Dusting Off the Old School Ties

By PICO IYER ETON

Forget the 18 Prime Ministers, Wellingtons, Pitts and Walpoles: any school that is the ostensible alma mater of James Bond, Tarzan and Lord Peter Wimsey has clearly made a contribution to the world. And the quirkiness of Eton College ensures that it still seems to belong less to life than to Lewis Carroll fiction. The boys wear coats with tails, the teachers are called beaks, and both parties greet one another on the street by simply raising a single index finger. The prefects who sweep into classrooms, gowns billowing, to summon boys to see the headmaster are known as praepostors (as in preposterous). And at Eton -- and only at Eton -- academic quarters are called halves, making three halves in a school year (though the midpoint of each is "long leave," since half-halves could be mistaken for quarters).

This year Gladstone's "Queen of all the schools of all the world" is marking a significant anniversary: exactly 550 years have passed since Henry VI dreamed up a school just down the road from Windsor Castle to accommodate "25 poor and indigent scholars." And last week's St. Andrew's Day (Nov. 30), the final great red-letter day of the school's anniversary year, was celebrated in typically Etonian style, with a staging of the annual Wall Game, a notorious blood sport in which 20 savage nobles flail and scramble in the mud in what is fittingly known as a "bully." Punching is forbidden, but applying "steady pressure" with one's fist upon a face is warmly encouraged. The poet Shelley was once used as a ball. No goal has been scored since before World War I.

Yet even as many of the school's antics celebrate traditions older than Caxton's printing press, Eton is, behind its ancient walls, steadily redressing itself for a more modern age. Perhaps the most hallowed tradition at Eton is a defiance of all expectations. And during the past 10 years, the school's headmaster, Eric Anderson, and its provost, Lord Charteris of Amisfield, have quietly set about revolutionizing the classic institution from within. Realizing, as Anderson stresses, that Eton must prepare its students for a more international world, it has opened its doors to more and more scholarship students and to boys from Germany, the Soviet Union and Spain. Latin is fading toward obsolescence, while Arabic, Japanese and Swahili are / all on the curriculum. In a sense, the place is drawing closer to its founder's original notion of a truly "public" school. "It is a privileged school," acknowledges Anderson, an energetic and articulate Scotsman from a family of royal kilt makers, "with beautiful buildings in a beautiful setting. But the only justification for privilege is that it should help people develop themselves to the full. We are elitist, but not exclusive. And I'm not ashamed in the least of being elitist. All that means is aiming at the highest standards you can achieve."

Thus Eton today is somewhat like an eagle in penguin's clothing. The Victorian morning dress that fashion-conscious boys once chose for the school uniform is still worn to classes, but jeans and ethnic shirts are increasingly common outside of them. Those who do not wish to win the Battle of Waterloo -- and lose limbs, mind and nerve -- on the playing fields can perform social service instead, teaching English to immigrant children or reading to the handicapped. And one recent Sunday evening, the red brick classrooms along the crooked streets were buzzing with students chatting over their terminals and the staccato music of computer printers.

Though classes at Eton are still known as "divisions," they are less and less reflections of class division. The school has, of course, its share of Bertie Woosters, but many of its students are rarely idle and hardly rich: 250 of the 1,270 boys have part of their fees paid by the school. Both fagging, whereby younger boys had to dance attention on their elders, and flogging are gone, as are some of the other fabled barbarisms that may have encouraged two of the school's alumni to fashion the most chilling dystopias of the century in Brave New World and 1984. Veteran teachers rhapsodize about a kind of Golden Age of liberality and modernity: of the 56 students taking the Oxford Entrance Examinations last month, 18 were specialists in natural sciences (as against five in classics). There is even a martial-arts room in the new Olympic-standard gym -- to toughen, no doubt, the fiber of future powers on and off the Wall.

Those kinds of facilities, in addition to the school's more august holdings (it has a Gutenberg Bible and a garden donated by the King of Siam), help give Eton more the air of a university than a high school. That impression is intensified by the precocious self-possession of its students, who seem to have nothing teenage about them, maturing overnight from short pants into three-piece suits. Recent issues of the Eton College Chronicle, the boys' magazine, feature long articles on perestroika, detailed surveys of Malawi, rhymed quatrains about Salman Rushdie. Boys put on plays by Ken Kesey and Lope de Vega, flock to a newly formed Green Society, gather to discuss the biological causes of altruism. They also enjoy unusual access to the world: in the midst of Conservative Party turmoil, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, a devoted Old Etonian remembered for his play along the Wall, was scheduled to come down to the school to address its political society. In some ways, in fact, there is almost an embarrassment of extracurricular riches. "The school needs to be more sympathetic to the personal psychology of adolescent boys, and give them time to simply think," wrote one adolescent boy in answer to a questionnaire about the use of students' time.

It is that kind of impish self-assurance that makes the school's enemies see red. It is not that the best-qualified students go to Eton, they charge, but that going to Eton is the best qualification for success: as recently as 1960, fully one-fifth of all Conservative Members of Parliament were Old Etonians (imagine 60 Republican Congressmen coming from a single high school). The school's defenders retaliate by pointing out that its distinctive features -- every boy has a room of his own and attends regular tutorials, known as Private Business -- ensure that it will continue to produce as many renegades as rulers. The only Etonian orthodoxy is unorthodoxy. Yes, there are still names on the school lists like Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, and the names of sons of foreign rulers, but there are also, no doubt, future Guy Burgesses, George Orwells and other eccentric mavericks. One of the proudest and most legendary of all Old Etonians, after all, was known as Captain Hook.