Yes, there is still a point to private school
We’re not such slaves to our genetic inheritance that education has no influence on achievement
Acottage in the country. Luxury travel for ever. Early retirement! Give me a moment and I’ll come up with some others. Because I’m just dreaming about what to do with all the money. Have I won the lottery? Yes indeed. And if you’ve got school-age children, you have too.
We are, according to Robert Plomin, professor of behavioural genetics at King’s, all winners. Because if you’ve ever considered sending your children to private school, and gnashed your teeth at the hundreds of thousands it will cost you, your troubles are over.
Elite schools make no difference, Plomin said at the weekend. Educational attainment is baked into our DNA. Thinking about sending
your kids to Eton for the grades? His answer is unequivocal: “Don’t.” At current fees, with two boys, such advice saves you £81,400 a year. Before tax that’s £134,241. And 65p.
The spreadsheet spirit soars. But then the human heart rebels. Are we really so pre-programmed for academic success or failure by what Plomin, in his book Blueprint, so elegantly called those “three billion steps in the spiral staircase of DNA that we inherit from our parents at the moment of conception”?
Plomin doesn’t just think so; he knows so. And he has evidence that’s hard to argue against: twins. Identical twins separated at a young age are the perfect nature/nurture test. Again and again Plomin and others point out that no matter how different their upbringing, identical twins’ lives are strikingly similar. It’s not just exams. It’s divorce rates, and the way they laugh. Indeed, Plomin has even drawn up a chart showing the significant genetic influence on everything from our ability to remember faces to our personalities. In which case, why bother trying at all?
Well, not all parents who send their children to private schools think only of grades. They are looking for other advantages: connections, confidence, access to facilities. And it is the last of these that shows why we should not despair and give ourselves up, like characters in a Greek tragedy, to inescapable fate.
Look at our most famous actors. Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne – all went to Eton. Benedict Cumberbatch is the exception. He went to Harrow. How about our cricket team? Of the 11 who started against Pakistan in the World Cup yesterday, Roy, Bairstow, Root, Morgan, and Buttler all went to private school. Far from being non-existent, some advantages of going to private school are so evident as to be, frankly, embarrassing.
This is because, as Plomin himself readily insists, when it comes to heritability there is a widespread misunderstanding between “what is” and “what could be”.
Obesity is the great example. There is no doubt that genes are a factor in our propensity to gain weight. Experience tells us as much. We all have friends who eat what they like and remain stick thin. But we all also know that there are many more fat people now than a few decades ago.
What has changed in the meantime is what we eat. It is our modern, high-calorie diets which expose that genetic variation in our propensity to gain weight. But it is still our own actions that have made the difference. What has changed in cricket and in drama is that opportunities for state schoolchildren to pursue those activities has collapsed. So again, our own choices have been critical.
There is comfort here. First, humans retain real agency. Second, as our understanding of genetic influence grows, some outcomes we assumed were predestined turn out to be anything but. Plomin’s own work shows that more than half of us assume breast cancer is a poisoned genetic inheritance. But genes actually play only a very small part. Genetics can lift, as well as impose, the dead weight of fate.
We parents think our children are good at football because we play with them in the park. Plomin argues we play with them in the park because they are innately good at football. But even if he’s right we still have to be sensitive enough to recognise that ability, selfless enough to respond to it, and skilful enough to find the best path for it to flourish.
And as elite schools will be happy to tell you, while they cash your cheque, that’s just the kind of tailored talentspotting and training that they do best.
follow Harry de Quetteville on Twitter @harrydq; read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion