Society

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Chance of a lifetime

 With the same coat of inevitability with which everything else gets glossed, it now seems inevitable to me that I ended up at Eton. But it was never any such thing. None of my family had been to the school or anything like it. Like most parents, mine had put their faith in state schools, not simply because they believed in them but because no other option was viable. I attended the local state primary and secondary schools and then to what had been a grammar school, but was now an inner city comprehensive. My parents had been promised that the old grammar school standards and ethos remained, but none

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Girl power | 3 September 2011

In single-sex schools girls don’t see themselves through boys’ eyes, says Mary Wakefield I remember quite clearly the moment I first realised how very lucky I was to have been sent to a single-sex boarding school. It was the summer of 1989 and my friends, Becca, Ilona and I were all 13 and arm in arm, collapsing into shrieks of laughter at the drop of a hat. We were at the Newbury agricultural show, as I remember, and still young enough to be thrilled by the corporate goody bags from the Massey Ferguson stand and to think stickers, any stickers, even ones that said ‘Invest with Natwest’, were cool. Down

Jrh Mcewen

Boys’ own

 Co-education is now so much the norm, even in the independent sector, that those single-sex establishments which remain, especially boys-only schools, might be thought eccentric, old-fashioned or even wrong-headed. Independent schools have transformed themselves in this respect: a quarter of boys-only schools have gone co-ed in the past ten years, and there is — almost incredibly — only one independent boys’ prep school left in northern Britain. But this revolution is not wholly a result of heartfelt arguments for co-education. Finance and, to a lesser extent, fashion, have also spoken powerfully in favour. Which does not mean that those former boys’ schools, now co-ed — Ampleforth, Rugby and Wellington, for

Rachel Johnson

Away win

Is there such a thing as ‘Boarding School Syndrome’? No, says Rachel Johnson  A few months back, I gave a speech in Leeds to the Boarding Schools Association, in the course of which I spoke of the time I was sent to an all-boys prep school in another country days after my tenth birthday. ‘I was cold and hungry all the time: rations were so short that I would huddle under my pink candlewick bedspread, sucking on a toothpaste tube to curb hunger pangs,’ I preached to the choir. ‘I once found a live maggot wriggling in my shepherd’s pie, and showed the headmaster, who advised me to eat it.’

Ralph Townsend

Keeping faith

 Most English independent schools, though not all, have their origins in Christian mission, Catholic or Protestant, and most maintain a compulsory element of religious instruction, both in the classroom and in the school chapel. It goes without saying that most things that form the basis of a school’s life are compulsory: attending classes, keeping fit, adherence to the school rules, and so on. No institution or orderly society can run without an acceptance that compulsion about fundamental things is essential. It is not optional to pay taxes or (if you want to drive) obtain a driver’s licence. The first question to answer, therefore, is this: is compulsory attendance at chapel

Jamie Mathieson

Get on and get in

There’s an art to filling in your UCAS form, and it doesn’t involve simply listing your after-school activities. Jamie Mathieson separates the bad from the good  Applying to university is like moving house. You need to know what you want, you have to be realistic, and you have to get the paperwork right. It can be very stressful, and an awful lot comes down to luck. Yet, wherever you end up, it will start feeling like home very quickly. A university, like a house, is just walls, and you can put whatever you like inside them. If you’re reading this, you may well be at an independent school. If so,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Making the grade

 In Switzerland, declared Harry Lime in The Third Man, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. He would now surely have added the International Baccalaureate. There is no Swiss product which rates so highly with the British middle classes. Certainly not Nescafé, not in an age of filter machines. Not Emmental cheese and not Lindt chocolate. The accepted wisdom is that while our own A levels have become watered down to the point of meaninglessness, the bac is still there to stretch pupils, just like in the good old days when schoolboys all wore blazers and caps

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Primary contest

The independent advantage starts early – frighteningly early, if you’re a parent, says Fraser Nelson  Fifty per cent of children are of below-average intelligence, but try telling that obvious fact to their parents. Humans are programmed to find their offspring mesmerisingly delightful, and to consider them strikingly quick learners and budding geniuses. I know I do. But like many parents, I promised myself I would not let it drive me to delusional paranoia or make me project on the poor lad my own ambitions. Certainly, when it came to primary school, I was going to relax. How much can they learn at that age, anyway? My mum and sister, both

The Spectator

Independent thinking

British education is in a state of flux and uncertainty. This summer’s A-level results have prompted concerns about the number of university places, as too many well-qualified applicants seek to get started in higher education before university fees rise next year. British education is in a state of flux and uncertainty. This summer’s A-level results have prompted concerns about the number of university places, as too many well-qualified applicants seek to get started in higher education before university fees rise next year. At the school level, moreover, many troubling questions persist: are grades still inflating? Can Michael Gove’s free schools rescue the state sector? How can Britain possibly build 420

