Same thing, innit? - or at least it presumably will be once Gordon Brown becomes President and evicts the occupants of Buck House, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, etc. Anyway, there's nowt wrong with Purcell's Fairest Isle, which would surely make a far better non-monarchist national anthem than the one we have now...

Best,

Alistair

Having been educated at a public school (on a scholarship) and Oxford myself, I think I know what Ian means.  The public school system exercises what I believe to be a profoundly unhealthy influence over our society (power is concentrated in the hands of people who have been to the same small number of schools and two universities, resulting in the promulgation of a common value system - and New Labour is every bit as involved as Cameron's Tories, with their thirteen old Etonians in the shadow cabinet).  Richard Hoggart made a telling point about how the public schools sell themselves as teaching primary virtues leadership, initiative and so on while in fact many of their values are secondary - conformity, class solidarity, obeying orders and toeing the line and so on.  One of my most powerful memories is a school assembly at the time of the first miners' strike and the three-day week, at which my headmaster - a man with a fine line in sonorous banality, and certainly not given to irony - intoning that the miners not only were failing in their patriotic duty, but represented the greatest threat to England and what it represented since the blitz.

And yet ...

First, recognising the emptiness (in my view) of those values, and learning how to rebel against them, was one of the formative experiences of my life (some of us wore the accusation of lacking school spirit as a badge of honour);

Second, the quality of education I received at the hands of a number of exceptional individuals was outstanding.  A history teacher who taught with passion and enthusiasm that an understanding of the past was essential to interpreting the present; a music teacher who determinedly mounted big choral works to a high standard, involving much of the school in the process; I had sung in both Bach Passions by the time I was fifteen, and that was a life-changing experience too.

But, years later, as a parent, I turned down a place for my daughter at the local independent girls' school for a place at the local comprehensive.  Now I should explain that the local comprehensive happens to be the school that Brighton's middle class parents move house and occasionally cheat to get their kids into; but the best of what I had at school is there too, without - except in the growing obsession with competitive sport - any of the ideological bunk that I was subject to.  And I think that there are better ways of learning independence of thought than rejecting a school system (there is in any case plenty for a independently-minded child to rebel against, like commercial pop-music and body-fascism).  I think what I take from this is that education at best is about exposure to exceptional individuals, and they can be found in private and state sector alike.  But there is nothing systematic about this; excellence in the most positive sense has nothing to do with the public school ethos, but as long as we are a society that is steeped in it, that the people who own and run our society will never really care about making that excellence more widely available.  Thatcher and Major came from much less privileged backgrounds than Blair, so are probably more culpable in the matter of pulling up the ladder behind them.

Finally, on the tax point - it's worth remembering that the state shovels money into private education through tax breaks - VAT exemption and charitable status.  It's one of private education's dirty little secrets that it costs the taxpayer far more to subsidise a pupil at Eton than it does to finance a state school pupil directly. 

Perhaps we need a separate "Public Schoolboy Guilt Complex Competition" thread?

Anyone want to counter the idea, which seemed to be at least lurking in some comments earlier in the thread, that 'teaching' was somehow either unworthy for a proper rebellious creative artist, sapped creativity or was a dubious establishment perk that composers could pick up like a CBE or something to keep them from frightening the horses too much?

In my innocence I would have thought teaching was something that was well worth doing in its own right and A GOOD THING in itself. And, looking at all this wholly from outside, it seems to me rather a good way (if only one among a number of ways) of squaring the circle of how to ensure that composers can earn a decent living (if they so choose) while still writing the music they want to write, and without the 'command economy' approach of handing down large grants directly to state approved composers - with all the tears before bedtime that entails. No? At least in the UK, as far as I can see though am ready to be corrected, we seem to manage it reasonably well without ending up with a separate species of 'academic music for other academics' (which does seem to me a real danger), don't we?

In principle, it's rather a good wheeze, isn't it, rather than something to be regretted? 

Beautifully and most elegantly put, if I may say so, as an eloquent exposé from personal experience of all the things that are, for the most part, the most reprehensible and unpalatable aspects of British public school life and conduct, although I take leace to doubt that they are quite as bad or (more importantly) as extensive and pervasive as once they were. The only issue I have here is that the teaching of the virtues of leadership and initiative are surely not bad of themselves, since someone has to be in charge of government, businesses, the Church(es), the health and education industries, charities and all else (in no particular order of precedence) - not to mention the armed forces (and I will make a point of NOT mentioning them!), just as, without enterprise and initiative, the working classes of all classes and none will be out of jobs; the only problem with this, it seems to me, is a matter of due proportion and balance, for it's no earthly use to any young school attendee to be banged on at incessantly about such things to the point where some of their confidence might suffer irreparable damage, for, in the real world, we obviously can't have only leaders and masters of initiative. All that I would add here is that there are no British laws of which I am aware that specifically confine the right to confer the "privilege" of inculcating such virtues upon the public schools; what's to stop any kind of school doing the same, or similar?

