So Eton, everything I expected and more

[JoanBias]

My DS is at a private school, so I have experience of private schooling, but my word Eton was like another world.

Not just the school, but the people there.

There was one prep school being shown around, all in tweed jackets, and to a boy the spitting image of Draco Malfoy (well there was one Chinese boy, but otherwise....).

One of the mothers doing the tour was not quite right in some respect, I'm not sure how but something wasn't wired up correctly or something. She was immacuately dressed, 6-inch heels (pretty daft considering the confirmation letter warns about having a long walk), but she was just bizarre. The admissions tutor said 'we have a waiting list of 80 boys and typically 35% of these will make it through', and she asked afterwards 'so 80% of the boys from the waiting list make it through?', and it was then explained again, but you could kind of hear the cogs going round and she clearly didn't get it. She had asked several other similar questions; e.g., it was explained that some Houses are catering and others go to a central cafeteria, so she then asked 'so they all eat in the cafeteria'? She pointed at the Fives Court and asked me 'what do they play here?' I said 'Fives' 'Is it squash?', she said. 'No, Eton Fives.' 'So is it squash?' It seemed as if this woman had had the benefit of the 'Finishing School for the Terminally Dim', because she was otherwise every inch the presentable upper middle-class wife.

Another family had a son who looked the prototypical pre-Etonian, and sure enough Daddy spent the tour braying on about his House when he had been there.

The facilities were extremely impressive, although they didn't bother to show us any of the academic parts, and basically the impression was 'if your son is incredibly pushy and self-motivated, send him here and we will teach him to be entitled'. They said 'every year we reject about a third of the highest performers on the test', essentially because they aren't pushy enough. (The House Mistresses seemed quite nice though.)

Fantastic training for future managing directors and whatever, but not for us.....

Well worth it to sign up for a tour, very illuminating. They take about 100 a day from what I can see, so obligation at all....

Why such a strong military theme? Ds at aged 1 was always more interested in the box the toy came in and the wrapping paper (if it had any). Perfectly normal at that age. Toys don't have to do something.

Lego is plastic, at least the lego in our house is.

I assume the toys sit untouched as they don't know how to play with them. How old you are dcs Mini?

7 and 11

Mine were about 13 or 14 before they got very resistant.

Do they play with other friends? Ds loves youtube too. He saw the Eton Gangnam parody on it and got half his school doing the dance at break time.

I sort of know what Mini means. Mine finshed with plastic stuff but not till 8 years old, which is probably much more usual.
All children, and adults for that matter are different.
fwiw, and in my experience,quite a lot of very bright people do not watch much if any television.I used to think they may have been doing it to be snobby. But I dont think so now. And I thought they then had to find things to occupy themselves with. But I dont even think it is quite that. I think they naturally gravitate to other matters which interest them far more. And those intersts can be wide and very varied.

bisjo, hasn't the actual Gangnam dance been seen by a billion people now?

There's a Mitt Romney spoof too:

exotic you did well. My ds spotted education-related stuff at the age of 6 and since then there has been no tricking him to do anything worthy at all.

amillionyears totally disagree. It's random. Arguably the three cleverest students at DS1's school (2 x Oxford Medicine and a Princeton) were utterly obsessed with tv crap).

DS2 aged 7 is very social and loves company and has a huge set of friends and a couple of very good friends.

DS1 has a few really close friends who are much like him. Two of his best friends are girls.

I'm not a tiger Mummy. Military theme? DS1 wants to work for the MOD designing weapons (I have an Albert Spears on my hands, help) and they are both interested in old movies about WW2. My father was in the navy maybe they get it from there.

Anyway enough about mine, what do other children play with?

I think they were about 13 before they dug their toes right in an refused outright. They were a bit resistant earlier. The Keswick Pencil Museum was the end - on a very wet day- they wouldn't go in!
I now joke with DS2 because he now goes with his girlfriend to places he deemed 'educational'.

computers, mostly.

Lego, Lego and more Lego. Building and creating things - oh and flipping computers of course...

They only ever want great big boxes of Lego for Christmas though (DT's age 10).

Mini what the heck do you get them at Christmas?

Very good. I like this Osborne spoof, the kids loved it too.

Yellowtip, do you live in the USA? If so, tv is bound to be different there. If not content, then structure. That may make a difference.

Ds (8) goes out on his bike and has a 'gang'. They do wild things like cycling to the end of the cul de sac and round the corner to the library. He has even been known to take a book out without having his library ticket.

