Winchester College
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Winchester College is the archetypal English public school. It's the oldest continuously-existing school in the world, and has the oldest school room in the world (7th chamber). It started off about nine hundred years ago, founded by William of Wykeham, who was a rich, religious bloke. He built College, which is the core of the school, specifically for people who were clever but couldn't afford to be educated by monks like the more well-off. It still operates like that today, but now you can still get in even if you're rolling in it if you're clever enough, and you only have to pay half. Over the centuries it's expanded. Now there are two churches, a whole big complex of classrooms, two cloisters, endless playing fields, an art school, two music schools, a wood and metalwork place, a PE centre, a theatre, two streets of houses where the teachers live, and ten more big buildings where people paying full price can go and live. These people, called, snobbishly, 'commoners', make up 600 of the schools 670 pupils.
The school has its own vocabulary and its own game. The vocabulary is pretty dull: 'dons' for 'teachers', 'handing up' for 'handing in', 'hour' for 'lesson', 'gallery' or 'chamber' for 'dormitory', stuff like that. The game is a combination of football and rugby with the worst bits of booth.
The school has many things to recommend it. The facilities are some of the best in the country, and the teaching is some of the best in the world, as shown by the massive proportion of people who get good places at universities. Pupils have a lot of freedom, and they can even do things like put on their own plays or their own concerts. There's a very strong school spirit. There are lots of nice people.
The school also has many things not to recommend it. A lot of the houses, College especially (hardly having been upgraded since it was built) are pretty dilapidated. Many of the teachers are total incompetents. Drugs, alcohol, smoking, theft, and underage homosexual sex are all worryingly rife, especially in College. There's a lot of intellectual snobbery and arrogance: everyone, even the 'dons', feel we're so clever we don't need to do GSCEs, and so we get awful grades, and even at A-level people are so convinced of their own perfection they do badly. It works the other way as well: people in College are almost universally hated for having done well at an exam, even though a lot of them are nice people. Apart from that, housemasters, many of them frighteningly irrational, have far too much control of the lives of the pupils.
Winchester is a horrendous place, but it's still not too bad as boarding public-schools go.
The school has its own vocabulary and its own game. The vocabulary is pretty dull: 'dons' for 'teachers', 'handing up' for 'handing in', 'hour' for 'lesson', 'gallery' or 'chamber' for 'dormitory', stuff like that. The game is a combination of football and rugby with the worst bits of booth.
The school has many things to recommend it. The facilities are some of the best in the country, and the teaching is some of the best in the world, as shown by the massive proportion of people who get good places at universities. Pupils have a lot of freedom, and they can even do things like put on their own plays or their own concerts. There's a very strong school spirit. There are lots of nice people.
The school also has many things not to recommend it. A lot of the houses, College especially (hardly having been upgraded since it was built) are pretty dilapidated. Many of the teachers are total incompetents. Drugs, alcohol, smoking, theft, and underage homosexual sex are all worryingly rife, especially in College. There's a lot of intellectual snobbery and arrogance: everyone, even the 'dons', feel we're so clever we don't need to do GSCEs, and so we get awful grades, and even at A-level people are so convinced of their own perfection they do badly. It works the other way as well: people in College are almost universally hated for having done well at an exam, even though a lot of them are nice people. Apart from that, housemasters, many of them frighteningly irrational, have far too much control of the lives of the pupils.
Winchester is a horrendous place, but it's still not too bad as boarding public-schools go.