Rowan Dean

Diary – 3 September 2011 | 3 September 2011

The three girls sitting opposite can’t take their eyes off us. Eventually it becomes too much for one of them (the pretty one) and she saunters over and shyly introduces herself. To Mark, of course, not to the rest of us. Mark smiles and shakes her hand, and that’s all it takes for the other two to rush over, pen and napkin poised for an autograph, mobile phones at the ready for the inevitable photograph. ‘We really miss you,’ gushes one of them. She even grabs his hand. ‘You should sooo never have quit. You should be the PM, not her.’ The other two giggle in agreement. Mark smiles bashfully

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Marriage guidance

In Competition No. 2711 you were invited to cook up a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of a poet of your choice. It was agony to whittle an especially fine entry down to the half-dozen printed below. Inevitably, some good ’uns missed out. Space permits only a hearty congratulatory slap on the back all-round. The winners earn £25 apiece and the bonus fiver belongs to Basil-Ransome-Davies. There’s a cloud o’ trouble loomin’ when a     squaddie takes a wife And the man ’oo’s lived in barracks ’as to face     domestic life With a creature ’alf ’is dearest pal and ’alf a sort of     sphinx And prettier than

Dennis Sewell

Punish the rich, hurt everybody

The Bible tells us that the poor will always be with us, but there is no good reason, and certainly no scriptural authority, to support the widespread belief that the rich will be too. As capital has become more mobile, slipping across fiscal boundaries at the snap of an enter-key, so too have its owners, who are today only a Gulfstream ride away from somewhere where the climate is more agreeable, the taxman less importuning and the populace less hostile. In the past, we have indulged ourselves during downturns in the politics of envy, responded with tax and regulation — then watched as the globalised rich took flight. From bankers

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Scottish football, double standards and the Notting Hill Carnival

Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. I’ve only been to Stranraer once, in 1975, when I watched my father stand by the docks and spit in the direction of Ireland, which loomed just beyond the edge of our eyesight. We were on holiday in this rather lovely and underrated neck of the Scottish woods and had ventured into Stranraer to buy provisions for the forthcoming evening meal in our camper van: a ‘salad’ — tomato cut

Lucy Morgan-Edwards

The road not taken

Abdul Haq and the ‘Afghan solution’ Just after September 11 2001, a piece appeared in the London Evening Standard under the headline: ‘Rebel chief begs: Don’t bomb now, Taleban will be gone in a month’. The accompanying photo showed a bearded man shaking hands with a beaming Margaret Thatcher. The man was Abdul Haq, perhaps the most famed Pashtun commander of the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. Haq’s fabled exploits included blowing up the Soviet army’s seven-storey-underground munitions dump with two single rockets; an event that turned the war. This time, Abdul Haq had a plan for how to win another war — the one that America had vowed to wage on

John Coldstream

Victim’s victory

On this Friday 50 years ago, at 1.30 p.m., the house lights at the Odeon Leicester Square dimmed for the first public screening of a British movie called Victim. It carried an ‘X’ certificate, which to the fans of its star, Dirk Bogarde, seemed decidedly odd. His reputation as the idol, not just of the Rank Organisation’s flagship cinema but of all the country’s Odeons, had been based largely on performances as Dr Simon Sparrow and Sydney Carton, and in other undemanding fare. The film’s release turned out to be a defining moment in the career of a great screen actor and a landmark in British cinema. For some, though,

Helen Schulman

New York Notebook

When the earth began to move, I was on lying on my bed with my cats in my lap. My son was in his room across the hall. The bed began to shake and I thought, inexplicably: is my little brother doing this? And then I thought, ‘Oh no, are we under attack again?’ (having 9/11 on the brain the way I and many other New Yorkers do). The cats lifted their heads at me looking for answers as the building swayed and the door to my bedroom opened and closed. When it was over, I called out to my son, asking if he’d felt anything, but he, an almost

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: The game in Spain

So the blink-and-you-miss-it summer break is over and football is back with an all-consuming vengeance. Despite the new season hardly having had time to clear its throat, it is already spewing headlines like a TV newsbar gone postal. And that is just in England. If anything can induce a breakdown among the north London chatterers, it is Arsenal being on the wrong end of an 8-2 scoreline at Old Trafford, and Manchester United’s wasn’t even the best performance of the day. That was the preserve of Manchester City, who popped down to the capital and put five past Tottenham. Fortunately that rout didn’t produce a riot, though Arsène Wenger will

Anne Applebaum

Is Nato finished?

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed. The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in

Sarfraz Manzoor

Fifteen minutes later

Pauline Pearce did not know she was being filmed when she spoke out against the rioters running amok in her Hackney neighbourhood. Standing in the darkness, on a debris-strewn pavement in front of graffiti that read ‘Fuck Cameroon’, she seemed a lone voice of conscience amid the carnage. ‘Get real black people. Get real!’ she shouted, waving her walking stick. ‘You lot piss me the fuck off! I’m shamed to be a Hackney person. Because we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Foot Locker and thiefin’ shoes.’ Within hours, the video clip had hundreds of thousands of views online: Pearce learned