Eton College

Eton is an elite school whose monumental campus and classroom lessons display the World State’s hierarchy in miniature. During John’s visit, the school’s promise of education for future leaders stands beside its students’ laughter at religious suffering, exposing the distance between the values taught within its walls and the traditions they dismiss.

Setting and Reception

John, Bernard, and their party arrive by plane on the roof of Upper School. Across School Yard, Lupton’s Tower rises fifty-two stories; College and the School Community Singery stand to one side, and a chrome-steel statue of Our Ford occupies the quadrangle’s centre. The scale and carefully arranged institutions give the school the aspect of a self-contained civic order, with Ford’s image presiding over its old-fashioned ceremonial architecture.

Dr. Gaffney, the Provost, and Miss Keate, the Head Mistress, greet the visitors as they step from the plane. The Savage asks whether the school has many twins, apprehensive about what the sight might mean. The Provost explains that Eton is reserved exclusively for upper-caste boys and girls: its pupils are not produced in batches, but come under the maxim “One egg, one adult.” Individual development, he concedes, makes education more difficult. The school accepts that cost because its pupils will be expected to assume responsibilities and handle emergencies.

Lessons and Social Order

Eton’s distinction from the mass-produced population is also marked by its reproductive policy. Miss Keate explains that most girls are freemartins and that she is one herself; about eight hundred unsterilized girls require regular Malthusian drills. The lesson, called from a corridor in a ringing soprano, makes reproductive control part of the school’s everyday discipline, even among the privileged pupils destined for leadership.

In the Beta-Minus geography room, the Savage learns the official definition of a savage reservation: a place left uncivilized because its climate, geology, or natural resources do not justify the expense of doing otherwise. The definition turns cultural difference into a calculation of utility. Its detached language frames the inhabitants of the reservations not as peoples with histories and beliefs, but as places that have failed a cost-benefit test.

The classroom then makes that abstraction into a spectacle. A film shows the Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, confessing before Jesus on the Cross and the eagle image of Pookong, then beating themselves with knotted whips. The young Etonians laugh so loudly that their laughter drowns out the recorded groans. When the Savage asks why, the Provost treats the answer as self-evident: the scene is funny. Eton thus teaches more than geography; it trains its pupils to meet unfamiliar religious devotion with amusement rather than comprehension.

The School as a Model of the World State

The school’s reserved status and its instruction reveal a tension at the heart of its elite education. Its pupils are given a more individual form of development precisely because they are expected to bear responsibility, while the society surrounding them depends on engineered uniformity and tightly managed reproduction. Eton preserves single births for its upper-caste students but still subjects girls to the state’s reproductive discipline. The difference is not freedom from social control; it is a distinction in how that control is applied.

The contrast between the Provost’s solemn account of responsibility and his broad grin at the film’s scenes of penitence sharpens the school’s significance. Eton prepares its pupils to manage the World State, yet its lesson in cultural difference reduces suffering to a joke. Its imposing tower, community institutions, and statue of Our Ford give stability a monumental face; the classroom shows the intolerance and instrumental thinking beneath it.