ABSTRACT
The typical education received by the sons of Britain’s industrialists from the early Victorian period onward-specifically, education at a fee-paying public school and (less often) at one of the two older universities-is at the heart of all variants of the ‘cultural critique’ of British economic decline posited by historians, for here is the actual mechanism of the process of socialisation by which the progeny of hard-nosed, profit-maximising, often self-made industrialists were allegedly transformed into effete and soft-hearted ‘gentlemen’, unfit by outlook, training, or behaviour for the rough-and-tumble world of the factories. Professor Wiener has put the case against the public schools clearly and succinctly:
For all their vaunted independence, the public schools, through new institutions like Headmasters’ Conference, converged on a common model. Despite the absence of state direction, they came to constitute a system, one that separated the next generation of the upper class from the bases of Britain’s world positiontechnology and business.
