At Labour’s final party conference under Jeremy Corbyn, delegates voted to abolish private schools. Of all the policies they supported, this one might well have been the most damaging. Its main victims, though, would have been the Left themselves.
After all, if there were no more private schools, where would the next generation of Corbynistas come from?
It is a long-established fact that the more Left-wing someone is, the more likely they are to have been privately educated. Take Mr Corbyn himself – and, indeed, much of his erstwhile team. Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray, Jon Lansman, James Schneider… all attended independent schools. As did their hero, Tony Benn.
People who have been to state school, by contrast, tend to recoil from hard-Left ideology. So, from the Left’s point of view, it would have made more sense to keep private schools and abolish state schools instead.
Luckily for the Left, they lost the 2019 election, thus securing their own future. But now it sounds as if they have even more reason to celebrate. The next generation of expensively educated Trots and Tankies may well prove to be even more militant than the last. Because, if reports are to be believed, private schools have started eagerly introducing their pupils to all the hottest new progressive ideas.
It may seem odd that the rich should pay tens of thousands of pounds a year to teach their children about the horrors of privilege and inequality. Yet that, it appears, is what’s happening.
Just last month, the £32,650-a-year American School in London – which one newspaper has called “Britain’s wokest school” – was downgraded from “Outstanding” to “Requires Improvement”, after an Ofsted investigation into complaints from parents about its alleged “woke agenda”. Apparently, pupils were being taught about such fashionable concepts as “white fragility” and “critical race theory”. Ofsted found that some of ASL’s teaching placed “much more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge and skills”.
Elsewhere, Brighton College (fees: up to £52,920 a year for boarders) now has a “Head of Diversity and Inclusion”, while St Paul’s Girls’ School (£26,406 a year) has replaced the title “head girl” with “head of school”, for fear that the former sounded insufficiently “inclusive”. Even the boys at Eton have been learning about the dangers of “toxic masculinity”.
The latest example of well-heeled wokedom was disclosed by The Telegraph this week. The £22,000-a-year Highgate School in London, we reported, hosted a forum in which pupils were warned that modern feminism is excessively white and “cishet”, the new term for anyone who is neither gay nor transgender.
