I 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.
I 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.