tell me about a 'privileged' education

[Frostycake]

If you attended a grammar or private school or if you teach in one (or taught in one), tell me what I may have missed by having a comprehensive education in the 1980s.

I sometimes see glimpses of the education I could have had if circumstances had been different for my parents (the recent TV series on Harrow, meeting and working with people who went to Oxford, Cambridge, Malvern College etc.) and I often wonder what it is I missed out on apart from the obvious opportunities and overflowing confidence and maturity this type of education seems to instill in pupils.

Come and talk to me about the detail as I'm bursting with curiosity.

I think girls' private schools have been churning out well educated ladies of leisure for generations! It's a minority pursuit, however.

from my own circle, there's no logic to it; the daughter of a household name / sunday times rich list mega wealth went to oxford for one subject and converted to medicine and is now a doctor. V similar for a Duke's daughter (not that there was much cash there). A lot married money but I think that's different to marrying FOR money - they went through life only meeting monied people so it's not overly surprising. I really can't put my finger on why some are driven and others not. Of those who did the PR route, they tend to be running their own agencies / doing corporate or public affairs PR - don't get any prejudice against that? Careers advice at the time was abysmal and that's probably a large part of it - swathes of us got to University doing utterly bonkers courses (theology was very popular for some reason, often coupled with history of art) and would then have stumbled out into the start of a massive recession - prior to that people rolled out of that type of education and straight into stockbroking / Lloyds of London etc and had great careers without apparent great effort.

I agree with Bonsoir, however it's unusual to me that they'd go to such an unusually academic school with such high pressure and then sit back and do nothing but polish the frame of their First from Cambridge etc

I guess it depends what we mean by ladies of leisure.

I know a hell of a lot of long term SAHMs, whose DC are now teenagers. For most of them, it wasn't their game plan. They're mostly well educated and had demanding careers that they quit when they had DC because their DHs also had demanding careers.

I don't think (m)any of them thought they'd end up still not working fifteen/twenty years later. But that's how their cookies have crumbled so they might as well enjoy it going to the gym, lunching, shopping etc (which probably looks to outsiders like this was always their fairly shallow plan).

I also don't buy the mother as role model. Many of us had mothers who did n't work and that did n't stop a lot of us having careers. I do get the misjudged career advice and degrees which whilst good for learning for its own sake might have been mistimed for career openings. I also still think that success in academics does n't translate to making things happen in the more pragmatic real world. Goes back to an old thread about aspirations. Actually I often aspire to be a lady of leisure but in fact it seems like too much hard work observing those around me.

There's a lot of judging other people by personal standards/goals.

Some people might like being the SAHP but feel they are under pressure to be more than that. Some people might abhor being the SAHP and desperate to fulfil themselves in other ways.

The point is only you know what's best for you. Reading people's generalisations on boards like this is neither relevant nor helpful.

Reaches for non-judgey pants and puts them back in the ironing basket.

summer there was a thread not long ago about under achieving.

Posters who had shown early promise but who had floundered at tertiary level education or more usually in the work place.

It was very interesting.

Many felt that that they had found academia fairly easy and then failed when things got tough. They'd never been properly challenged beforehand to build up their resilience etc.

Also, lots reported that they left education with lots of certificates but no real idea how to make their work life properly function. They just didn't have those skills.

Indeed the history of education for girls in the UK has for most of history until the last century been about preparing girls for marriage. Wealthier Victorian girls were taught piano playing, a bit of light French and the like whilst their brothers did a lot of classics. In fact my daughter's school North London C was one of the first in the late 1800s to have a proper academic curriculum and that was very risque in its day,

Even today some posh boarding schools which are not academic and are for girls only are still designed for those families where women will marry well and not work and men keep women - a very repellant dynamic to me but succour for the soul of sexists everywhere and pretty much also what those in Saudi and ISIS like for their girls too.