Not being of a naturally rebellious nature when I was at school, I do admit that nevertheless I drew the line at what I saw as the utterly absurd obsession about having, on school days, to wear the "school uniform" in public (which, of course, was not something paid for by the state, even though I attended a state grammar school); I was particularly incensed, for a number of reasons, by the expectation that a school cap should be worn (in all weathers), not least because not wearing one at least made it impossible to doff the wretched thing at anyone and the sheer nonsense of donning a blazer upon which was emblazoned a pompous-looking ersatz coat-of-arms bearing a motto in Latin was not lost on this particular student who happened to have noticed its incongruity as a "representation" of a school which was in the process of phasing out the teaching of Latin. When brought to book by the school headmaster over this, I said as much, adding that the said motto "finis coronat opus" must stick in the craw of the only Latin master left in the school, since he was suffering the painful ignominy of being made redundant one academic year at a time. I was ordered to kow-tow (at which point I remind anyone beginning to wonder that this was NOT a public school) and refused by asking why I should; I was told that, when out in the street, I represented a good school (which I have to admit it was) and ought therefore to be proud of it. I then asked why wearing the uniform was the only way to demonstrate this and the headmaster made some remark about standards of dress, smartness of appearance and such. I reminded him that I was wearing a decently cut civvy street suit that I'd bought and paid for with money I could ill afford and that if he ever caught me somewhere near the school on a school day looking like a scrufball he was welcome to expel me on the spot. He relented.

This is not the first time I have heard this kind of thing from people who have attended public schools, although, again, I am not seeking to hold up the concept as more virtuous than in any other school per se, for the highest educational standards are not the exclusive province of such schools any more than they are dependent upon the particular sources funding upon which the schools depend.

A very interesting and most valid point in this argument, indeed. People do regard certain state schools as though they actually are public schools and will fight almost to the death to get their children into them.

I agree with all that you say here, except that I'm by no means certain that greater accusations should be levelled at Thatcher and Major than at Blair as you suggest here, for I do not think that any of them has presided over all that much in the way of credible and viable education policies, frankly.

Good point - and one which I'd overlooked. What it does, however - especially when taken alongside recognition that it can cost quite a lot to send children to certain state schools and that the Etons, Roedeans, Rugbies, Harrows and Cheltenham Ladies' Symphonies (I mean Colleges!) have no particularly great exclusive hold on high-cost education - is to illustrate that governments of all colours offer all kinds of tax breaks in many quarters that could in certain circles qualify as "dirty little secrets". One has only to look at three products in the British investment industry that have been paraded as championing the "small saver" over the past two decades - the PEP (Personal Equity Plan), devised by Thatcher's Conservatives, the ISA (Individual Savings Plan) which took over from it during the present administration's régime and the absurdly-named Stakeholder Pension invented by the Blair lot; the first two were supposed to be (and originally were) tax-exempt at the back end (i.e. no taxes on income taken or on gains when encashed) and the last, like other pension products, tax-relieved up-front (i.e, when contributions are made by the investor). What has happened? Well, some of those conscientious investors who used up their full limits on investment every year in PEPs and then ISAs now have portfolios that have grown to several hundreds of thousands of pounds in value with almost no tax benefit to the government of the day and the Stakeholder has been relished mainly by people who already pay the top rate of tax because they can get the maximum relief of contributions and don't have to have NRE (NEt Relevant Earnings) from employment or self-employment in order to be entitled to make them - in other words, these things have benefited the well off far more than the less well off. The ISA is now not so tax-efficient as it once was (due to a series of back-door stealth moves of a Brown hue), so some of these portfolios are now being moved offshore to protect them from the ravages of the Treasury.

To get back to the subject, I openly admit that I don't much (and cannot in any case afford to) care where the money comes from to fund what I do, as long as it comes; I don't expect it from government and the thought that any kind of funding source may come tainted at the outset with orders as to how things should be done is, of course repellent. So I try to put up and shut up, but still need the money. I'm not "Elliott Carter" either, you see...

Best,

Alistair

Indeed - point well made and taken - although I'm still less than certain why he'd seek to change its status without changing that of other churches in Britain - but then perhaps he'll tell us...

Thanks for putting me right on that.

Best,

Alistair

I speak as someone who had a good (and) challenging time at secondary school, more life lessons than academicals. A while back I was shepherding a youngster from Eton through somer local pr calls and the inevitable question of elitism came up-these guys have a practice studio with multi media feedback and variable acoustics worth thousands, wheras the state schools are associated with a skills gap.

I think several socio-political points are worth adding into the equation.

1. getting rid of public schools throws the baby of excellence out with the bathwater. far better to open up the facilities to wider use, and to use this as a chanell to encourage diversity but also focus and social skills for those who take up the exchange.
2. the traditional class structure of the music/ arts scene is not going to change overnight where government  policy is populist and equivocal -and its view of the skills gap in general is equivalently polemic rather than empathic.
(a nod to my old borough of Lewisham for bringing on an afro-caribbean tubist, but thats an extreme rarity in a sea of diffuse politically correct mediocrity as I've heard from teachers there and in the home counties)
3. As well as the meretricious public  schools producing some freeloaders, the better ones foster social skills and entrepreneurship more effectively than the box-ticking recent traditions of secondary education.
An example of this is the Brownian return ,woefully underfunded, to competitive sports after the cynical
faux-leftist position that competition fosters hostility (look at the popularity of gang membership and its
consequences lately in the absence of youth clubs and accessible sports facilities-sold off as real estate- for example)

Those enlightened guys working within Unis of course have the vital opinion here, George's point about musioc for and by academics seems to me to be coming to pass in the refuge which the system can be
for those who've has their quota of initial attention and are now pro tem back in relative obscurity and penury. Pro-active, reality checking etc etc all to the good but I think some time active as a musician,
rather than exclusively as a composer would be a good thing before making with the theroreticals.

Just a thought on this - the impression I get is that the universities in the US in general (and of course this is a big generalisation) much more 'cut off' from the rest of American society than is true of their British equivalents, for various reasons, one of which may be simple geography (many university campuses literally in the middle of nowhere). You've been involved in British and American institutions, martle - do you feel this sort of thing? And could be part of the reason why it's possible to foister an atmosphere of rather aloof 'academicism' in the US, which is less the case here?