Public schools have gone soft

As you read this, I’ll be preparing to give an after-dinner speech at one of the oldest prep schools in Kenya. The school motto is Fortuna Favet Fortibus, so my theme is going to be the importance of character. I’m going to ask whether there’s any point in spending upwards of £30,000 a year to send your child to an English public school — a decision that many of the Kenyan parents will shortly have to make. If one of the purposes of a good education is to teach their children resilience in the face of adversity, wouldn’t they be better off sending them to a state school in Nairobi?

This is partly for provocative reasons. On the night I’ll be speaking, the audience will be crawling with agents for top public schools. They’ll be trying to gull the parents into parting with their life savings, so I feel dutybound to debunk some of the myths they’ll be peddling about the benefits of a public school education. That part should be fun.

But I’m also genuinely convinced that institutions like Rugby and Marlborough have suffered a terrible decline in the past 20 years or so. I don’t mean academically, obviously. From a purely academic point of view, England’s top public schools are still world class. I mean they no longer have the same positive impact on their pupils’ characters. The reason for this is simple: they’ve become too luxurious. Instead of being one step removed from prison camps, they’re now five-star hotels.

I’m basing this entirely on the experiences of my wife Caroline, who attended Cheltenham Ladies College from 1985-90. On her first day as a boarder, she returned from lessons to discover ‘cuddly’ had gone missing.