The Education of the Next Generation
The education of the principal's children and grandchildren is a matter of considerable consequence, deserving the same attention as any major estate decision.
Few decisions a principal makes will shape the life of their family more profoundly than the choices made about the education of the next generation. The selection of schools, the engagement of tutors, and the decision whether and where to study abroad are all significant. So too is the private but no less consequential question of how family values are passed on alongside the formal curriculum. These matters deserve the same careful attention as any decision concerning the principal's estate or business affairs. They are too often delegated, in our experience, to spouses, to schools' admissions departments, or to the inertia of family tradition.
Before a single school is chosen, the family must, in our view, address a prior question: what the education is for. The honest answer varies considerably from family to family. For some, the priority is academic distinction and the opening of doors to the most demanding institutions of higher learning. For others, it is the cultivation of character: a young person who is at ease in any company, a competent linguist, a thoughtful host, capable of carrying the family's name into the world without strain. For others still, it is the preparation of a successor to a particular enterprise, requiring exposures and disciplines which standard curricula do not provide.
These priorities are not mutually exclusive, but they are not equally served by every institution. A family that has not articulated, between themselves, what they hope the education to achieve will find it considerably more difficult to choose between institutions. All of them speak persuasively about a great many virtues at once.
Schools, like other institutions, have reputations that lag, sometimes by a generation, the realities they describe. A school which was excellent in the principal's own time may be excellent still. It may also have changed in ways which an old boy or old girl is unlikely to perceive on a brief return visit. We strongly counsel that decisions about a child's education should rest principally on what the school is now. This reality must be observed in detail and at length, not on what it once was, or on what it presents itself to be in its published materials.
That means visiting properly. It means speaking to current pupils and to recent leavers. It means asking specific questions about pastoral care, the quality of teaching in the subjects the child cares about, and the culture of the year group the child would enter. A serious enquiry of this kind, undertaken by a parent or by a competent advisor, will reveal far more than the most polished open day.
A child remembers the teachers who knew them. The institution's reputation, however considerable, is no substitute for that single fact.
Alongside formal schooling is the unspoken curriculum which the family conveys at home. The languages spoken at the dinner table; the subjects the principal discusses freely with the children; the friends the family entertains; the journeys undertaken together. All of these contribute to the education of the next generation in ways which no school can replicate. Where the family takes this aspect seriously, and supplements it with thoughtfully chosen private tutors in the subjects which most matter to them, the result is a young person whose education has a coherence that formal schooling alone cannot produce. This is, we would respectfully suggest, the form of education which the most distinguished families have always discreetly provided. It deserves to be weighed alongside, and not after, the choice of school.
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