As children across the country head back to school, we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.
Have you ever worn a boater? I confess: I have. There is surely no more potent symbol of our nation’s class divide than this most singularly pointless and poorly designed piece of headwear.
I owned a boater for the one year I spent at a school called Croftdown, at the age of six. It is almost impossible to settle a boater comfortably on your head. They look ridiculous. Only a school confident its parents had enough money to disregard practicality in school uniform would ever inflict a boater on its pupils. And yet: these schools exist, and the boater manufacturers of the world remain, tragically, in business.
When I tried, in the coalition government, to ban state schools from including boaters in their school uniform, my interlocutor Jo Johnson MP accused me of “class warfare virtue signalling”. He had no idea I was simply acting out a 25-year-old vendetta.
Most people who’ve been to public school understand their privilege. David Cameron – an old Etonian like Johnson – used to say he was passionate about education reform precisely because he wanted every child to have as great a schooling as he had experienced, at Eton. That instinct is to be admired. But my schooling convinces me that he and so many posh-boy reformers are on the wrong crusade: they’re missing half the point of what makes a private school education so valuable.
I went to a lot of schools: seven in total. The reasons would be too much of a distraction to bother you with them. (But if you’re worried: no, I was never expelled nor did I explode any school buildings). The seven include the full spectrum of all educational opportunities available on these British isles, from a prep school so ostentatiously privileged it had its own steam railway, to a comprehensive in rural Wales where a suspicious number of children disappeared during the lambing season, and only half made it to sixth form.
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