One of my sons sent me this link which is a fascinating programme about the education of girls in 2015 (abroad - not UK)

I switched from a state Grammar to private in sixth form via a full bursary in the 80s and the level of aspiration and expectation was the missing link.
From my Grammar school friends around 20% went on to Uni and became mainly teachers , 1 doctor and 1 engineer.
From private school 90% went to Uni and into high paid careers.
When friends reunited was in its original format I chose to research all the top girls schools by selecting 10 and 15 years after the same year as I had left to see career choices and life stages. Interestingly whilst there were some stellar achievements many had given up working after having children.

JillyR - sadly I have a friend from a monied background here in London whose only expectation is that his daughter currently at a very selective school " marries well"

Frosty, I went to a dreadful comp in the 80s, but one of my university friends went to one of the best independents in the country. A few months ago, I actually asked her what it was like to go to a school like that.

She was really reticent about answering the question, but finally she started to talk. One of the things that really stuck out for me was that their sports options included archery and horse riding.

Overall, what became clear was that her school focused on the application of knowledge in real life and how such knowledge fitted into the grand scheme of civilisation.

In my secondary school French lesson, we were taught to parrot sentences to pass the GCSE; my friend was taught how to speak French to a fluent standard. In art class, we were left to muck about; she was taught how to draw and sketch, and was taken on a water-colour trip to Italy.

In my English class, we read bits of a Shakespeare play. At her school, they read the whole play, a few others in the same genre, put the play on in the school theatre, and looked at the history of drama up to that point. They also put on a Greek tragedy as part of the same package of work, whilst also being taught how to write an effective essay and how to defend a hypothesis.

The upshot of this was that when I started university, it took me the first and second year just to get to the same level of knowledge that she and other privately-educated students had before they even put in a UCAS application. I had to put in a serious amount of work.

Like Jon Snow, I knew nothing.

And something I have noticed in my own profession is the extent to which good public schools teach certain concepts, noticeably that anything is achieveable and you can therefore achieve it if you put your mind to it and find the correct process to achieve it. There is not a lot of self-doubt or self-editing, which is rife amongst my comp-educated friends to this day.

As a very rough example: publicly-educated people tend to assume that what they produce will be good or within the ball-park of "reasonable"; state-educated people tend to assume that what they produce will be shit and it will take a lot of work for it to reach the level of "okay."

Indeed, looking back at my comp education, I can now identify how limiting a lot of the language and attitudes towards the pupils in the school were -- and it still makes me cross. I went to school with a lot of very smart cookies who were let down by the poor ethos and have had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve even half of their potential.

worksallhours

What an amazing contrast you paint. How does it make you feel to see those privately educated peers today or, indeed, to see the current generation of privately educated kids? Do you tend towards inequality or towards aspiration for all?

People's reaction to perceived privilege is interesting. Can it be split into

• I want everyone to have that; or
• I want no-one to have that; or
• I want that.

MN164

Aspiration for all. I would like every child to have access to elite educational experiences, even if only for a few weeks a year.

As for my own feelings ... oh, I don't know. Everyone gets a different life path.

And it is swings and roundabouts. I went to a pretty rough comprehensive and one of the skills I did acquire there was a keen nose for trouble and troublesome people. I can see problems, "incidents" and dodgy sods coming a mile off.

Many of my privately-educated friends did not develop this skill because it was not required at their schools. For one of my privately-educated friends, the absence of the "dodgy sod" identification skill has pretty much ruined her life and left her to an impoverished future ... and the sad thing is that she doesn't even realise what that impoverishment will actually mean because she has no experience of being in such financially-constrained circumstances.

worksallhours, that's exactly what I want for my children in their private school education - that education in a broader sense, the general knowledge, the expanding of the mind, wanting to know why about everything on the planet from the latest huge black hold just found to why flowers are yellow. The GCSEs they are doing this year are almost irrelevant compared to that.

