8 hours ago
8
I wholeheartedly agree with Alastair Campbell’s call for a “nationwide state-school alumni network” (If you went to state school, do you ever feel British life is rigged against you? Welcome to the 93% Club, 19 June). As someone from the 93% who left a secondary school – in Walthamstow, east London – many years ago with no academic qualifications, I know the feeling.
After years wandering around low-level criminality and unskilled “cash in hand” jobs, I was lucky that a youth worker presented me with two options: carry on earning money through dodgy activities, including following up individuals with outstanding debts for the infamous Kray twins, and end up in prison; or use my brain and get myself off to university.
With his support, it meant moving on from my working-class school mates and the closed social networks they offered. This was challenging. It took time to develop new cultural capital, play down intermittent feelings of impostor syndrome and reinvent myself to fit in with middle-class culture – new friends who knew which knife or fork to use first at dinner and learn professional network protocols.
Campbell is spot-on. Enhancing social mobility by offering mentoring and support from individuals with backgrounds such as mine in state schools to counter the 7% in privileged positions of power in our class-ridden society is a way forward. I’m up for it.
Roger Green
Visiting research fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London
Alastair Campbell is right about the awe in which we still seem to hold the graduates of our posh schools. Eton is fond of telling us how many prime ministers it has provided, but the fact is that our ascent into first-world status depended almost entirely on people from other walks of life.
When the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century kickstarted our journey away from religious superstition, it was mainly the grammar schools and academies of lowland Scotland that provided pioneers in empirical philosophy, economics, science, engineering and town planning. These institutions were teaching science a century before the posh boarding schools in England got round to it.
And the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution that followed were a mixed bunch indeed. George Stephenson, the railways pioneer, was illiterate until his late teens. But as the nouveau got riche, they sent their children to the English boarding schools to give them the patina of a classical education without having to get their hands dirty, and to have them meet the “right people” – the rich landowners, in this case. And so began the pattern that we see today.
Was it the late Fred Dibnah, a steeplejack and television personality, who said this country was made by men in overalls, but ruined by men in suits?
David Redshaw
Saltdean, East Sussex
Alastair Campbell’s article omits one key element. Many boarders must surely live with emotional and psychological trauma resulting from their early separation from family. Thus many of our office-holders (and usually cabinet ministers) are unable to feel the empathy that good governing requires. They see themselves as entitled to power and are often responsible for doing harm to our society. I welcome the current cabinet’s state school backgrounds, as long as they stay true to their values. I write as a Fettesian who hated and has been handicapped by his school days.
George Rook
Lyneal, Shropshire
