Word: etonisms
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Forget the 18 Prime Ministers, Wellingtons, Pitts and Walpoles: any school that is the ostensible alma mater of James Bond, Tarzan and Lord Peter Wimsey has clearly made a contribution to the world. And the quirkiness of Eton College ensures that it still seems to belong less to life than to Lewis Carroll fiction. The boys wear coats with tails, the teachers are called beaks, and both parties greet one another on the street by simply raising a single index finger. The prefects who sweep into classrooms, gowns billowing, to summon boys to see the headmaster are known as praepostors...
...even as many of the school's antics celebrate traditions older than Caxton's printing press, Eton is, behind its ancient walls, steadily redressing itself for a more modern age. Perhaps the most hallowed tradition at Eton is a defiance of all expectations. And during the past 10 years, the school's headmaster, Eric Anderson, and its provost, Lord Charteris of Amisfield, have quietly set about revolutionizing the classic institution from within. Realizing, as Anderson stresses, that Eton must prepare its students for a more international world, it has opened its doors to more and more scholarship students...
...Thus Eton today is somewhat like an eagle in penguin's clothing. The Victorian morning dress that fashion-conscious boys once chose for the school uniform is still worn to classes, but jeans and ethnic shirts are increasingly common outside of them. Those who do not wish to win the Battle of Waterloo -- and lose limbs, mind and nerve -- on the playing fields can perform social service instead, teaching English to immigrant children or reading to the handicapped. And one recent Sunday evening, the red brick classrooms along the crooked streets were buzzing with students chatting over their terminals...
Though classes at Eton are still known as "divisions," they are less and less reflections of class division. The school has, of course, its share of Bertie Woosters, but many of its students are rarely idle and hardly rich: 250 of the 1,270 boys have part of their fees paid by the school. Both fagging, whereby younger boys had to dance attention on their elders, and flogging are gone, as are some of the other fabled barbarisms that may have encouraged two of the school's alumni to fashion the most chilling dystopias of the century in Brave...
Those kinds of facilities, in addition to the school's more august holdings (it has a Gutenberg Bible and a garden donated by the King of Siam), help give Eton more the air of a university than a high school. That impression is intensified by the precocious self-possession of its students, who seem to have nothing teenage about them, maturing overnight from short pants into three-piece suits. Recent issues of the Eton College Chronicle, the boys' magazine, feature long articles on perestroika, detailed surveys of Malawi, rhymed quatrains about Salman Rushdie. Boys put on plays by Ken Kesey...