These constitute an institution which lies at the heart of the british establishment.
The first school was Winchester
College, set up by William
of Wykeham in 1382. Eton College followed somewhat later. They were
greatly expanded in the nineteenth century, when they were substantially
changed. With the advent of a massive Empire, they were transformed to train
and 'anglify' the colonial administration. Perfecting techniques used by
the Janissaries, the off-spring of colonial officers, civil and military,
were uprooted from their place of birth, educated in the mother country
and then recycled to run another part of the Empire, providing a waft and
weave to the colonial structure.
With the collapse of the Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an over
production of this middle-class strata, who in many ways were unfitted to
domestic life in England. Many succumbed to drug addiction and fuelled the
so-called Hippy movement in England. Essentially
degenerate, in that their 'socially useful' role had disappeared, those
which did not completely decompose allowed the ruling class to have a hand
in the counter-culture which was developing at the time. Thus it could be
lead onto safe terrain where the contestation of class power was disipated
in lifestylism.
Currently the have modernised themselves, some even establishing on site
mosques so they can more succesfully attract the offspring of the ruling
class in the middle east generally they have abandonned the outmoded crustiness
which permeated the upper classes from the 1930s through to the 1970s, and
along with Oxbridge constitute a cultural asset offered by the English ruling
class to the recomposition of a homogenous world ruling class.
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