We’re still talking about Prince George’s secondary school (high school). It was announced this week that George will attend Eton in September. Eton is where Prince William and Prince Harry went to school, and they had very different experiences there. Eton regularly educates Britain’s ruling class – countless prime ministers, aristocrats and titans of British industry are Etonians, not to mention some international royals too. Given how much William loved his Eton days, it now feels pretty obvious that William wanted that for George, despite the Princess of Wales’ years-long campaign to send George to her alma mater, Marlborough. Well, the Telegraph had a lengthy piece about why Eton is “the right choice” for George and how the ruling class is glad that Kate didn’t get her way. Some highlights:
The perfect choice for George: “It pains me to say this as an old Harrovian, but I think Eton is a wonderful school and absolutely the right fit for Prince George,” says Will Orr-Ewing, an educational consultant and the founder of Keystone Tutors. “I am interested in this idea of character education. George is someone who will be a leader in one way or another, and it is important he goes to an institution that has a history of producing elite statesmen – one that has an idea of what a young man should be. I know that Simon Henderson, the head, will have been thinking about these issues in a profound way.”
A rarefied air: This smorgasbord of privilege is largely a good thing for young Windsors, as it gives them the chance to spend five years among boys who consider them no more than equals. William is thought to have retained a circle of close friends from his Eton days, and is said to want his children to create the same lifelong loyal bonds at boarding school. “We weren’t in awe of William, and I don’t think he would have wanted us to be,” says one contemporary of the Prince of Wales, who attended the school from 1995 to 2000. “You have to remember that at Eton, he never stood out that much – there were boys from even richer families than his, and also boys from very old English aristocratic stock, who could trace their lineage back thousands of years, and who would tease William for being an upstart German. He was popular, but he was also just one of the crowd.”
Eton is more academic these days: By the time [Prince Harry] arrived in the late 1990s, Eton was no longer an institution prepared to accept the more dim-witted members of the aristocracy, since greater weight was being placed on high marks and top university placements. Today, that shift has only accelerated, and bright pupils from around the world now undergo years of tutoring to pass the necessary entrance exams. Scholarships and bursaries, which Eton offers more of than nearly every other public school in Britain, are mostly awarded through their own series of gruelling tests, and the result is classrooms full of highly academically gifted students.
Is Eton the right fit for George academically? “It will be a slightly different process for George, but I do believe that the school would be really honest if it wasn’t right for him,” says Orr-Ewing. “I don’t know anything about the boy, but I do know Eton very well, and I know it’s the kind of place that would say no if they believed he was the wrong fit in either an academic or a character sense… I think George will get less special treatment there than he would at any other school,” says Orr-Ewing. “You can’t change the security detail or the fact that some family members will want to take pictures with him, but on the whole at Eton, your status tends to derive from your sports or drama ability, or if you are a scholar or a brilliant debater. The fact that he is a prince will be fairly unimportant.”
His own bedroom: All boys – princes or otherwise – are treated the same when it comes to day-to-day life at Eton, where security is tight. Unlike most boarding schools, George will never sleep in a dormitory, as boys are given their own bedrooms from day one. There is some flexibility for students to go home at weekends. Communal showers take place after sport, but for daily ablutions, there are private bathrooms. And while the eccentric waistcoat-and-tails uniform is worn to class, evenings are casual and communal affairs.
The arrogant Etonian: Of course, for all of the school’s obvious merits, Etonians have been derided in some quarters for their famous confidence, which can so often tip into arrogance. But those who have attended the school in recent years say its culture has changed. Rather than teaching boys they are the inheritors of the earth, as it perhaps once did, today’s Etonians learn to be more outward-looking and understanding of people from an array of backgrounds. “I think there are two different Etons,” says one former pupil. “There is the Eton of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when the school taught you to believe you were superior to everyone else. I look at men of 50-plus in the public eye who went there, and a lot of that reputation for entitlement has come from them. But the Eton I went to after that was different, and far more self-aware. It is an incredible place, and I honestly believe it will only do Prince George good.”
Eh. I have my doubts that Eton suddenly became hyper-academic for all students in the 21st century. I think for little princes and the sons of lords, earls, dukes and viscounts, it’s probably the same “inheritors of the earth” vibe. Still, I believe that George will probably benefit from this environment overall, and it’s now clear to me that William wants George to be “Windsorized” from this moment on, which is about the same age when the process really began for William. For what it’s worth, I also believe that George *wants* to go to Eton. If that matters at all to these people, I mean. If George gets a say, I think he would choose Eton as well.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
