Letter from America
Philip Delves Broughton
Until his death last year, the linchpin of the Old Etonian gatherings in Los Angeles was the actor Clement von Franckenstein (1944-2019). His Austrian parents had died in a plane crash and a friend of theirs sent him to Eton.
He strung together a career in Hollywood out of dozens of bit parts playing the smoothie or the cad. He relished his OE nights out, when he could regale his audiences with tales of life before the ubiquity of condoms.
Prince Harry might have enjoyed his company as a break from the pieties of his domestic life in Montecito.
The reputation of English publicschool boys in America these days is mixed (I went to Eton myself and now live in Connecticut). There is still a remnant of social deference to the accent and manners, but it’s often mixed with the reasonable suspicion that millimetres deep lies villainy. Franckenstein is assumed to lurk within all of us.
The good news, though, is that compared with many American private schools, the English public-school system seems almost squeaky clean.
Even taking into account the row at Eton over the firing of Martin Knowland, the teacher who created an excruciating presentation about toxic masculinity, English schools seem far more confident about who they are and why they exist.
Americans still love a good private school. But their rankings are constantly changing and the big East Coast names have becomes options rather than obligations for the ruling class. The names at the very top of the pile, Exeter and Andover, remain unchanged, but boarding schools in general are less popular than they were. Each city and region has its favourite day schools.
In New York, the financial titans wrestle for places at Trinity; the more Bohemian types crave Dalton.
In Los Angeles, the moguls line up for Harvard-westlake and Marlborough. Washington DC has Sidwell Friends, where the Clintons and Obamas sent their daughters, Georgetown Prep and St Albans, which groan with senators’ and ambassadors’ children. Seattle has Bill Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside.
The ethos of these schools is not so much about class as about opportunity.
The goal is no longer to wear tweed and play lacrosse as much as it is to keep pace with the hyper-educated elites of China. The focus is academic and the object admission to a top-tier university.
Parents are not lining up for Exeter because they hope their child can one day practise law. They line up because Mark Zuckerberg went there, and from there to Harvard, where he met most of the founding team at Facebook.
But you would never grasp that these were the schools’ priorities if you listened to what they said, instead of paying attention to what they do. In public, American schools do a good job of seeming torn between ambition and guilt. Instead of defending what they are, elite institutions for the well-to-do and a few deemed worthy of financial aid, they are constantly apologising for what they are not, instruments of social change.
This year has been particularly grim for them. Aside from having to close down because of the pandemic, they have been accused of decades of mistreatment of minority students. Over the summer, past and present black students used Instagram to talk about their experiences, using the hashtag ‘Black At’
followed by the name of their school. Other students lined up with tales of bullying and sexual abuse.
The board of trustees at Brearley, one of Manhattan’s top girls’ schools, wrote in an email, ‘We have immersed ourselves in the painful, often searing stories of the first-hand effects of institutionalised and, at times, overt anti-black racism within our walls. We are deeply sorry.’ School after school issued similar, self-lacerating apologies.
Behind the scenes, one senses they are becoming more sharp-elbowed, not less. They are constantly having to raise money, which leaves them hostage to their boards and their wealthiest parents. Few of those parents would shed a tear for social justice if it meant giving an inch on their child’s university admission.
St Bernard’s, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, may be the tweediest of New York’s schools. It educates boys from kindergarten until they leave for high school, in Latin, proper handwriting and a firm handshake. But this year, it announced the departure of its long-serving headmaster, and all hell broke loose.
The New York Times reported that his resignation resulted from a clash of New York cultures. The trusting old WASPS, who showed a benign neglect towards the next generation of Winthrops, were no longer in power.
Today’s ruling class are meddlers, fully involved in their children’s lives, thrusting themselves into their homework and extracurricular lives.
‘They were a different species now,’ said the New York Times, ‘unable to look from a distance at their children and trust that they would succeed.’
Parents, dammit, have started to care about what these schools are up to and it has changed everything.