How the other half lives
It’s not often an article on the newspaper comment pages leaves you feeling cheerful, but there was a great example in Friday’s FT (http://tinyurl.com/5uchfj) called “A parent’s lesson on public school study leave”. (You have to register to view the article.)

The writer, Jane Owen, was complaining about her eldest child’s boarding school. She begins by saying she has just paid £9000 for her eldest child’s summer term at boarding school. That, for those of you who aren’t so hot at maths, is £27,000 a year.

So we’re already aware that this is going to be a different order of complaint from the ones that most of us engage in: petrol prices are too high, Sainsbury’s was right out of cauliflower, the bus was 20 minutes late, etc.

Then we get to the actual complaint. Having paid £9,000 for what is presumably a standard term of 10 to 12 weeks (that’s nearly a £1000 a week for those of you at the back), the writer finds that the school has decided to send her child home part-way through the term for “study leave”. So the very thing the school is being paid to do (namely house, feed and educate her child), it is refusing to do.

What takes this beyond the realm of the ordinary is her response. Instead of hitting the roof as most of us might do, she consults a friend who suggests asking for a rebate on the fee. “Wrestling with loyalty and gratitude to [the] school, on one hand, and a feeling of having been bamboozled, on the other”, Ms Owen writes to the school asking for a discount – which, naturally, they refuse.

Now don’t you just love that? “Loyalty and gratitude?” “Bamboozled?” Here is an institution that, to the dispassionate observer is clearly a) absolving itself of its responsibilities b) engaged in a massive scam to rip off its customers. No-one in their right mind, you feel, would put up with this kind of treatment – least of all, you would think, the well-off, articulate middle classes. And yet here she is, our writer, feeling nothing more, it would seem, than mild indignation.

I came away with that same glow of self-satisfaction you get from doing an IQ test and discovering you’re in the top two percent of the population. Not only does the state education system allow me to keep my spare £27,000 to myself (supposing I had a spare £27,000) but it even manages to educate my daughter for the length of time it’s agreed to. Result.