Some schools prepare children for the world. Eton College has been preparing children for the world and then handing it to them since 1440, which is the year Henry VI founded it to educate the poor and which it has since reinterpreted as a mandate to educate 20 Prime Ministers, a rotating share of every British Cabinet, the King himself, and starting September, the 13-year-old who will eventually be the King after him.
Kensington Palace confirmed this week that Prince George will enrol at Eton in September. According to GB News, he will reside at Manor House, the same accommodation where William and Harry both lived, which means the Manor House has now housed a future King, a Duke of Sussex, and will shortly house a third consecutive member of the same family, all within living memory, all at fees that currently stand at 63,000 pounds per year. The fees are not incidental. Eton’s theory of education has always included the fee level as a feature rather than a condition, because the fee level produces the enrollment mix, and the enrollment mix produces the old boys’ network, and the network produces the 20 Prime Ministers, and the Prime Ministers produce the conditions under which the school continues to charge 63,000 pounds. It is a very efficient system if you entered it on the right side.
William flourished at Eton, per GB News, sat 12 GCSEs, completed three A-Levels, and integrated into the school’s social fabric with the ease of a man who was accompanied everywhere by security and still managed to seem relatable. Harry attended the same house, the same school, the same institution, and then spent the following 25 years describing the experience in increasing detail across court filings, documentaries, authorized biographies, unauthorized biographies, and a memoir called Spare that sold 1.4 million copies in its first week and devoted considerable attention to what happened in and around the Manor House that George is now moving into. The housemaster has presumably read it. Whether they have prepared talking points is unclear.
Charlotte and Louis attend Lambrook, where they have also attended alongside their cousins and where several generations of Middletons preceded them, because the alternative to generational educational privilege is not available to people who cannot access it.
When the school that produced 20 Prime Ministers enrolls the future King in the same house where his memoir-writing uncle lived, what exactly are they teaching him that the last two generations didn’t already know?
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