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This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, each writer shares some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.
The craziest day?
I would choose the one that began with an assembly during which the chemistry master waved what he claimed was a loaded pistol. Lessons were suspended and fifth formers smoked cannabis and snogged in their hide-out overlooking the playground. The afternoon before had seen a concerted attack on a female biology teacher with Bunsen burners attached to taps and used as water cannon. I had not witnessed it because I had been suspended from the subject for suggesting insolently, in a mock O level, that the alimentary canal went from London to Liverpool and had recently been upgraded by the London to Liverpool Alimentary Canal Society.
Mr Hope, with his pistol, restored some order but Sidcot School in the summer of 1976 was not a place for the faint-hearted or the academically ambitious.
Idiots online sometimes discover that I went to a fee-paying boarding school and write triumphant messages suggesting that I have no ability to question Tory Privilege or American Imperialism and so on, because I had such a privileged upbringing myself. The better-read of them genuinely imagine the earlier chapters of A Dance To the Music of Time: tuck boxes and wall games and fags fixing your toast.
We didn’t even have hot water. There were cockroaches in the showers that we’d douse with lighter fluid and set alight. The latrines were unheated. At meals older, stronger children took the best food. Best being a relative term: I became a vegetarian to avoid the poisonous semi-cooked sausages on which most of the school lived. When I try now to make my kids eat food marginally beyond the sell-by date they raise their eyes to the sky and mouth ‘Daddy went to boarding school’.
And yes, I did yearn for privilege: for a home that hadn’t been poisoned by mental illness, for tea and telly with Mum and Dad and a bed that wasn’t metal in a dormitory with dozens of other boys. For a life in a nice comprehensive like my wife’s former school, where all the children of the teachers at the local university formed their own cosy group and holidayed in a camper van before gliding effortlessly off to top universities. But it wasn’t to be.
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SubscribeI am, as Justin Webb calls me in this piece, an ‘idiot online’ who ‘discovered’ that he had been privately educated. This isn’t hard to do. If, like me, you listen to the news interactively with social media rather than simply passively as part of the voiceless audience, you develop habits like looking up the journalists involved as they speak. When, like me, you discover that time and again they have been privately educated you begin to wonder why. If only 7% of the population have had this experience why are they sometimes 100% of the presenters (as on Radio 4’s Today programme, for example, in fact the programme that Webb regularly presents)?
Webb says in his piece that the ‘more well-read’ of the idiots online imagine that private education is like the life described in A Dance To The Music of Time. I can assure him we idiots don’t, and that this is a straw man argument. The nasty privations, borderline if not actual abuse, forms of torture and subsequent damage done at many boarding schools has been well documented and is well-known. Most people, if they think about it for a moment, actually feel sorry for people ripped from their families – often because their families don’t want them at home – and sent to survive in the vicious society of other damaged children and frankly weird adults.
Webb, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, confuses the ‘privilege’ we idiots accuse the 7% of having with something to do with luxury. We don’t. My own, often short of food but full of love childhood in a tiny house freezing in winter and boiling in summer, with attendance at the local grammar school, was clearly much nicer than his childhood. The privilege, however, was not there. My stellar O levels, equally stellar A levels and even more stellar degree at Birmingham University could not and would not overcome my very unstellar background or indeed, apparently, my ‘idiocy’. A concrete ceiling of many complex layers formed above my head. He, however, admits that he messed around during his O levels and was still OK because the school closed around him when he needed them. This is exactly what private education does in this country; it closes round its own. Careers, for example in law, at the BBC, in politics, in business, even, these days, in acting, are all but out of reach if you haven’t got a named school to call on to underline your suitability for polite society. We haven’t had two Eton PMs in ten years because they’re the best intellects this country can provide. We’ve had them because a privately educated sense of entitlement together with the way connections close around their own people makes for an unassailable combination, and that’s how things are still done in this country.
The title of this series: ‘Boarding school put me in my place’ couldn’t be more apt. Webb is safely in his place presenting the Today programme; the rest of us have to be content to be merely idiots online.