I also notice that divide on mumsnet threads. When I say aim high and women can do very well a load of people keep trotting out - well most of us aren't very bright or the usual line - we all need care home workers. Well yes we do but no need to lower the expectations of your children by suggesting they have some kind of moral duty to pick the lowest paid work there is just because society happens to need people to do that. Aim high. There is nothing particularly special about me that many people could not emulate if they want to do reasonably well.

I went to grammar school and was always made to feel stupid because I wasn't outstanding at anything and my results were often in the bottom quarter of the class. I hated school and dreaded every homework and thought I must be at the wrong school.
When I got to gcses, I was told that if I didn't do well in my mocks then I would only be entered for the lower papers. I was so pissed off that I rushed out and bought Letts revision guides for everything and just studied by myself.
I ended up getting really good grades, went on to a levels, university and then had a City career.
If I hadn't had the attitude I did, I think I may have done really badly. Maybe I would have felt more positive about my abilities and had more confidence if I'd gone to a comp?
Who knows.

"As a very rough example: publicly-educated people tend to assume that what they produce will be good or within the ball-park of "reasonable"; state-educated people tend to assume that what they produce will be shit and it will take a lot of work for it to reach the level of "okay."

That really is an extraordinary statement- can you back it up at all?

Hakluyt- I totally understand that statement - own current exp is that DC both at top selective london schools starting from Y6 have to present to the class end of unit work. Teacher tells them there is no right or wrong as long as they are able to justify and articulate their reasoning. DC very able to articulate thought processes. So work may not be accurate nor complete but they learn to talk around and highlight the positives. I can now see how at Uni the most self assured ( but not the brightest) were the public school educated. I always felt I had to deliver twice the body of work to compensate for lack of confidence.

MN coming from a disadvantaged background and seeing what real advantage looked like both at Oxbridge and later in work my thought has been I want that for my DC.

I would love every kid to have it. But that ain't gonna happen. So I still want that for my DC.

Oh, I understand it- it's just the idea that a generalization like that can apply to 93% of the population that boggles me!

You quite right it does not apply to 93% of the population, its about 88% of the population. It is those who were educated in real comprehensive's or worse schools that are at a disadvantage in terms of aspiration.

So you genuinely think 88% of the population assume everything they produce is shit??

Hakluyt my understanding would be that if a group has a tendency to something it does n't mean they all do just that the distribution of the group for that characteristic may be skewed in that direction.

I believe that 88% of the population are just doing enough (going through the motions) . This is because they are just getting enough money to get by in life. There are other reasons for this, not just financial reward. 88-90% of the population have come to the realization that it is not going to get any better for them. This is the case financially, emotionally and the fact they are in a career or job that does not mean anything, other than putting food on the table.

On the whole the vast majority of successful people have come from selective schools be those state or private. (we all know exceptions who have beaten the system). These are exceptions , people need except that 88% or so population are producing very ordinary outputs. This has origins from their mediocre educations at Comprehensive schools.

People on this site with their stories of 'mega' successful DC and their own high flying life's and careers are far away from mainstream society.

So the only happy, successful, fulfilled people in the country went to private school?

If you'll forgive me, that really is a ridiculous thing to say.

I did not say that , I said a very high number of the most successful people in the country (including sport excluding Boxing/ Football Though even that is changing) have been educated in selective schools either private or state. State selective schools by the way include the top 50 so called 'comprehensive' schools that select by selection as well as postcode. They are selective schools despite being designated as comprehensive.

There are a tiny few who escaped from inner city comprehensives or secondary modern schools. There were some figures , a while a go showing the percentage figures from different types of schools going on to high flying careers ranging from sport to Medicine to law. The Modern schools produced so few to be invisible, inner city comprehensives were marginally better. Grammar schools and selective comprehensives were Ok . However, the vast number of highly successful people came from Private or the public school systems.

I attended a secondary modern school in the 80's. It was quite odd, I'm here to tell you. We had the deputy head marching about with a cane, fully gowned with his silly mortar board perched on his head, whipping miscreants during lunch.

