God Harry always creeped me out a bit. I reminded me of the wealthy "hooray Henries" that my brothers went to school with. My brothers went to "Public School" which in England means exclusive private school for those of you not in the UK. We were not that sort of family and I was sent to the local state, bog standard Comprehensive, because, you know girls dont really need an education ....
The school was full of very wealthy, entitled jerks who thought that they had an absolute divine right to their wealth. standard of living and that they were inherently superior. They were born to be in charge (actually heard the Headmaster say this at "Speech Day" prizegiving). So they would take their driving tests on their 17th birthday (learned to drive on daddy's estate), mummy and daddy would buy cars, flats, fully fund gap years abroad, skiing and Uni and then provide contacts for jobs. But in private their would be scathing about "poor" people wanting a living wage and pretended not to understand why it was harder to find a job in the dying pit and steel towns of the North. One guy saw no irony in saying this stuff but then failed all of his Alevels because of partying - but of course *he* had daddy's contacts so within a couple of days he had a job in banking in the city.
I have A LOT to say about all this rank iniquity.
Don't worry, I won't! (I've it that countless times in appropriate venues.)
Just to say that I've had a lot to do with both public and state schools in my working life.
Perhaps the strongest impression I formed was that money/ability to pay for schooling is not necessarily or even perhaps fundamentally the determinant of 'being in charge'. A surprising number of capable children get scholarships to public schools, as determined by the entrance exam that all children must take.
As I see it and saw it in action, it's the way each system treats the pupils.
Generally, public schools imbue their pupils with aspirations and entitlement, they're treated with respect and with appreciation of their individuality which is encouraged. There is the strong expectation that pupils will take up interesting pursuits, and consider leadership careers. Discipline and orderliness, calmly and firmly applied, is a sine qua non.
In state schools, generally, pupils are more likely to be less favoured. Discipline is too often a set of rules which gets updated every year and applied ad hoc. I've come away almost in tears from meetings with management because of the way they'd speak about their pupils and would leap to apply heavy sanctions for a minor infraction that would be dealt with in a far more respectful, proportionate way in a public school. Low respect for an individual's needs and personality in comparison. Expectations are too often mediocre to grim. Too many pupils are silo'd as unteachable when individual attention would be the remedy. In other words, the state system is structured to provide the worker drones for the public schoolers to be in charge of.
I apologise profoundly to the state school teachers reading this. I've done my best to keep you (and politics) out of this very broad brush depiction. I know how hard it is to work in this system, Accountability lies with gvts and Whitehall policy makers for their deliberately low expectations and commensurately low resourcing - the country needs lots of low paid worker drones apparently.