; Westminster second; West Point Grey Academy (look it up and be not surprised) third and DebateMate fourth. The grip had loosened, but only by a single, exhausted sinew.
Whilst this is a true story, it is also (as the brighter, possibly privately educated, among you will have already realised) one whopping great metaphor for society at large. You see, just as the Dulwiches (Farage’s old school), Westminsters (Clegg’s old school) and Etons (David Cameron’s old school) of the ‘circuit’ comfortably stroll ahead of the competition, as if moving on those sorts of floor escalators you get at airports, so too do the spawn of the rich in society.
In my opinion, the only thing the rich can justifiably have access to more of is stuff. Material objects. Not services. The rich don’t deserve better police, better ambulances or better fire engines and definitely don’t deserve better schools. Schools especially should be universal and unqualified because they deal exclusively in young people. This distinctiveness is important because schools help define what kind of stakeholders we’ll be in society. Whether that be a CEO, multinational stakeholder, or a greasy spoon restaurant, steak-holding waiter. You get the idea, if you’ll pardon the abysmal pun.
When the rich separate their offspring from the rest, at the age of about five or eleven, and then have them systematically groomed for power in institutions that rake in numbers close to that of the GDP of small African nations, it becomes blaringly obvious that the most influential in society will continue to have the same surnames. If this carries on then what incentive is there for change? Whilst a king-of-the-hill mentality hangs over society like an omnipresent chandelier, class based nepotism will always be the method of choice for social immobility. In short, the co-existence of state comprehensive and fee paying independent schools means the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the gap between them will become far more significant than the eight miles between Mayfair and Tower Hamlets.
But what’s the point? Really? I mean, there are a million words written in favour of the abolition of private schools and few hundred of mine won’t suddenly woo the world into collective “trendy-lefty-beardy-weirdy” thought, as Michael Gove once so eloquently remarked, in reference to progressive teaching methods.
And even if all that I say is true, then I know for a fact it won’t change. But the frustrating thing is that I don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing that there’s someone ‘behind it’. No grand conspiracy against the poor, no New World order, just well-off concerned parents and savvy teachers.
It’s strange really. Robert Fludd dedicated his life to the creation of a perpetual motion machine, yet all he needed to do was visit the playing fields of Eton and then the palaces of Westminster, and he would’ve seen he’d already been beaten to it.
A couple of thousand years ago, some guy you may have heard of said: “forgive them, for they know not what they do”. But I would add to that sentiment that we should never give up on trying to stop them, because if we do, well, I might just win something.
Words by Sam Cunningham