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public school/boarding school is such an unbelievably intransigent culture in the uk. It not just posh thugs and princesses who are such a problematic element in society though. You can almost always spot boarding school survivors in public institutions by their practical briskness and inability to tolerate difficulty- it’s an odd combination of being privileged and often brutalised at the same time. Don’t get me wrong some of these people made passionate contributions that benefit others but, thinking of the ones i know, i also think of their own questionable self interest and who from a normal background also could have done the work they had done, perhaps better, if they had had a chance. So much of public life is designed around the drills of boarding / public school and the values invested therein. Their sense of themselves as ‘mucking in’ and self importance, grr. You often find them in the NHS and in universities talking about how it is important to listen to nurses and secretaries while not listening to nurses and secretaries. It is such a culture though that it informs the social and practical arrangements of whole swathes of m-class life, regardless of the school background of the majority in it. People emulate it. the grammar school i went to lived in the shadow of three v posh schools, there were other state schools around, and other grammar schools, but they were treated like they didn’t exist. it was like living in a fucking wilfred owen poem mixed with a 0 budget, pilot episode of the OC. There were lots of driven and academically brilliant kids who did well but the people who did well who didn’t work hard and didn’t have an aptitude for the more formalised routes to wealth were the ones who successfully assimilated with the posh kids. then, when they’re sorted and in their forties after
a lifetime of kissing ass and false consciousness they talk about their humble background and how they worked their way up like it is some moral trump card. fuck them and their golf clubs