Damian Thompson

The corruption of our public schools

By Damian Thompson Education Last updated: September 7th, 2012

Public schools have lost their special ethos…

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph

T
he growing influence of very rich foreigners in Britain is changing society almost as profoundly as New Labour’s cynical and irreversible policy of open-door immigration. In the competition for upmarket houses and top jobs in the City, the upper-middle-class gent is being elbowed aside; so is his wife – literally – when she bustles into Harvey Nick’s. But nowhere are the changes more far-reaching than in the field of independent education.
If, like me, you didn’t go to a public school, you may not care very much about the corrosion of Britain’s public-school ethos. But I’ve spent the past week talking to people who work in this sector, either as teachers or tutors, and I reckon we should all care – not least because we stand to become victims of the mindset that’s replacing that ethos.
Two disturbing things are happening. First, new vistas have opened up for minor public schools that were on the verge of closing because their deadbeat teachers couldn’t produce the exam grades to justify the boarding fees. “They appoint headmasters who are basically glorified PR men who spread the word in China and the Middle East that they’re a 'top public school’,” says one tutor.
“A dyslexic Saudi boy I know ended up at a school that boasted of all sorts of special facilities and activities. But when the parents visited their son, there was no evidence of them.”
Another well-connected source says these horror stories are common. “There are all sorts of educational fixers out there. Once the 'agent’ has taken his cut, often a term’s fees, he washes his hands of it. One boy from the Far East arrived at the railway station to find that the school had 'forgotten’ to send anyone to pick him up.”
Major public schools know about these scams and won’t have anything to do with them. “They’ll put down the phone if an 'agent’ rings. They don’t even like talking to guardians, only parents,” says my source.
But the famous schools have their own relationship with foreign money, he adds, and it’s more insidiously corrupting.
Competition for places allows them to charge stratospheric fees that exclude the children of old boys without lowering their academic standards. You can indeed buy a Rolls-Royce education for this money – and that’s the problem.
Your son or daughter is guaranteed a luxuriously engineered experience; moreover, the richer the parents, the fatter the benefactions. The founding ethos of the school disappears underneath the technology centre or squash courts funded by a grateful Russian property magnate.
The result: a mixture of British and overseas pupils whose common denominator is the experience of growing up stinking rich. I don’t want to romanticise public schools, which have always produced their fair share of wretched snobs. But, says my informant, “what we’re seeing now is an education that leaves pupils reeking of entitlement without imparting any sense of the social responsibility envisaged by the schools’ founders.”
This transformation hasn’t happened suddenly: for the past 20 years, globalisation has been sharpening the greed of a certain sort of public schoolboy. Often this is combined with vague benevolence, but it’s the benevolence of the billionaire smirking as he writes a cheque rather than that of the volunteer whose aim is to liberate ordinary people. Some of those entitled young men have gone into politics and are sitting around the Cabinet table. Which is one reason why, as I said earlier, this is a mindset that threatens all of us.