One day, as punishment for something or other, I was sent to the lowest streamed class for the morning, and it was actually bonkers in there. No teacher even showed up for the whole morning! So a class load of loons were basically bouncing off the walls.

In my final year, as the teachers sunned themselves on their staffroom balcony, some boys got an air gun and took pot-shots at them.

I think in my year about four of us (out of 120 pupils) went to university.

No wonder that everyday, I punch the air that my son has a place at Grammar school.

NC for this. OP, I attended an apparently 'top' private school (in the 80s) which did not instil any 'overflowing confidence and maturity' in me. There was a lot of in-class competition there on a daily basis, 'what marks did you get in that test' kind of discussion -but the goal was just being top of the form not anything more lasting or externally focused.
there was very little discussion of the future or career path or career guidance when I was there (until age 16). There was no sense of competition to get out in the world and take opportunities at work or whatever via by going to a 'good' university. We had none of the extra opportunities mentioned on this thread - exotic trips, exciting work experience placements and outside speakers etc.
My scholarship was only for the senior/secondary school bit of the private school so I left after that expired. I now wonder if it was a bit of a finishing school where they didn't have high expectations or whether I wasn't encouraged in that way, as they somehow saw I wasn't going to 'succeed' or wasn't truly one of 'them' so I wasn't worth their time.

There was the usual mix among the fee paying girls- some shy and some confident, some naturally clever and some not so clever. The ones whose parents had paid their way since the prep schools were in general noticeably hard working but less naturally clever it seemed. The girls on scholarships were in some cases truly amazingly clever (I certainly wasn't in the amazing category) but we were all bullied in different ways in a way the fee paying girls weren't. The school turned a complete blind eye to it.

Yet to get my scholarship to that school, I had to have come in the top 10% of the 11+ entrance exam (I found out recently) so looking back I feel surely they should have tried a bit harder with me?

The local state 6th form college I ended up at for A levels at did send a few people to Oxbridge each year but was overstretched looking back with hindsight. you had to already show extreme hard work and keenness to be invited to join the Oxbridge preparation class . Not having heard about those classes and how that worked (of course it didn't occur to me to ask to join them when I did hear about them) and not having any clue about the difference 'an Oxbridge degree' would make to my future working life (and with no specific career in mind) I mucked about at sixth form, discovered boys and rebelling against my parents, who just continued to be quite uninterested in me.

Even now as an adult I still have no confidence in myself and I suspect am not very mature emotionally - I often feel I lack worldliness which has put me at a disadvantage both at home and work. I am now in my forties and I come across younger people at work very often who are very ordinary in what they produce but who seem to succeed wildly at work in terms of promotion and earnings because they have the confidence and the apparently all important Oxbridge graduate label. They usually also seem fun to be around and not intense and make things look easy- that's their mindset.

However I wonder if it's also about the confident types having had good family support, money and helpful connections on top of the private/public schooling? I had none of the above and my mother was (and is) very sneery about anyone who 'puts themselves forward' for anything. It's been absolutely toxic for my sense of self worth and looking back I feel like I might have achieved more and been a bit happier if I had had more confidence. Having had some years in the private system wasn't enough in my case to make me feel 'good enough' at work. like the PP have said I still feel I have to literally work myself into the ground to produce something I think is not shit but OK. I am a perfectionist I think.

With my DC I try to give them confidence from taking an interest in them and being loving to them to make them feel like they matter. I am trying to tell them it's OK to ask for what they want (or to even allow themselves to want something in the first place- that it could be possible or realistic for them too)

I can't afford private school so I will try to teach them things that matter at school and work like having focus and trying to know yourself enough to know what you want to do and then taking themselves seriously enough to give it a shot. I hope they will not worry too much about taking risks (and maybe not succeeding in the goal) because we are not judging them but supporting them. Then I worry I might be an overbearring pushy mother.