Word: eton
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
EDUCATION: Eton celebrates an anniversary...