Word: etonisms
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Twenty or so boys dressed in white tie and tails are being taught by Liam Maxwell on a recent Friday at Eton College, the exclusive boys' school 35 km west of London. For centuries Eton - founded in 1440 - has been synonymous with privilege, the place where Britain's élite is given its polish and an air of entitlement. But this class doesn't feel like a hothouse for languid aristocrats. The boys are not declaiming Latin[an error occurred while processing this directive] but staring into computer screens, trying to master the database program Microsoft Access. Though a student...
...still regrets answering honestly on a transatlantic flight when his seatmate asked where he went to school. "For six hours he kept making snide remarks," he says. Douglas Hurd, Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Secretary, wrote in his memoir that his family believed "that if I had not gone to Eton I would have become Prime Minister in 1990." (That was the year that the Conservative Party opted instead for John Major, who attended Rutlish Grammar School in south London.) It's not because Eton lacks famous alumni. Its graduates include 19 British Prime Ministers, the founder of modern chemistry Robert...
...said and done, Cameron did win the Tory leadership. Polls rate him as more popular than Tony Blair or Brown - and his speaking style has a lot more street cred than Brown's. Blair himself is the product of an Edinburgh school, Fettes, that is often called the Scottish Eton. A lot of institutions that used to symbolize and perpetuate inequality in Britain seem to have lost their toxic punch; the royal family, for example, has never been more popular. What about Eton? What lessons is it imparting today, to what kind of boy? Is it manufacturing smug toffs...
...William Rees, talks of a "culture of mutual high expectations between masters and boys." Because it's a seven-day-a-week boarding school, the high expectations extend beyond the classroom. Richard Mason, a South African novelist who published his first book, The Drowning People, three years after leaving Eton in 1996, says that as a student he got to act in several plays "in a 400-seat theater. They were quite serious productions." Classmates composed music that was performed by the school's symphony orchestra, in a hall that is attached to a professional-quality recording studio...
...wish I could read the dregs of Arabica in my mug. During early childhood, parents take us to football practice, ballet lessons, or early-reading classes to prepare for school. Then, many struggle with waiting lists to get their kids into elite prep schools a la Eton. Soon the time will come for standardization in the quest for the elusive Ithaca: elite colleges. To the application recipe, add a pinch of both “productive” extracurriculars and “useful” summers. Always remember the secret ingredient: “It should look good...