One of the reasons my kids are so eternally grateful to the head teacher of their primary school was that he expected his pupils to excel, no matter what the opposition. When we took chess teams to National Championships, he actually told them that not only did he want them to "beat the posh kids" but that he wanted them to make them cry.
Do you think instilling that kind of prejudice at such a young age is a good thing?
Thank you Rapples for making that point. If I found that a headmaster was encouraging bullying based on who a child's parents are, I would be appalled.
And yes, I was bullied for being "posh" - because I didn't live on the council estate next to school, like many other kids!
Kids cry when they lose games of chess: I've seen grown men cry when they lose games of chess. They cry when they have been given an unreasonable expectation of their entitlement to something. It's a hard game and there's no escaping the fact that, if you lose, on that occasion your opponent was better than you.
If you are brought up, as many privately-educated kids are, to expect everything on a plate, it comes as a nasty shock when it doesn't happen, especially when it's your supposed inferiors who dish it out to you.
It's nothing whatever to do with bullying.
I think that's a bit harsh on the public school kids. Yes, children cry when they lose, but to say it's mere sense of entitlement is to lose a lot of the background there.
Kids at private school - as I know, having been to one, as ESL has kindly pointed out - don't have as much of a sense of entitlement as you suggest. (Possibly at Eton / Rugby / Harrow, but not at places like the one I went to.) Yes, the parents have to pay, but they don't just push the money in like a parking meter and leave the kids doing nothing.
To get in, you pass some hideously difficult exams (our 11+ paper was based on a GCSE text). If you are willing to work hard enough, there are amazing opportunities there - peripatetic music lessons, a huge art lab, playing fields for miles, drama clubs, teachers who are always willing to spend morning break going over work with you. It's an atmosphere in which it's difficult
nott to learn.
But within that hothouse environment, you don't often fail. When you have that much input from parents and teachers, and a classroom full of other kids who are (secretly) keen to learn, you DO get through the 11+ and you DO get brilliant GCSEs and you DO get the grade 8 music and you DO get the sports medals and you DO get good A levels and you DO get your top UCAS place.
You learn that if you just work that bit harder, you can achieve anything.
And then you enter the real world and you're not competing against thirty other kids, there are six billion adults in the world and you cannot, no matter how hard you work, be best any more.
It's not a coincidence that a number of my classmates had a couple of holidays at Rhodes Farm, and almost all of my friends from Oxford have at some stage been provided with Citalopram.
Your little chess players didn't, I suspect, cry because they felt entitled to win, but because losing was synonymous with shame, inadequacy, parental disappointment, and failure. If you're hothoused into winning everything you do, losing is a REALLY big deal.
