another brick in the wall
I heard last week that the day when parents find out whether or not their offspring have managed to secure the school place of choice, came and went with the usual tears, tantrums & tussles. I quite feel for them in certain ways as it is undoubtedly important but have to admit that I do hanker after the times when the decision was oh so simple. Back in the day, it was either you paid or you didn’t, and in my neck of the woods, you either went to the local catholic school, or you went to the local protestant school. All the schools were equal in terms of size and quality and that, pretty much, was that.
What’s more, very few people appeared to want to pay for anything above this. The case for the abolishing of public schools really seemed to have gained momentum and it was widely accepted that they were cut off from the real world, only taught relatively useless subjects such as ancient Greek, encouraged strange attitudes to both sex and servitude, and universally failed to produce well-rounded individuals who were equipped for life in the modern world. The one potential choice open to some was the grammar route and, in the 60s & 70s, this seemed to further sound their death knell.
However, in a fantastic case of Mark Twain’s ‘reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’, the public schools hit back with a vengeance, and as the quality of state schools declined, public schools upped their game. Out went the fagging and bullying of Tom Brown, quickly followed by Achilles & archery. In came Mandarin and machine code. And in came the pupils; up from 4% in the 70s to almost 8% today. With a unabashed focus on small classes, great teaching and excellent extra curricula facilities they undoubtedly offer the very rich an entirely unfair leg-up in life. You may, like me, find it surprising that the majority of Britain’s major public schools began as grammar schools in the late Middle Ages – Winchester was founded in 1382, with places for 70 poor scholars and only ten fee-paying gentrifiers! With today’s modern-day establishment being dominated by the public school elite, we can only wonder, where it all went wrong.
