TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210120.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.0 KB | 144 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 102

Dusting Off the Old School Ties


Behind its ancient walls, Eton, at 550, slips into the modern
age

By PICO IYER/ETON


    Forget the 18 Prime Ministers, Wellingtons, Pitts and
Walpoles: any school that is the ostensible alma mater of James
Bond, Tarzan and Lord Peter Wimsey has clearly made a
contribution to the world. And the quirkiness of Eton College
ensures that it still seems to belong less to life than to
Lewis Carroll fiction. The boys wear coats with tails, the
teachers are called beaks, and both parties greet one another
on the street by simply raising a single index finger. The
prefects who sweep into classrooms, gowns billowing, to summon
boys to see the headmaster are known as praepostors (as in
preposterous). And at Eton -- and only at Eton -- academic
quarters are called halves, making three halves in a school
year (though the midpoint of each is "long leave," since
half-halves could be mistaken for quarters).

    This year Gladstone's "Queen of all the schools of all the
world" is marking a significant anniversary: exactly 550 years
have passed since Henry VI dreamed up a school just down the
road from Windsor Castle to accommodate "25 poor and indigent
scholars." And last week's St. Andrew's Day (Nov. 30), the
final great red-letter day of the school's anniversary year,
was celebrated in typically Etonian style, with a staging of
the annual Wall Game, a notorious blood sport in which 20
savage nobles flail and scramble in the mud in what is fittingly
known as a "bully." Punching is forbidden, but applying
"steady pressure" with one's fist upon a face is warmly
encouraged. The poet Shelley was once used as a ball. No goal
has been scored since before World War I.

    Yet even as many of the school's antics celebrate traditions
older than Caxton's printing press, Eton is, behind its ancient
walls, steadily redressing itself for a more modern age.
Perhaps the most hallowed tradition at Eton is a defiance of
all expectations. And during the past 10 years, the school's
headmaster, Eric Anderson, and its provost, Lord Charteris of
Amisfield, have quietly set about revolutionizing the classic
institution from within. Realizing, as Anderson stresses, that
Eton must prepare its students for a more international world,
it has opened its doors to more and more scholarship students
and to boys from Germany, the Soviet Union and Spain. Latin is
fading toward obsolescence, while Arabic, Japanese and Swahili
are all on the curriculum. In a sense, the place is drawing
closer to its founder's original notion of a truly "public"
school. "It is a privileged school," acknowledges Anderson, an
energetic and articulate Scotsman from a family of royal kilt
makers, "with beautiful buildings in a beautiful setting. But
the only justification for privilege is that it should help
people develop themselves to the full. We are elitist, but not
exclusive. And I'm not ashamed in the least of being elitist.
All that means is aiming at the highest standards you can
achieve."

    Thus Eton today is somewhat like an eagle in penguin's
clothing. The Victorian morning dress that fashion-conscious
boys once chose for the school uniform is still worn to
classes, but jeans and ethnic shirts are increasingly common
outside of them. Those who do not wish to win the Battle of
Waterloo -- and lose limbs, mind and nerve -- on the playing
fields can perform social service instead, teaching English to
immigrant children or reading to the handicapped. And one
recent Sunday evening, the red brick classrooms along the
crooked streets were buzzing with students chatting over their
terminals and the staccato music of computer printers.

    Though classes at Eton are still known as "divisions," they
are less and less reflections of class division. The school
has, of course, its share of Bertie Woosters, but many of its
students are rarely idle and hardly rich: 250 of the 1,270 boys
have part of their fees paid by the school. Both fagging,
whereby younger boys had to dance attention on their elders,
and flogging are gone, as are some of the other fabled
barbarisms that may have encouraged two of the school's alumni
to fashion the most chilling dystopias of the century in Brave
New World and 1984. Veteran teachers rhapsodize about a kind
of Golden Age of liberality and modernity: of the 56 students
taking the Oxford Entrance Examinations last month, 18 were
specialists in natural sciences (as against five in classics).
There is even a martial-arts room in the new Olympic-standard
gym -- to toughen, no doubt, the fiber of future powers on and
off the Wall.

    Those kinds of facilities, in addition to the school's more
august holdings (it has a Gutenberg Bible and a garden donated
by the King of Siam), help give Eton more the air of a
university than a high school. That impression is intensified
by the precocious self-possession of its students, who seem to
have nothing teenage about them, maturing overnight from short
pants into three-piece suits. Recent issues of the Eton College
Chronicle, the boys' magazine, feature long articles on
perestroika, detailed surveys of Malawi, rhymed quatrains about
Salman Rushdie. Boys put on plays by Ken Kesey and Lope de
Vega, flock to a newly formed Green Society, gather to discuss
the biological causes of altruism. They also enjoy unusual
access to the world: in the midst of Conservative Party
turmoil, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, a devoted Old Etonian
remembered for his play along the Wall, was scheduled to come
down to the school to address its political society. In some
ways, in fact, there is almost an embarrassment of
extracurricular riches. "The school needs to be more sympathetic
to the personal psychology of adolescent boys, and give them
time to simply think," wrote one adolescent boy in answer to
a questionnaire about the use of students' time.

    It is that kind of impish self-assurance that makes the
school's enemies see red. It is not that the best-qualified
students go to Eton, they charge, but that going to Eton is the
best qualification for success: as recently as 1960, fully
one-fifth of all Conservative Members of Parliament were Old
Etonians (imagine 60 Republican Congressmen coming from a
single high school). The school's defenders retaliate by
pointing out that its distinctive features -- every boy has a
room of his own and attends regular tutorials, known as
Private Business -- ensure that it will continue to produce as
many renegades as rulers. The only Etonian orthodoxy is
unorthodoxy. Yes, there are still names on the school lists
like Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, and the names of sons of
foreign rulers, but there are also, no doubt, future Guy
Burgesses, George Orwells and other eccentric mavericks. One of
the proudest and most legendary of all Old Etonians, after all,
was known as Captain Hook.