He plays with girls too (and they are in his gang as well as boys) but I'm banned from talking about them.

When he is at home he watches too much tv, plays with plastic crap and plays games on his iPod. Thank heavens he boards most of the week so no doubt he does worthy stuff there like homework and reading.

bisjo, he probably does more than enough at school and you don't really see how much because he is boarding. Mine are both in state.

He is at home some nights so I do see how much homework he has. It isn't very much at all, 10-15 mins at most. Plenty at his age though.

No amillion we're completely UK. I agree that it does seem to be the cleverest families who seem able to cope without tv but I also know that there's no necessary nexus between watching mindless tv and being rejected from Oxford and Cambridge. My sample is big. And once there, the habit continues and you meet like minded souls with whom you stay up deep into the night exchanging views about Millie and Spencer, Hugo and Francis, Binky and Weese. Or whatever's your thing. I broke mine in early, in readiness.

But yellowtip surely the issue isn't whether you can get into Oxbridge and stay up late into the night debating MIC. It is whether they have widened access enough to be inclusive of Vicci who would be onit like a car bonnit.......

I think it's wonderful we have huge variety - children at Habs or home educated or at Eton or a local school or whatever. I really don't think life would be interesting if we were all clones.

You do what you think is right for the child and thankfully we do not live in a communist state. Those of us whose oldest children have graduated can see the finished product in a sense and I am quite happy with the finished products I have so far. I think mine watch less television than I did as a teenager simply because there is more alternative now - internet and hobbies etc. We all decide what influences we want on our children. Feminist women tend to want their children's influences to be not woman as clothes horse but most clever teenagers tend to want to do the opposite of what their parents want.

I don't know the age of MM's children. My own view is that left to their own devices as long as you also talk to them a lot children tend to find things to do. That also suits me as I like a lot of time alone doing things myself. So it's win win although I do love to accompany music practice at the piano so the fact 3 won music scholarships is purely because I have indulged myself.

I don't often watch television but that's not because I'm particularly against it. I jsut have things I'd rather do and we did have a phase of no television in the week when some were younger but it's up to each parent to decide within the boundaries of the law of course. There tended to be a child in each year of our children's schools who had no television at home.

It must be a record, but I agree with everything in your post Xenia!

We had one very bright boy, our best historian, who spotted in one of his modules in his history A level that the question was flimsy and argued it back to front. He got a U for it. We sent the papers to a couple of dons at Oxford and Cambridge and they both said it was first-class honours stuff, but we looked at the template and we had to agree with the exam board.?

This seems odd to me. Did the boy not understand the question? Surely if it was badly worded, 'flimsy' (?), then the school should disagree with the U awarded by the exam board?

Who marks the papers? Is it really true that if a candidate takes the topic 'off piste' and makes points that are not on the 'grid' they do poorly or not as well as they might?

Hamishbear Some of our Master's students mark A2 questions, they are paid on the basis of some horribly short period of time to mark the questions and if they query that an answer doesn't match the template, but was original and thoughtful and makes good points, they are pointed back to the template. Obviously we can't know the details of a given case but in general it is really a worry with DD2 who is Dyslexic and loves off piste, but I know that if she doesn't scupper herself at A2 she will have every chance of being a great student at uni level, and tutors will love her off the wall ideas.

I have marked A2 and agree and you don't have much time to mark either. I am not sure it is any different today though. One of my A level questions was "Is Tess a moral fable". The girls who did badly just wrote what the whole book was about. Those who answered the question did fine. I am not sure daughters A2 English was too much different 20 years + on.

We had one very bright boy, our best historian, who spotted in one of his modules in his history A level that the question was flimsy and argued it back to front. He got a U for it. We sent the papers to a couple of dons at Oxford and Cambridge and they both said it was first-class honours stuff, but we looked at the template and we had to agree with the exam board.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear

There is a difference between being good at a particular random field of competence (or even a number of fields) and having a truly useful intelligence - getting results in the real world.

That child may have been good at history for his age, but I have real difficulty in labelling his behaviour as "bright".

Either the child is incapable of assessing the surrounding context enough to establish the right practical approach to take to the question, or the school failed to inform him that there are other, better times to show an independent spirit that restlessly takes issues with the fundamental underlying framing of the current discourse (like pretty much any other effing time than answering an A-level module question?).

Either way why on Earth would anyone view the above as a positive story about how you are educating the children under your charge?