This book’s subtitle contains of course a fundamental category error. The Decline and Rise of the Public School? Public? From any commonsensical 2015 perspective, these highly resourced and increasingly international businesses – masquerading as charities – are thoroughly private institutions. When the going rate to attend Eton, Winchester, Harrow et al is upwards of £30,000 a year, well in excess of most parental incomes, and average fees even for non-boarding schools are pushing £12,000, so-called “public” schools are public only in the most nominal sense of the word.
It is one of the many virtues of David Turner’s well-researched, pleasingly written and mainly dispassionate historical survey (with the only factual error I spotted being to call Anthony Crosland a Wykehamist, perhaps a natural mistake given his intellectual arrogance) that he clears up the terminological puzzle. “Private” schools, he explains, were usually local, profit-making and set up by an individual, often not outlasting that individual and as a phenomenon largely on the way out by the early 20th century at the latest; whereas a “public” school (with the term in use by the late 17th century) tended to have a much broader geographical intake, educating the children of wealthy families from across the nation. The distinction, in other words, was a genuine one. But still, “public”? The confusion has undoubtedly played its part in enabling these engines of privilege to survive more or less unscathed.
The long-run story that Turner tells is a fascinating one and, I suspect, surprisingly little known. The first public school was Winchester College, founded by William of Wykeham in 1382, with other resonant names following over the next two centuries, including Eton (1440), St Paul’s (1509) and Westminster (1560). Most of these pioneer schools were intended by their founders to educate predominantly the poor and deserving; but in practice this seldom happened, so that by the 18th century a public school education had become, in Turner’s words, “almost the standard education for the ruling class”. The Victorian age saw the traditional barbarism being mercifully modified – Thomas Arnold at Rugby was the great reformer – as well as the creation of many new public schools to cater for the offspring of the rapidly expanding upper middle class. And much of the 20th century was about warding off a real (sometimes) or imaginary (more often) socialist threat.
Turner fleshes out all this with well-chosen detail and pertinent number-crunching. He is also alert to the texture of these strange and often hermetic places – most memorably in his pages evoking what he calls “a permanent atmosphere of violence” between roughly the 1770s and 1830s, as the older boys, imbued with a self-confidence and sense of entitlement that would make even their present-day descendants in Downing Street blush, regularly rose up against the authorities in defence of their autocratic powers over the younger pupils, above all through the harshly capricious fagging system. In 1964, when I went to Wellington College, that system was still in place; five years later, when I became a house prefect in my last term, it had gone.
As it happens, that decade was on the cusp of the development that lies at the very heart of Turner’s analysis. From the 1970s onwards, as is clear from his and other accounts, the private schools (as I have to call them) really got their act together – just as the state grammar schools, some of which had been academically as good as the best private schools, largely disappeared from the scene as a result of the comprehensive revolution. And by now, according to Turner (until quite recently the education correspondent of the Financial Times), the education provided by the all-shiny, all-dancing private sector could hardly be better: “impressive academically, scientifically, economically and pastorally”.
He may well be broadly right – and certainly at my old school, Anthony Seldon’s occasionally mocked initiative in teaching “happiness” (better understood as emotional intelligence) has in its own way been Arnold-like. Yet the sober truth, which Turner tacitly acknowledges but is ultimately not swayed by, is that these generally excellent schools are, put simply, educating the wrong children. Most of the pupils, even before entering the private education system, are already, in socioeconomic and cultural-capital terms, highly privileged in comparison with the vast majority of other children; and the expensive education which this 7% receives then makes them even more privileged. We have, in short, a deeply unfair, grotesquely sloping playing field, making a mockery of talk of equality of opportunity. While as for claims that bursaries and suchlike somehow make the private sector net contributors to social mobility, the detailed refutation that I undertook last year with my son George (New Statesman, 31 January; Guardian) has not been challenged, and indeed was endorsed by Michael Gove, conceding that “our great public schools” are “overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy”.
But for Turner, all this matters less than what he puts forward as the economic-cum-educational justification for the present-day apartheid. The very existence of private schools, he argues, “greatly increases overall UK spending on education, and hence on human capital”; this in turn increases “opportunity in Britain”, especially given that the schools are “particularly strong in useful, modern subjects”; and furthermore, “their greatest virtue of all”, they “provide a necessary diversity of approach to how to educate children” – in stark contrast to “the uniformity to which the state system is prone”, with all too often a “flawed approach to talented children”.
These are good points, judiciously made, but in turn open to three objections. First, that it is quite possible that the academies revolution in the state sector will render redundant the “uniformity” claim; second, that the historic divide has contributed hugely over the last century and a half to our having such a segregated, snobbish and class-bound society, in turn a major factor in our long-run economic decline, being disastrous for the promotion of talent or for the encouragement of purpose and cohesion on the shopfloor; and third, that there is in the case of private education a far more important value judgment involved about what sort of society we want.
I would suggest that it is a society in which at least the educational playing field is level and children have an even chance. Is that the politics of envy? Or the politics of decency? I think the latter. And if our private schools were integrated into the national system, retaining operational autonomy but determining their intakes on any basis other than depth of parental pockets, there might be a chance of such a society.
The Old Boys is published by Yale University Press (£25). Click here to buy it for £20
