To what extent are our personalities shaped by our schools? Most people rarely ask themselves such a question. There comes a time in one’s life, as the rites of passage are ticked off, when school begins to recede into the distance, relegated below more formative experiences. Not, it seems, for politicians.
Whether it’s Liz Truss boasting about being the first Prime Minister from a comprehensive school, or Angela Rayner deriding her opponents as ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynist, absolute pile of banana republic Etonian piece of scum’ – for denizens of Westminster, school remains a living and active part of theirs and others’ identity.
The seven years we spend in secondary school is, hopefully, a fraction of our lives. But for some, when it suits them, it is the crucible of personality. This most often finds expression in the liberal left getting exercised by independent schools and, of course, one school in particular. Rayner spoke for many in her party with her remarks about Boris Johnson’s, and indeed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, alma mater. Such comments are, compared to those made on Twitter about the school, highly articulate and relatively sober. For them, independent schools are another Bilderberg Group (only with worse pay and dress sense) with Eton at its centre, exerting an inflated influence through those old school ties that bind and bond them together in one, nefarious, worldview.
George Orwell, the patron saint of the left (and, inevitably, another Old Etonian), wrote that the ‘religious, moral, social and intellectual’ codes that we learn at school contradict ‘one another if you worked out their implications’. In other words, life should find a way of teaching you that early lessons learned have to be unlearned if we can truly claim that we’ve grown up and become something more complex than an adult adolescent. Life teaches us more than school. And one would hope that this might be the reason that Rayner has now toned down the class war rhetoric because, annoyingly, the same Etonian ‘scum’ have decided to open a sixth form college serving her constituency and improve the life chances of the children she represents. How inconvenient.
The problem that those who blame Eton, and independent schools, for the endless crises we find ourselves in is that you have to transfer the same set of prejudices to the state sector when the personnel (and sector) changes. If you believe that going to one sector or another is the determining factor in one’s life, then where does that leave you when state sector produces a struggling, socially awkward, Prime Minister? Perhaps, like numerous Guardian columnists, you could begin to argue about how many trees a proper comprehensive should have before it can be classed as authentically gritty. Or, like Sarfraz Manzoor, you could seek to illuminate those who might be confused by a state-educated politician and point out that ‘we aren’t all like Liz Truss and it’s perfectly possible to go to a comp and not be utterly useless’. Thank goodness we have commentators like Manzoor to clarify such things. How typically British the need to do so.
This is Bash Street Kids’ politics: a polarisation of views, and expectations of beliefs, based on little more than social class, appearance, and whether you went to the right (or wrong) school. Trading in such currency is done in order to accept, or reject, others from joining your gang in the policy-making playground.
And perhaps it is those who find it so hard to move on from school who most miss that easy factionalism, and who are least able to cope when members of one gang move to the other gang. Preconceptions are predictably short-circuited when outward signs of easy classification are confused (and confusing for those with a tramline-certain set of preconceptions), but it helps explain how Labour MP Rupa Huq can refer to the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as ‘superficially’ black: he is posh, rich, an Old Etonian, but from an ethnic minority. He should be in her gang, along with Sunak, Braverman, Cleverly and Zahawi. All are walking, talking cognitive dissonances, and all expose the self-serving laziness of identitarianism.
We need to break free of our preoccupation with school and accept that individuals are responsible for their actions, not an assemblage of contributory social factors they experienced but did not absorb. Whether the Prime Minister went to Eton or Roundhay, or whether your best mate was Plug or Percival Proudfoot Plugsley, our successes and our failures are the result of the unique identity that is our own self, freed from weight of the past, and judged in the harshness of the present.
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