‘Public’ Schools: *they f**k you up…*

Posted on | March 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

Francis Wheen on ‘the blight of the public schools’:

Public school parents sometimes say to people like me: “How could you sacrifice your children by sending them to state school. But they are the ones who are making the sacrifice, I would argue. My boys, who go to the local comprehensive, get a far better and broader education than any Etonians will ever have. The Eton boys may go on to be high court judges, maybe even prime minister, god forbid, but at what cost?

To re-write Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, the public schools.” Maybe it wouldn’t matter if they only fucked up their own kind, but they fuck up the rest of us too because they run the show.

And Barnaby Lenon, Headmaster of Harrow, in response:

In Britain we like to knock things which are successful. But if we were to ask people outside this island what things they especially admired about Britain, in the top four or five, alongside the Queen, no doubt, and the army, would be British public schools. I believe this to be true because I know in the past year every single public school has been approached by one country or another to set up a franchise branch abroad. At Harrow, we’ve set up three so far…..if we’re a blight on British society then the blight is spreading fast.

The Queen (”no doubt”) and the army? Different planet, dear boy….different planet. Lenon’s misplaced certainty is, of course, shared by his peers. Francis Wheen, in his speech, relates a line from a recent talk by Andrew Grant, Headmaster of St Albans School, another of the ‘public’ schools:

Everyone should be grateful for public schools because, without them, Britain would not have enough officers to lead its army.

Quite. The £100m per year handed over to these private institutions pretending to be charities helps, I am sure, to mitigate the lack of gratitude from the great unwashed.

Francis Wheen kicks off a rollicking IQ2 debate on the motion: Public schools are a blight on British society. As John Naughton writes:

One of the most revealing things about Britain’s private schools is their reluctance to describe themselves as such. With the same mastery of metaphor that characterises the American right they call themselves ‘independent’, as if somehow they were in fact ideologically neutral or detached from narrow sectional interest. This opening speech by Francis Wheen in a debate organised by Intelligence Squared is an entertainingly concise attack on these strange institutions.

The whole debate can be found on the IQ2 YouTube channel.

Postscript: – I had to censor the post title a little since the expletive was starting to attract a certain brand of blog spam