On the way to work this morning, I was listening to an NPR article about the Brexit and the rivalry between PM David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson. Both are graduates of Eton, a private boarding school. The school has existed since the 15th Century and has educated many of the United Kingdoms elites throughout history.
How influential has the school and the connections it has built between much of the nobility and gentry on Englands politics and culture been? Did it play much of a role in the development of the English boarding school system that guided much of English culture in the 19th and 20th Century?
Since it hasn’t really been tackled, I thought I’d have a go at this question. I would argue that Eton has been immensely influential in English life although to what extent its influence is based on it being Eton rather than any other public school had Eton not existed remains to be seen. However, it was the place of education for 19 Prime Ministers including Robert Walpole and Gladstone, more than any other school with Harrow its nearest competitor. In the words of Patrick Joyce, “Eton was not just connected to the centres of English/British power, it is and always has been such a centre… a part of the state machinery”.
Eton was felt to be sufficiently important in 1736 to exempt it from the Mortmain Act, along with the universities and Winchester and Westminster Schools. According to Paul Langford, under George II Westminster was considered to be the top school, but under George III Eton became top-dog. Langford attributes this to a combination of ‘the exceptional administrative ability and social influence’ of Edward Barnard, supposedly ‘the Pitt of masters’, and royal patronage - George III’s visit in 1762 is said by Langford to have caused him ‘delight’. In 1802 George declared himself to be ‘anti-westminster’.
J C D Clark argues that in the eighteenth century Eton and Westminster, preeminently, “were playing a distinct social role: preparing their charges to take their place in the aristocratic world of values, by acquaintance with the patrician ideals of classical civilisation, and the practical skills of oratory’. He goes on to argue that England was unique in having a patrician class defined by culture which enshrined the equality of gentlemen. “Nowhere else in Europe was school education as important to the structure of the elite’s code. It was a nineteenth century Lord Willoughby de Brook who said: ‘As is the attitude of the average Englishman to someone who is not an Englishman, so is the attitude of all Etonians to someone who is not an Etonian.’”
According to Patrick Joyce, from 1758 to the 1880s, Eton’s textbook on Latin and Greek grammar predominated and ‘it’s formalism became associated with Toryism and power, uniformity in grammar being associated with uniformity in religion’. Joyce quotes Henry Salt as having said that by the time he left Eton, he had composed 30,000 lines of poetry in imitation of Ovid and Tibilullus, which gives you an indication of what Joyce refers to as the ‘grinding’ in grammar of the boys at the school.
I think probably by the mid 19th Century, Rugby School was paradigmatic of school life, with its emphasis on games, epitomised by the novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). I presume this emphasis extended to Eton too - Robert Tombs quotes the headmaster of a French school visiting in 1870 as having said ‘Boys who learned to command in games were learning to command in India’. This whole notion of ‘playing the game’ appears to cited by many as essential to upper class life in this period. Obviously, Rugby's game rugby has been far more popular than Eton's wall game, which sounds to be incredibly brutal. Joyce argues that these kind of games and the culture of the school contributed to an upper class attitude of emotional detachment when causing harm to others and spends a lot of time arguing that Eton was at the forefront of this.
Eton was also influential in the findings of the Clarendon Commission in 1868, which proposed a hierarchical system of schools, with the top tier of schools modelled on Eton (and eight other elite schools) which were to be mostly boarding, have a classical curriculum and sent boys to universities. Eton remained however the top school, with 81% of the great landowners having attended (1880-99 - dropping to 73% between 1900-19 according to Harold Perkin). Following this its influential on public life may have seen a relative decline with the proportion of Civil Servants having been educated there dropping from 44% in 1880-1899 to 10% for 1920-1939.
All in all, I would suggest that Eton was incredibly important in building the connections between the richest in British society and contributing to a shared culture. Arguably it was at the leading edge of defining the culture of the public schools. However, it has to be taken together with other schools such as Westminster and Rugby in creating this culture, although it appears to have been considered 'the best of the best'.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom_by_education (sorry!)
Patrick Joyce (2013) The State of Freedom, Cambridge: C.U.P.
Paul Langford (1989) A Polite and Commercial People, London: Guild
J C D Clarke (1985) English Society 1688 - 1832, Cambridge: C.U.P.
Robert Tombs (2014) The English and their History, London: Penguin
Harold Perkin (1989) The Rise of Professional Society, London: Routledge
I'm not sure I can answer your first question, but I can at least help flesh out what the question is.
Eton, perhaps more so than any other school, seems to have as part of its remit to help train its pupils for the kind of public service including high political office. (The headmaster said as much in a newspaper interview I read a while back.) It seems successful at this.
However, what's not clear, and would I think be highly disputed, is to what extent Eton pupils are getting to these high positions as a result of their good education, as opposed to through some "old boys network". Owen Jones "The Establishment" argues the latter strongly, but has been critiqued. (But then again, if its thesis is true, you would expect "the establishment" to want to rubbish it.)
The other question is to what extent Eton's education has prepared people for the kind of leadership the UK "needs", or whether when they get into power they shape the country in their own interests. Again clearly you're going to get disputes split along political lines.
Do you have a source for that quote?
The Wikipedia link you provided states that it is a misquote.