Eton College: privilege exemplified?Wikipedia Commons

The university system in this country privileges the privately educated. In other news, the Pope is Catholic, and the sky is blue. However, the appointment and consequent swift dismissal of (take your pick) classist, ableist and misogynistic Toby Young has revealed a truth which I’ve spent the last year trying to suppress. As an ex-state school student, I feel I’ve been on the back foot at Cambridge from the word ‘go’.

A recent article in this newspaper persuasively rethinks Oxbridge’s classification as a middle-class institution. While I doubt the extent to which an institution whose attendees are predominantly middle- or upper-class can avoid being labelled as such, what is more prevalent to me is that the elitism, self-entitlement and expectation bred at Oxbridge corresponds directly with that bred in private schools. It’s no coincidence and you’d have to have been living under a rock your entire time here to have missed it. My frustrations, however, lie in that overused and under-defined term, ‘meritocracy’.

“What state school misses, but what private school doles out in abundance, is expectation”

Irony of ironies, it was Young’s father who coined the phrase. Baron Young of Dartington, leading sociologist and protagonist of post-war leftist thinking, first put it to use in The Rise of Meritocracy (1985). At the time of writing, the 11-plus entrance exam was, of course, a very real part of mid-century society and far from an appraisal of ‘meritocracy’; the older Young points out that while this test-based system of advancement seemed to offer equal opportunity irrespective of background, in fact, it perpetuates a centuries-old class divide. Lacking access to everything from proper educational resources to hot food, underprivileged children tended to score poorly on the 11-plus, thus explaining their lower status later on in life.

I understand that privately-educated BME or scholarship students will resent my placing of them under the blanket-term of ‘privileged’, when their experiences (particularly of the racism encountered within private schooling) indicate otherwise. That is not my intention. Instead, I simply wish to highlight the problems within British schooling at large.

“Academic confidence, like most things, has been neatly parcelled up and privatised”

What state school misses, but what private school doles out in abundance, is expectation: the expectation that their pupils will go on not just to university, but a Russell Group university. Indeed, not just that they will go to a Russell Group university, but that they will thrive in that environment. Here there is enrichment in drama, art, sport, music. Here, debate is encouraged rather than seen as a hindrance to the lesson plan. Here, connections are made, industry ‘ins’ are sought after and provided. Expert advice on UCAS is a given. One word makes all the difference: education as a right, education as a privilege.

I have some advice on how things might be changed. Supervisors and Directors of Studies: stop assuming that first-year students are already versed in Latin, or familiar with Aristotle, or can offer a vigorous dissection of Nietzsche’s back catalogue, or know their King James Bible back to front, or actually feel confident at all sharing their ideas. They often forget that a state education does not have the luxury of time and resources to groom its pupils for Oxbridge, that academic confidence, like most things, has been neatly parcelled up and privatised, and sold off to the highest-bidding parents. I don’t mean to say that you ought to ‘dumb your lessons down’ because, quite frankly, that is anti-intellectual and I am sick to death of anti-intellectualism being associated with the working class. Instead, consider the language you use. Don’t make assumptions. Your students are here because they are ambitious. Accommodate for that.


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Mountain View

Cambridge is not middle class, and it’s time we admit it

In the broader picture of British education, what we plainly need is investment. Reallocate money from free schools (which benefit the middle classes more than anyone else) towards the rejuvenation of dilapidated state school buildings. Subsidise art enrichment. Pressure universities to provide outreach programmes, and employ more teachers so that class sizes stop escalating. And that daft old train whose stops include Silver Spoon, Eton College, Christ Church and the Cabinet needs to be dismantled, once and for all. It’s a defunct line.

Lastly, let’s address ‘meritocracy’: a term into which we here pour so much value, but is actually worth very little. Let’s focus not on the fact that we’ve all ended up at Oxbridge, but on the fact that our journeys have been so different