On not being privately educated

Further studies on the vulgar middle class

What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
— Samuel DANIEL

I have realised too late in life that the course of my existence has been determined in large part by my failure to hob-nob with the right people at university. As the first family member to set foot in higher education, I tumbled into it with an ignorance of what it actually entailed. The study of liberal arts is not really, as one might suppose, intended to “furnish the mind with beauty”, but to get in with the sort of rich, idle, and well-connected louts that can afford to study the humanities and still have enough money at twenty-five to be granted a mortgage.

University education is perhaps the only opportunity that the vulgar middle-classman has to rub shoulders with his privately educated superiors and to form the sycophantic social bonds that will serve him financially for the rest of his life. That is because the child of the lower-middle class is (by my definition) almost always state educated; it is from the bowels of the comprehensive education system that he learns his innate sense of intellectual and moral superiority, surrounded as he is necessarily by the very lowest and most pitiable members of the public. Ignorant of the superiority of the privately educated — ignorant, even, of the existence of private education — he can hardly be blamed for believing himself at the top of Britain’s social and intellectual hierarchy. He is in fact, only at the top of the bottom, and this realisation is quick to come when he enters university.

The University of Bedfordshire, whose gilded halls I walked as a young man.

I add here a slight clarification to my operative definition of the term vulgar middle class which may surprise readers: The vulgar middle class is not determined necessarily by any monetary advantage over his working class counterpart. It is, in fact, entirely possible that his family has even less money than theirs. Rather, he is defined by an innate and often-misplaced sense of superiority, the origin of which might be something as trifling as having a more polished accent, pertaining to a high Anglican church, or being able to play, however clumsily, a classical instrument.

The cultural disparity between the vulgar middle class and the genuine middle class in Britain is far more pronounced than in other countries, and this is largely due to the chasm which exists between our state and private education. Private education in other European countries is far more obtainable to children of the vulgar middle class. Spain and France in particular have a more varied system, with your typical independent schools being mixed in with charter schools: concertado in Spain and sous-contrat in France. These charter schools are funded partially by the state and partially by tuition fees, with this subsidisation flattening the playing field and allowing families of more modest means to access private education. As a consequence, entirely independent schools are required to lower their costs in order to compete. No such system of charter schools exists in Britain. While there is a significant range in price in our private schools, with the most expensive schools of course carrying the most prestige and conferring the most connections, the cheapest private education in Britain will still round off to about £10,000 per annum, while the average charter school in Spain charges just 119 euros per academic month.

Private education in Britain, then, is the clear threshold between the vulgar and the real middle class. Independent schools in Britain are typically seen as a way to maintain a middle class hegemony in Britain, but when we consider the more liberal approach of our continental neighbours it seems more accurate to say that our state education as a way to secure working and lower middle-class stupidity.

In Britain, even the poorest of state schools require their students to dress up in a shirt, tie and blazer. This is a sort of joke played on us by the government, a parody of real education, and it brings them the sort of base pleasure that you and I might get from seeing a dog walking on its hind legs.

This is not only economic inferiority, but a cultural one. The privately educated mind entering into a serious study of literature has already rote-memorised a catalogue of classical myths, conventions of poetic metre, and Latin declensions, so that when confronted with the dense texts which make up the syllabus, can breeze through while drawing on that heavily-embedded pool of knowledge. The state-educated student has received an education bereft of the sort of elitist cultural capital which is so necessary to understand the greatest works in the English language. He must pore meticulously over every footnote, explanatory appendix and introductory essay to understand what the privately educated mind can grasp on a just cursory reading. One gets the feeling that the footnotes to classic works are there for the sole benefit of the state-educated. A rather obvious explanatory note in my copy of Middlemarch says patronisingly: “Philistine: a boorishly uncultured person,” as if it wished to make fun of me for even turning to it.

But the study of great works, as we have said, is ancillary to the true purpose of a liberal university education. One’s real objective should be to curry favour with anyone with even a whiff of privilege, especially if one wishes to publish anything after graduation. Just as one does not sit down to a game of cards without having someone at the table to injog the deck for us, nor would we expect to make a living by writing without having a friend or cousin working at the Spectator.

It is important to make connections, and early on. I was particularly talented at identifying the privately educated when at university, but only used this knowledge to my own detriment. Feeling, for the first time in my life, the inferiority of my suburban upbringing, the collapsing, semi-detached house of my parents, and of my superficially-buried estuary accent (which threatened, constantly, to bob above the surface), I deliberately alienated myself from that privileged milieu, even going as far as to antagonise them. While peers of a similar social status to mine (but with a better social instinct) took to forming profitable liens with the Winchester crowd, I was pissing on their carpets at house parties.

Garden Party for The Scholiast Magazine where I met Robert Thinhair, son of theologian Sir Paedocles Thinhair.

Years later I have continued to do the same thing, sending thinly-veiled threats to editors of conservative papers, demanding that they publish me. On reflection, this violent approach of insulting every person who might even have considered me as a viable contributor to their publication — almost guaranteed to elicit rejection — has been a means to avoid the possibility that I am unpublished simply because my writing is poor. I have attempted to ameliorate the consequences of this bridge-burning aspect of my personality by turning up to several of the London garden parties hosted by political magazines and introducing myself under a false name, sometimes even dressed as a woman. On one of these occasions, where I had managed to slip into the soirée of a burgeoning right-of-centre cultural magazine, I thought I might have won a commission from one of its assistant editors. But at some point the mask must have slipped, and he must have detected in me, throbbing just beneath the surface, my contempt for him and his self-consciously “clever” articles. It seems impossible, but I felt that I saw in his eyes, just for a moment, a flash of recognition; something in my tone when I began talking about the texture of the soufflé which we were sharing alerted him, and I am certain he knew that it was I that had called him “the distended abdomen of his theologian father” over Gmail. It is possible, too, that he saw the hint of my Adam’s apple when my chiffon scarf slipped down, though I seriously doubt that something so trifling as that would have deterred him.