My regular reader will know my strong, irrational and profoundly hypocritical views on private education, because she’s married to me. Others may be on less firm footing, so let’s try and demonstrate by taking a look at something written by Ralph Lucas, editor of The “Good” Schools Guide. His charming prose appears in the latest edition of Living South, which is one of those magazines which pops through your front door and lets you imagine a world where you need stone flooring, a glass-and-steel conservatory, and a new house with a 90 foot garden.
I don’t know Mr Lucas, but his photo is best described as generic overprivileged and somewhat-overfed white man. He is introducing a special supplement feature in Living South, which is essentially a dozen pages of adverts for local schools in my area. Most of these are private schools, as they’re the only ones who need to advertise.
He starts off in a friendly if vaguely disconcerting fashion:
“After, I hope, a relaxing holiday free of academic strees, it’s back to the autumn term and, for me at least, thoughts turning to ‘which school next?’”
What is this “academic stress” he speaks of? Is is stress which is caused by studying? Or stress which is made pointless by external events? And what does he mean by ‘which school next’? Is he planning some kind of bombing?
No, of course he’s not. He’s talking about choosing the next school for your loved ones. As he says:
“You need to give yourself a good, long run up – three years seems ideal to me – to dig out parents to chat to, read prospectuses, take advice, visit and discuss, and all in good time to make the grade for entrance: whether this means tutoring or moving home.”
I had to read that sentence a few times to let the full middle-class existential horror of it wash over me. Yes, folks, if you haven’t worried about your child’s next school for a good three years, you’re not working hard enough. And what’s this about “making the grade”? Tutoring is presumably about improving your useless offspring to the level required by these awesome seats of learning. But moving home? Does that mean moving out of an area if you’re not good enough for it? Or vice versa?
“Most London senior schools are ridiculously selective. The cause of this is the shortage of independent secondary schools in central London, caused in turn by the shortage of good state secondary schools: not something that shows signs of being speedily remedied.”
Ah, Mr Lucas is on firmer ground now. This is recognisably Daily Mail territory. Not only is state education, ipso facto, shit, but its essential shitness is also dragging down the fine purveyors of private education. And with a sweep of his Mont Blanc, Mr Lucas writes off the thousands of men and women who remain dedicated to state education in London. Nice going, Mr Lucas.
So Mr Lucas recommends looking further afield, to something he calls “country schools”. Not, as you might think, named for the kind of people they grow on the trees in these schools (think about it), but for their essential Non-Londonness. The phrase is redolent of cord trousers, restaurants which close at 10pm and an inherent assumption of superiority. Mr Lucas mentions Eton and Wycombe Abbey, and describes such schools as having a “delight in educating the average child and bringing out the best in them.”
Ah, the average child! God bless the average child! Fear not if your child is average, because these charitable institutions, these “country schools”, will take them on. As Mr Lucas says, they will take on the “shy, the dyslexic, the sporty, the theatrical, the entrepreneurial, the rebellious – and still have a shot at getting him or her into Oxbridge if that’s how they turn out.” And all for free! Although I might have got that bit wrong.
God bless Mr Lucas and his kind. With their sage advice and warm humanity, we can share in the common endeavour of educating all children, or equipping the next generation with the social skills, the love of learning and the sense of fellowship which this country needs. For otherwise, what is there? A country where the rich educate their children to a sense of entitlement, of special distinctiveness which marks them out from the common crowd, and where the rich encourage their children to avoid the common herd at all costs and choose private education for their own children when the time comes because all state schools are, axiomatically, completely and utterly shit.
Thanks Mr Lucas! And by the way, the person who build your website obviously went to state school, because it doesn’t work! Stupid state school idiot.
Stupid Good Schools guide
Tutoring and moving house are a pitiful waste of time and effort. When it became clear that Hermione and Marmaduke weren’t going to make the grade at our preferred school (country, boarding) we simply adopted a couple of Korean children instead. Can’t remember their names, but they’re doing jolly well. Meanwhile H & M are now fitting printed circuit boards in a factory in the Philippines. They still write from time to time, but their handwriting is deteriorating, which just goes to show we right were in spotting their academic weakness early on.
@Nik You’re a very funny man.
There’s really no need to spend all that time researching and tutoring. Do what most parents do and send your kids to the same schools your friend’s kids go to, and then spend the rest of their school years telling yourself and everyone who’ll listen why you’re confident you made the right decision.
It’s called “post-purchase rationalisation” by marketing people and it’s the same whether you’re choosing a school or buying a car (or any decision that has a high cost of undo or switch). After you’ve made your decision, you will feel a powerful urge to justify it and formulate a case for defending it.
How can any of us be sure we’ve chosen the right school for our kids? None of us have known enough kids before and after they’ve attended a particular school to have a meaningful sample group to base our opinions on prior to making the decision. League tables of results tell us more about selection bias than about a school’s ability to transform our grotty little sprog into a dux. Deep in what remains of our hearts, we know this, so instead we mostly build up the case for the decision we made after we’ve made it.
Most people will tell you to talk to other parents at a school beforehand, but really, what parent — whether committed to a government or private school — is going to say they might have made the wrong decision? Admit that I was wrong about something as important as my child’s education? Not likely!
It’s the same reason millions of Vauxhall owners are quite happy with the car they’re driving.
So if I were you (and sometimes I wonder if I am) I would tell myself that my strong, irrational bolshie opinions about education are actually about as rational as anybody else’s, and defend them loudly, with great passion, to the extreme embarrassment of your wife and children.
My son’s only eight and I already recognise that my own strong, irrational bias towards using my child in a selfish and meaningless gesture to inject at least one good, academically gifted kid into the government school system is doomed — he will ultimately go where his mother wants him to go because, frankly, her choice will be easier for us both to defend once the decision is made.
Fuck it, and fuck them all. I’m still going to make him take a paper round and I am not going to make any of the ‘voluntary’ donations the private school will ask for in addition to the exorbitant fees I pay. New gymnasium? Fuck that. They can do gymnastics in the rain, on the fucking soccer field, like I did, the little fuckers.
@alan Blimey. I can see why you were alarmed to see that go on Twitter.
But as you say, fuck it. We’re all wrong and right in equal measure. And I long ago decided it’s impossible to have a face-to-face argument about this stuff. But that’s what blogs are for, right?