One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that is schooling.
‘So where do your kids go?’ I’ve learned is just as loaded and inescapable a London dinner party question as ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Where are you on Brexit?’
If you choose private, you’d better have a plausible explanation (e.g. ‘We just didn’t want to make our child the social experiment’). And if you choose state, you’d better mention how ‘absolutely brilliant’ the school is, lest anyone think you didn’t put years of thought and research into the decision.
The truth is, as a Canadian, I’m not fussed where my kids go to school. When the time came, I just did what we do in my culture, which is send them to the one around the corner.
This is not because I’m performing a social experiment (although that does sound fun) but because it’s easy and safe and free. Last time I checked, London schools were performing better than the national average. And while we’re not living in Singapore, the UK has a well-functioning education system at both the state and private levels. I care about my kids being decently educated — that’s why I’m bringing them up in London and not, say, Ouagadougou, where according to Zoopla we could get a much bigger house.
But where I live, in a semi-gentrified patch of north-west London, taking a blasé attitude to schooling is tantamount to an extreme form of child neglect. Breeders round here — as in most middle-class enclaves in Britain — seem to assume that all responsible parents should be tied up in knots over the question.
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