A Worthy Apology

Eton College now stands just one apology away from being the first establishment institution to acknowledge that men and women are different.

A bulk of government ministers, media pundits, financiers, royals, and academics simply refer to Eton as “School”—the assumption being that anyone on their hallowed turf must have come from the same crucible of the elite. Located in the shadow of Windsor Castle, the boys-only high school is now at the center of Britain’s gender-war debate. The result will be impossible for the establishment to ignore.

A fall from grace is probably more stressful when covered by the national press—but there is a certain privilege in speaking truth to power at Eton: You at least get your day in court. Once the word went out, it took just hours for Will Knowland’s ex-students to raise the tens of thousands necessary to appeal his dismissal. Some of his ex-pupils were in positions to offer housing to the English teacher and his five children, having left his classroom just a few years earlier.

The whole country can now see Knowland’s lecture, which the school banned from its intranet. The jury is open. What exactly is so offensive about the video that Simon Henderson—Eton’s headmaster—sacked him for gross misconduct? Plambag Canvas Duffle ... Best Price: $22.76 Buy New $32.99 (as of 05:03 UTC - Details)

In summary, the presentation merely reaffirms what any sane person already knows: Men and women are innately different and modern gender theory is a load of rubbish. Are parents really paying the world’s most prestigious school £43,000 a year to teach their children how blue the sky is? No, they’re not. The existential purpose of Knowland’s lecture is to reveal how offensive the traditional view has become in a place where the nation’s elite forge their concept of reality. It is both a wake-up call and a correction for a society that has tactfully avoided offending a radical minority for long enough that they are now in charge.

The hurdle we have to overcome is not mainstream falsehood but the type of censorship that “alternative truths” (let’s be kind) need in order to survive. Let everyone have their ideas, in other words, provided that they don’t shut other people up.

There is nothing new under the sun, of course, but narrations of truth must be updated to correspond with the fads of the era. Though his presentation of the facts is well referenced, Knowland points out that scientific data has been brought to support feminist gender theories, too. So, in describing the differences between the sexes, it is for a teacher of English (rather than biology) to draw on the experience documented by nearly the whole of humanity’s literary output to set the record straight: Men and women are different, carry out different roles, and, for what it is worth, do so because of their innate advantages and limitations. Knowland thus launches himself deep into a “Red Pill” discourse that has been hashing out the relationship between biology and society for almost as long as modern gender theory has been attempting to redefine it.

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