Monday 16 December 2019

Is private school all about connections and avoiding contact with the 'Hoi Polloi'?


My first - and so far only - brush with celebrity came from a Telegraph article that was written about my finances back in 2015. It caused a little bit of a stir at work and taught me some important lessons of the perils of courting publicity whilst being in someone else's employ.

For the purpose of this post though, I want to draw out my reasons for having spent so much money on my children's education. The Telegraph reporter quotes me as saying that I'd spent the money to help my children 'get the best contacts'. I actually never said this. I remember her making that assumption and ascribing it to me when we spoke on the 'phone. It seemed an inconsequential thing at the time but the line jarred when I read it in print. The hope of giving my kids a leg up through the back door by tapping into an alumni network was never part of my thinking.

More recently, an international school Head who I struck up a conversation with, was convinced that my address book must be stuffed with the details of the great and the good from my time at the
London version of Harrow School. The implication was that he'd reached his heady position through hard graft, battling against the debilitating setback of being born into a middle-class church family as it turned out. I, on the other hand, having gone to Harrow, must be privately wealthy, have the Queen and the Prime Minister on speed dial, and have navigated my way through life with a series of nods and winks.

Of all the reasons why we decided to send our children to private school getting good contacts was not one of them. Like most parents, I wanted my kids to be well balanced, hard-working and to achieve things in life on their own merit. Had I thought for one moment that sending them to private school was just about the cocktail circuit, I wouldn't have bothered.

I still feel this way largely because of my experience at Harrow, not in spite of it. At Harrow, I made a lot of friends and had a great time, but none of these friends has had any bearing on the advancement of my career. My school friends have busy lives of their own. It never occurred to me to touch them for a leg up. In fact, all of them have spent their twenties and thirties in much the same boat as me: making their own way in the world with the same setbacks and occasional turns of good luck as befall everyone else. Life has happened to us and if people were making backroom deals we were all too busy to notice.

Perhaps I am a poor networker, but it would never have occurred to me to have a 'giz us a job' sort of conversation with any of them. Besides which they are all my contemporaries: the last thing I would have wanted to do would be to have to work for one of them - imagine the indignity! And what of those in the years above me, many of whom have gone on to have illustrious careers? Here too my Harrow contacts have been of no use, nor have I tried to exploit them. The school was pretty hierarchical and we had little to do with those in the years above or below us. I simply don't know those in other cohorts that well. Of course, I have met some since and sometimes we have struck up a conversation based on our shared experience but never has this led to anything more than the sharing of a set of school-boy memories.

More than this, it was hammered into us from the moment we arrived, to the moment we left that there was nothing particularly special about us. The deal was clear and delivered with unambiguous zeal at our regular chapel services: we'd been given much and so much would be expected from us. The fate of the hapless servant who failed to capitalise on his inheritance still rings in my ears:
But for the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 25: 29-20).
We needed to make our own way in the world, using what had been given to us. To underachieve, or to attempt to cheat, was never presented as part of the plan.


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