Hypocrisy is one of the most widely disliked of all human failings and, when combined with sanctimoniousness, it curdles into something deeply unpleasant.
Yet even the worst offender might baulk at directing their condemnation at teachers and school children. Unless, of course, that school is Eton.
For many, Eton College is different from other schools: it’s fair game in the culture wars. Its critics seem to view it as a toffs’ Bilderberg group, cunningly claiming the instruments of power as they munch away at their delicious meringue-based dessert.
The attacks on the school usually come from the left: the likes of Angela Rayner – who sees no distinction between Tories, Etonians, and ‘scum’ – was hardly rebuked by Keir Starmer for the language she used. Other attacks on the school are too numerous to mention, but they have of course intensified of late because of one of their most famous old boys, Boris Johnson, and his never-ending campaign against maintaining standards in public (as well as private) life.
But there is a particular frisson of excitement when an attack comes from ‘within’. John Claughton is a former teacher at Eton (he was later High Master at King Edward’s School in Birmingham) who this week wrote a letter to The Times about Johnson and the influence his alma mater has had on him and some other old boys of the school. He wrote:
Perhaps [Eton’s] its most important mission will be to ensure that its pupils are saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Ben Elliot and thereby damage a country’s very fabric. Sadly, I failed in that purpose.
Twitter’s self-appointed moral arbiters loved it. James O’Brien, the achingly liberal LBC host claimed it was ‘so true’ (and was rapidly endorsed by Jolyon Maugham), and the novelist Robert Harris went further, tweeting about ‘the tremendous amount of damage this institution has done to our country’.
Whatever Claughton’s intention was – to rewrite Eton’s mission statement for them, or to ask for his own atonement in possibly (but more likely not) shaping the character of the future Prime Minister – one outcome is certain: it adds to the growing levels of toxicity that surrounds what is, let us not forget, a school that teaches children.
And the logic behind such attacks does not withstand even a few seconds’ analysis. There is no evidence to prove that Eton was instrumental in promoting those Old Etonians’ sense of privilege, entitlement and ‘omniscience’ (a strange elevation to some sort of deification, which even Boris might blush at). It is far more likely that greater forces were at work in forming them: the inherited genes, mannerisms and ideas that family bestows; and then there are the books, films, friends, articles, primary school teachers, and all the other fragments that add to the kaleidoscope of character.
Yes, senior school is a part of it, but Eton will, like all schools, have had a diversity of thought in their staffroom, simply because each of those teachers would have their own ideas. No school enforces one moral framework, or one view of society, or even one set of standards that are always observed (as Johnson’s former housemaster showed). To think otherwise is tendentious, and usually fits with the preconceived critical view of that school.
But is one’s senior school that formative? How many of us as adults can honestly say that it was those few years we had before we came of age that made us who we are today? Was it more important than university? More than our work, our partners, our children, our wider family, the experiences we’ve had in the decades since we left that last exam?
But let’s concede that a school really is the most important element in shaping a person’s life, and that in doing so those individuals’ characters and achievements reflect to a great extent the values of that school. If you believe that, where do you stand on a school that has produced Shelley, Gladstone, Robert Boyle, George Orwell, Humphrey Lyttleton, Tam Dalyell, Ranulph Fiennes, Hugh Laurie, Rory Stewart, Eddie Redmayne and the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
Would the country be better off without them? Would the world be a better place if Eton had not educated Peter Benenson who, after leaving the school, went on to found Amnesty International? And we are yet to learn how many people will be grateful for the work that OE John Gurdon has pioneered, but it will undoubtedly be many. Should we, by Claughton’s logic, be lavishing praise on Eton for all of these achievements?
Eton is, of course, a school of enormous privilege – but through its extensive work with the state sector, it is at least doing something constructive with those advantages. Like all schools, it produces people who turn out to be saints and sinners.
We can debate the issues surrounding independent schools, but we should all learn that condemning a school, even one as prestigious as Eton, is felt by those who study and work there. They are easy targets who can’t respond, and indulging in such an activity shames all those who do it. Social justice warriors should leave children and teachers out of their moral crusades.
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