The private school stranglehold over the arts must stop

Spend long enough at this university and you’ll pretty soon overhear some ale-swilling hooray in the corner of the Wadham Room loudly proclaiming his unwanted opinions on the nature of class and education. They’ll be hackneyed and utterly lacking in imagination, not least because it’s a topic that has already been given a good thrashing earlier this year by a “classist gimp” MP and a warbling has-been.

But vulgar though this may be, I’ll persevere, quixotic in the hope that maybe some value can be eked from it.

The proportion of privately educated kids at Oxford is disgusting. And the prominence of privately educated kids across the arts at Oxford is downright astounding.

Every single cultural bastion at this university is dominated by the ruddy-cheeked darlings of the Home Counties, whose parents chose to send them to fee-paying schools.

From the O’Reilly to The Isis, Dot’s Funk Odyssey to Bloody Knuckles (though the latter is probably scraping the barrel a bit), the wily pilgrims of the privately educated class – which represents only 7% of the population – have infiltrated and set up shop.

I’m not advocating a Kristallnacht-esque reclaiming of culture in Oxford, because this isn’t a cheap, below-the-belt pop at the people who were lucky enough to go to fee paying schools. The amount of time and funding given over to artistic pursuits, the quality of the facilities and the culture of extra-curricular enterprise, will all, typically, be significantly greater and better in the private sector, and fundamentally the question boils down to the relationship between commercialism and education in Britain.

But I’m not on the verge of a Marxist tirade. Because the relative disparity in the nurturing of creative talent in the state and private sectors tells only half the story. The most real and immediate enemy to an artistic community based on merit rather than background is the pervasive culture of cronyism that stalks the cloisters and cobbled streets of this town.

Go to a school like Eton or Westminster and you can guarantee that seventy of eighty people from your year will also be here. So what? Doesn’t mean that they’re all going to go and form some all-singing, all-dancing, Von Trap cabaret show, does it? Very true, but what it does mean is that when a creative production of any sort is put on by a former private school student, they will inevitably select their former school chums (who, let’s face it, are probably closer to them after five or seven years at school) to give them a hand.

I’ve been to see plays in which not a single member of the cast was educated by the state. And why? Because when someone who didn’t pay for their education goes into to the audition room to stand before a director, who was just finishing telling the stage manager the story of how the producer had once climbed up the chapel roof at the school they were all at together, chances are that it won’t be their best performance.

Really it comes down to the confidence that a private education affords you. And not in a gung-ho, Rule Britannia, “empire-builders of the future” sort of way. Simply for the fact that, for a privately educated member of this university who wants to produce something within the zone of artistic interest, the sheer number of friends and acquaintances garnered through a lifelong subscription to the independent schools club immediately gives them an audience.

I should reiterate that this isn’t a whinge intended to decry the evils of the privately-schooled population of Oxford. Anyone that sticks their neck out with the intention to create or add to the creative community should be heartily commended, no matter where they went to school. As one great social philosopher, who spoke at the Oxford Guild last term, said, “we’re all creatives here, we’re all born artists”, and we shouldn’t cower in the shadows “for fear that someone might laugh at our ideas.”

But be in no doubt, there is something fundamentally rotten in the iniquitous way “culture” is manufactured at this university. And maybe James Blunt would call me a “classist gimp” too. But he’d be wrong. Because unlike in the wider world, in the sheltered, fuzzy warmth of the Oxford microcosm, this isn’t a question of class, and nor is it really a question of privilege. It’s a question of self-satisfied exclusion-ism – the formation of artistic circles based on pre-existing friendships, rather than on talent and worth. And the delicious irony in all this (which I’ll point out before one of the comment-box warriors beats me to it) is that the very author of this piece, a so-called Tab “culture writer”, may also count himself as one of those who paid to be educated. But as former alcoholics will tell you, recognition is the first step to recovery. So take note.