Eton’s Ethically Equivocal Entrance Exam Essay

A statue commemorating King Henry VI’s role as founder of Eton College. Photo taken by Michael Kraft, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

We’ve freshly addressed issues of moral fitness to hold power over others here in these United States. So as one will do, I think of Mother England. Okay, not really. But seriously, I do think about leadership relatively often, what good leadership looks like, what bad leadership looks like, why bad leaders make the decisions they do.

Back in 1441, Henry VI ordered that a school be founded to educate up to seventy “poor boys” a year at Crown expense. Today that school is called Eton College, and it’s debatably the world’s most famous institution of secondary education. Twenty of the last sixty of Britain’s Prime Ministers were educated there. Eton has yet to integrate women,¹ and the young men who attend Eton live there seven days a week (although of course their families can and do come to visit). Hogwarts for politics nerds!²

A while back, I stumbled across a news item that this was one of the questions on a recent Eton entrance exam:

The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol becasue of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protestors have attached public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the Government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped by 25 protestors have been killed by the Army. You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the army against violent protestors was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.

It’s weird to think that this would be a significant part of how the most prestigious high school in the English-speaking world would choose to test a 12-year-old’s abilities as a writer. “Imagine you’re the Prime Minister…” is a very fine beginning, I suppose. And I don’t have a problem with giving intelligent 12-year-olds a very challenging question as part of an exam to gain entrance into a prestigious school. But “…and now your job is to explain away something super morally questionable”?

That question conveys a message to a young person who is asked to respond to it. Specifically, a young person who the school’s teachers have to be aware has a much higher than baseline chance of actually being Prime Minister in 2040. And even if no one who found himself tasked with writing this essay does wind up in a position of high public responsibility, I’m still kind of queasy about the implication that this is an important life skill for which a student’s aptitude will be measured and, presumably, developed throughout the school’s curriculum.

A part of me hopes a decent number of those essays ended with phrases like, “…and so because those incidents happened under my custodianship of the Government, I must take responsibility for them, and I offer the Monarch my resignation as Prime Minister. Thank you all for the opportunity to serve, and may the families of the fallen find comfort and solace.” But I wonder if enough 12-year-olds would see that as a viable option, or fear that doing so would fail the assignment: that would require a rather high degree of moral courage faced with a rather high amount of real-world risk. Easier to just complete the essay as given, offer a justification for the peacetime deployment of the military within the civilian population and resulting deaths.

Okay, maybe you don’t need to resign to pass the test here. But I do hope that what the instructors were looking for was: “Will the student take moral responsibility as a leader for this? If so, how?” I wonder how many of the students passed this facet of the exam, and how many simply completed the assignment as given. Again, it seems a lot to ask of a 12-year-old under high pressure to gain entrance to a prestigious school.

I wonder how many people aspiring to positions of political leadership would feel morally bothered by being asked such a question. How many there are who realize that they seek a position in which they will be confronted by such moral questions, and of those, how many will have thought of answers to them, and of them, how many will stick to those answers when they are inevitably confronted with an awful reality. Leadership, and particularly high level political leadership, will involve making choices whose price will surely be paid in tears, if not in blood. I doubt anyone here needs any reminders of why this is a point upon which I choose to meditate regarding immediate, American political choices, but I also hope to inspire some thought about how a future generation of leaders are being educated, not only here but globally.

1. And in this American’s opinion it looks well past high time it do so, or establish an equivalent parallel school for young women. If Eton is going to continue to educate one-third of all of the UK’s Prime Ministers, it ought take note that in one-third of the past 45 years, the UK had a female PM.
2. Who happen to be male. In mitigation, Eton does “partner” with several prestigious co-educational secondary schools.