Assault on Privilege

Britain's elite, privately financed "public" schools have long been a recognized channel to top political and social power. Just one of them, Eton College, numbers 19 Prime Ministers among its alumni--none of them from the Labor Party. Which goes a long way toward explaining why Laborites look on such schools as citadels of snobbery, undesirable anachronisms in an age of egalitarianism. Prime Minister Harold Wilson (who attended Wirral Grammar, a state school), in fact, has a commission hard at work on plans that could drastically change the nature of the public schools.

Bastion of Aristocracy. Chief complaint against the public schools is that their admissions are based on wealth and family ties, rather than ability--another way of saying that too much of the nation's educational resources is devoted to the benefit of too few. The roughly 300 independent public schools have some of the nation's best school masters and faculty; yet they enroll only 4% of Britain's high-school-level students. No one puts the argument more bluntly than Education Minister Anthony Crosland (a graduate of a little-known public school, Highgate). These schools, he says, are "a major cause of social inequality. It is no accident that Britain, the only country in the world with this stratum of private and privileged education, is the most class-conscious, snobbish and stratified country in the world."

The nature of the public schools varies widely. Wellington, for example, is known for turning out top army officers; Gresham's accents science; St. Albans, which claims to have been founded in 948, has shifted its emphasis from classics to mathematics. Yet any discussion by the commission--or the public--naturally focuses first on symbolic Eton, the largest (1,200 students) and one of the socially most selective of them all.

A five-centuries-old bastion of aristocracy hard by the walls of Windsor Castle, Eton admits as much as 75% of its students from among the sons of Old Etonians, many registered at birth. More than one-third of its current boys' parents are listed in Debrett's; two-thirds of Britain's current dukes, marquesses and earls, as well as one-fifth of its 245 Conservative M.P.s (but only three Labor M.P.s) and many of its top civil servants, attended Eton. Resistant to change, Etonians still wear striped trousers, black tailcoats and white ties--a stuffy outfit their predecessors first donned in the 19th century. Even some of its own students concede that the net impact of Eton is to "perpetuate social isolation and class prejudice."

Eton's enlightened headmaster, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, is sympathetic--up to a point--with the need to broaden the public school's selection practices to accept "all boys who are fitted, intellectually and temperamentally." It should be as easy, he says, "for a soldier's son to enter as it is now for a brigadier's son." Yet he also fears, and will presumably fight, any government move which, "on a doctrinaire point of social policy, uproots the individual excellences of these schools."

No one denies that the public schools provide topflight academic instruction. At Eton, for example, there is one teacher for every ten boys; classes range in size from five to 29, and tutors seek out each boy almost daily. Most of the 1,200 students live in 25 houses scattered through the school-dominated town of Eton (pop. 4,505, including students), and each house has a stern but solicitous master, who advises each boy on his problems, personal and academic.

The curriculum at most public schools is heavily classical, although most no longer require Greek. Etonians, who can stay for six years (aged 13 through 19), must take Latin, the history and teachings of the Christian religion, and French in their first two years, as well as English, math and science. They have a broad choice in their upper-class years, can specialize in any of four departments: classics, math, science or modern arts (which includes modern language, economics, geography and history). This collection of courses has been criticized as irrelevant in an age of shifting values and onrushing science, but its goal, argues Master Peter Pilkington, is to "train people to be perceptive, sensitive, aware, conscious of personality and individual values."

From Every Class? Although some critics are calling for the public schools to be merged with the system of state-supported schools, the possibility is remote at best. It amounts to nationalization and would require an unlikely act of Parliament. But the public schools are already bowing to public pressure. Next fall, for example, Eton and Winchester will drop their requirement that an entering student must know some Latin. Seemingly a trifle, this change will knock out the need for most boys to attend expensive private primary schools to get their Latin, and will vastly expand the number of eligible boys.

When the Public Schools Commission reports in December, it will probably demand that the public schools admit students of every social class, perhaps on the basis of a common entrance examination. This will require government scholarships to carry the cost (at Eton, more than $1,600 a year, including board). Even more shattering is the possibility that the commission may carry egalitarianism to the point of insisting that girls deserve admission too. Eton's Chenevix-Trench does not mind the idea of having girls mix socially with boys, but he fears that they would outperform and thus discourage the boys in the classroorn. Says he: "I am all for girls coming into the boarding-school life of the boys but not into the boarding schools."

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