The corruption of our public schools

By Damian Thompson

 
The 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.
 
Exterminate the double entendres
 
The new series of Doctor Who opened with the jaw-dropping spectacle of the Parliament of the Daleks and some crafty twists in the plot. Alas, the programme has picked up the Hollywood mannerism of making its characters shout to each other above the roar of special effects. It’s exhausting to follow. Also, every other line of dialogue is a wisecrack, which makes you feel as if you’re trapped in front of a stand-up comic who doesn’t know when to shut up. I found myself rather warming to the Daleks, whose unfortunate vocal impediment means they can’t speak fast enough to lace their murderous threats with smart-aleck double entendres.
 
 
How disappointing to learn that the Mars corporation has disowned the deep-fried Mars bar. I hope this doesn’t upset the well-upholstered new Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, who is rumoured to have a soft spot for this Caledonian delicacy. Tartaglia, you may recall, bizarrely suggested that the early death of a Scottish Labour MP was somehow connected to his homosexuality. He’s a man of robust views whom you don’t want to encounter in a bad mood. Let’s hope the Archbishop isn’t deprived of the simple pleasure of dunking batter-encrusted confectionery into his bedtime Horlicks as he watches favourite episodes of, say, The Golden Girls. Tartaglia doesn’t often giggle, but I bet he can’t resist Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and her deliciously dry one-liners.
 
Masked politics shows its face
 
Amid the gushing “journalism” from the Democratic convention, how refreshing to read R Emmett Tyrrell, grand old man of American conservative journalism. “The Democrats milling about on the floor have interesting faces,” he wrote. “There are the feminists, the race hustlers, and the other vested interests: environmentalists, consumerists, school teachers – the kind of people that we at The American Spectator call practitioners of Masked Politics. They claim a special fervour for the environment, the consumer, for children. Yet behind their masks they are standard issue Big Government meddlers.”
 
Precisely. Moreover, Masked Politics is now the default style of the British Left, which is far more Americanised than the Right. If you don’t believe me, just turn on Radio 4 any weekday morning: “Blah blah blah desperate shortage of investment blah blah lack of resources blah blah short-sighted cuts…” And those are just the presenters.
 
Madame Mao is lost for words
 
It’s the Last Night of the Proms tonight, and as usual I’ll be giving this gruesome institution a wide berth. But it would be churlish to bang on, because this week the Proms provided me with two glorious musical experiences: Chailly and the Gewandhaus in an explosively joyful Mahler Six, and John Adams conducting his opera Nixon in China. I kept marvelling at the laconic elegance of Alice Goodman’s text – and there she was, on stage at the end, dressed like the Vicar of Dibley.
 
Goodman, now an Anglican priest, didn’t seem remotely embarrassed by the line she put in Madame Mao’s mouth: “Let’s teach these m———— how to dance.” But I did notice that it was missing from the libretto in the Proms programme…
Telegraph