Prince and Princess of Wales seen touring Eton with Prince George

Please join me in congratulating Prince George of Wales.

It’s been a big year for the kiddo who has gotten one step closer to the throne, is about to turn 10 and finally managed to palm off all of those blasted faux-Victorian sailor suits onto younger brother Prince Louis. (Why William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales love to dress their children like miserable child extras in a BBC bonnet drama, I do not know).

Also, George has managed to get to this ripe old age of nearly-double digits and to thus far escape the same dreaded fate as his father and grandfather King Charles.

Said in the voice of the Baroness from The Sound of Music … boarding school.

But that could all be about to change with the news that la famille Wales has been spotted touring the famed British public boys’ school Eton, which was founded in 1440 and which has educated 20 of the UK’s prime ministers. (Programming note: The Brits call what we would call private schools public schools).

Today, William and Kate look dangerously like they are about to make a serious George mistake that could cost all three of them dearly.

The British royal family has never been very interested in educating their future Kings and Queens, just ensuring they have enough French to get by and someone has explained the ins and outs of the Magna Carta to them.

Even when the 20th century rolled around, the late Queen was never sent to school. At all.

(She had private tutors and the curriculum was very much designed for a future monarch and a future monarch only).

When little Charles arrived in the world, it was time to do things differently. In 1956 he made history by becoming the first heir to the throne to set foot inside an educational establishment and who was then expected to stay put and learn and something.

First was London’s Hill House School followed by, a year later, the news that the young prince would face the fate of aristocratic kids everywhere – boarding school.

Off he was sent to Cheam where he was lonely and miserable.

(In 1958 Queen Elizabeth, in a letter to the Prime Minister Anthony Eden, as you do, wrote: “Charles is just beginning to dread the return to school next week – so much worse for the second term”).

In 1962, he was then shunted off to Prince Philip’s alma mater Gordonstoun in northern Scotland which he later dubbed “Colditz in kilts”.

Despite being close to the icy North Sea, students wore shorts all year round and were forced to sleep in dormitories where the windows were always kept open. It’s easy to understand why Charles thought of his time there as a “prison sentence”.

(Which only adds credence to novelist Evelyn Waugh’s famous line, “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison”).

When it was his son Prince William’s turn, he and wife Diana, Princess of Wales stuck assiduously to the establishment script and at age eight, the little boy was sent to board at Ludgrove.

In 1995 he started at Eton, with younger brother Prince Harry following in his footsteps.

Even though these days Diana is hailed as the eternally perfect mother who was always ready with big hugs and illicit sweets for her adored sons, remember, she sent them off to essentially live away from home when they were in about the equivalent of Year 2.

All of this is, to modern sensibilities and even to someone who has been to boarding school, unthinkably cold and verging on the cruel.

Thus we get to William and Kate, who, when they became parents, always seemed intent on doing things differently.

In 2017 when George started school it was, gasp, at co-ed Thomas’ Battersea, making him the first future King to get girls’ germs at such a young age.

Last year, the family moved to Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor Estate with the specific aim of putting their three children closer to schools with much bigger grounds and better sporting facilities. Last September, George, Princess Charlotte and Louis all started at Lambrook School.

The bottom line: The Waleses have been busy bucking expectations and the upper crust educational status quo.

Until now.

Now, it looks dangerously like after all this, William and Kate could be about to revert to type and just do what 582 years of titled parents have done, and send their sons off to storied college.

According to the Telegraph, “It is thought likely that the future King will eventually transfer to Eton”.

How bloody disappointing.

Not that I ever thought that George might end up going to the local comprehensive, but the prince and princess following such a depressingly predictable route is exasperating.

William and Kate have long tried to give their three children as normal – cough, “normal” – a childhood as possible, with them having been seen in recent years having a pub lunch, at the supermarket and at a school soccer match.

They have done all of this while also trying to teach their children about their extreme privilege.

“On the school run, we talk about what we see. When we were in London, driving backwards and forwards, we regularly used to see people sitting outside supermarkets and we’d talk about it,” William said in an interview with the Sunday Times last week.

“They [will] grow up knowing that actually, do you know what, some of us are very fortunate, some of us need a little bit of a helping hand, some of us need to do a bit more where we can to help others improve their lives.”

So to go to all of these lengths and then just happily fill out the Eton enrolment forms feels somewhat hypocritical.

I also think it’s doing George a huge disservice and will fail to truly prepare him to be a modern King.

If he does attend Eton, he will be educated surrounded by a very narrow segment of predominantly white teenage boys who will all hail from similarly extremely wealthy backgrounds. (The current fees are $87,000-a-year).

As of 2020, six per cent of Eton’s student body was black, while less than one in five (19 per cent) of boys were black, Asian, and from minority ethnic backgrounds.

What a way to prepare him to be the head of state of a country with such a multicultural, ethnically diverse population.

There are other options open to William and Kate which would be much more in line with their supposed sharing, caring, contemporary ethos.

Take UWC Atlantic College in South Wales. It would be nigh on impossible to find somewhere with better royal pedigree, with King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Princess Raiyah of Jordan both alumni. In the last few years, Princess Leonor of Asturias, the future Queen of Spain, and the next Queen of Belgium, Princess Elisabeth, both graduated as did Princess Alexia of the Netherlands recently. Later this year, Princess Sofia of Spain will start.

Students can take lessons in social justice and climate change. The school also boasts pupils from 80 different countries, who thus likely don’t think diversity means letting in an occasional student with an olive complexion.

William and Kate have a duty to ready George for a lifetime of meeting and working with people from every walk of life and to potentially have a role in the Commonwealth. (The leadership of which does not automatically pass from sovereign to sovereign).

If he does assume some sort of leadership position, it would be in an organisation made up of 56 member countries, which is home to almost one-third of the world’s population, more than half of whom are Hindu and Muslim.

Sending him off to learn to conjugate Latin verbs alongside hedge fund managers’ sons and boys called Hugo and Guy is hardly any sort of real preparation for what lies ahead. It would not expose George to any sort of plurality of experiences, cultures or kids and would trap the prince in a rigid, homogeneous adolescence.

And here’s the most ridiculous part if William and Kate do send George to board at Eton – the school is less than a 20-minute walk from their Windsor home.

What a way to make the Prince and Princess of Wales seem like hands-on modern parents.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.