This letter was in The Times this morning:
There is remarkably little to add.
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Honestly, what a mess we’re in. I’ll bet they’re all doing alright though.
The letter falls into the class of “oh dear – but perhaps Eton will get better, somehow”. No it won’t. Aboltion of any and all private schools. The state has a monopoly on full time education. Turn Eton into a hostel for refugees (including the chapel).
I am inclined to agree
Good lord – a rare moment of reflection indeed.
“It goes without saying, reading this history ( “Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the U. K.” by Simon Kuper), that the overwhelming influence of a single kind of graduate from a single university (and often a single school, Eton) at the top of British life has been profoundly damaging.”
(Tim Adams in The Guardian 1/5/2022)
Agreed
An old article but I still read and refer to it regularly…. (NB.. as this was written 9 year ago it refers to David Cameron as PM).
Why boarding schools produce bad leaders
By Nick Duffell
The elite tradition is to send children away at a young age to be educated. But future politicians who suffer this ‘privileged abandonment’ often turn out as bullies or bumblers. A psychotherapist explains why…
In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.
Read the full article at-
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/09/boarding-schools-bad-leaders-politicians-bullies-bumblers
We are keen to try and have a balance between gender and race in appointments, is it time to limit the number of MP’s, Judges and other professions from private schools to 7% or whatever the current level of take up is?
From Tom Brown’s school days to the campaigns of modern journalists like Alex Renton and Nicky Campbell private boarding schools continue to be recognised as places of systematic physical and sexual child abuse.
Any child placed in such an institution from the age of seven will have their understanding of human relationships, family and society severely warped.
In a rational world such places should have been legally abolished decades ago.
Apart from the harm they do to children, their resulting capacity to produce an endless supply of sociopathic incompetents like Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Sunak has done immense harm to this country and the seventy million people that live here.
We can blame the likes of Eton all we like but we (collectively) are the idiots that vote these psychopaths in.
I didn’t
Why did you?