A simple lesson: private schools are for duffers

I have known many people who were privately educated; very few had voracious or original minds

The latest university mini-scandal seems harder to understand the more you look at it. The newspapers have got hold of the story of a boy, Anirudh Singh, who was rejected by Bristol University. He is obviously a high achiever, getting five A grades at A-level and winning prizes; he is also a good cricketer, playing for the Warwickshire under-19 team.

All this achievement paid off, and he is studying economics at Cambridge, but comment has been made about the fact that one of his other choices, Bristol, declined to interview him. The conclusion that his former headmaster, Roger Dancey, and the newspapers reached was that Mr Singh was not considered because he was educated at a private school.

I don't see why Mr Singh or his school is moaning about it. No one in their right mind would go to Bristol when they could go to Cambridge, and it seems bizarre, to say the least, to start complaining that you weren't considered by a university you didn't particularly want to go to.

When I applied to university, 20 years ago, from a Sheffield comprehensive, no university apart from my first choice invited me to an interview, presumably because it was perfectly obvious that I was going to get into Oxford. It certainly never occurred to me to complain about the fact, or to start drawing conclusions about anti-state education bias from my particular case.

But of course this is not really about Mr Singh at all. He is going to be all right. What they are concerned about are the well-trained duffers who, with expensive tuition and endless drilling, manage to scrape Bs and Cs. Those are the people who are losing out at interviews for university. In the eyes of many admissions tutors, a candidate from a decrepit and underfunded comprehensive school who gets, say, three Bs at A-level is a better bet than an exam-passing machine with the same grades from a great public school. The first has acquired the habit of self-education which university requires; the second may very well possess no real intellectual curiosity at all.

Mr Singh said: "It is a bit unfair to suggest that just because someone was at state school that their good grades must be better – it's the same grade at the end of the day." With respect, no. What universities are (or should be) looking for is intellectual curiosity, which good grades may reflect or may not. Notoriously, private school candidates do extremely well at getting into university, but much less well when it comes to achieving Firsts at the best universities. A clever pupil from state education is much more likely to have acquired the habit of reading independently, of educating himself, for the simple reason that his education has not stretched to fill his entire time.

Private education, really, is of most help to duffers who would sink without trace in the state system. Anyone clever – even Mr Singh – would or should do just as well in a comprehensive school, and in a way it is disgraceful that the middle classes feel no embarrassment about paying for their children's education, and damaging the social mix of their children's upbringing for a dubious and deplorable principle. In much of Europe, and certainly in France, Italy and Germany, there is an active stigma attached to parents who send their children to be privately educated. The instant assumption would be that your children were unusually stupid.

That is not the usual response in England, on hearing that an acquaintance is sending his children to Eton, but isn't it the real facts of the case; the assumption that, though you are literate and cultured, encourage your children with exposure to museums and music, that they are just too thick to cope unless you pay some Gradgrind thousands of pounds a year to ram some facts into their heads? Or, even worse, that you secretly know how thick you are, never read a book or listen to a piece music from one end of the year to the other, and want to offload some responsibility on to someone else?

The fact is that private education, in the vast majority of cases, works only if you consider that education is synonymous with exam-passing. I've known many people who were privately educated, from urban prep schools to the great public schools, and I have to say that very few of them have anything approaching an original or voracious mind. It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the products of posh schools one met at Oxford were not only extremely ignorant but exceptionally stupid. In the majority of cases, universities are right to turn such people away, despite their glittering grades. What is needed is a wider understanding of two social principles. First, that an expensive education won't necessarily get you into a good university. Second, that private education carries a stigma; because, in my view, private schools are really there for the benefit of thick children.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk