The headmaster of a leading private school has compared the rise in Oxbridge admissions among state-educated pupils to the policies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Anthony Wallersteiner, head of Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, told The Times that parents of his students are complaining about “social engineering” edging their children out of places at Oxford and Cambridge.
He said: “There’s a much more concerted effort by [Oxbridge] admissions tutors to drive down the number of places given to independent schools and redress the balance and to put in contextual details.”
Wallersteiner then went on to claim criticism of private schools had become “a micro-industry” that “echo[s] the conspiratorial language of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
He added: “It was relatively easy for Hitler and his henchmen to suggest that the Jewish minority was over-represented in key professions: medicine, law, teaching and the creative industries.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabricated booklet published in 1903 that purported to lay out a Jewish plot for world domination.
The Times exposed it as a fraud in 1921 but it was used by the Nazis to stoke anti-Semitism and still has adherents even today.
Wallersteiner’s comments drew swift condemnation on social media.
Last year a report found 42 percent of places at Oxford and Cambridge go to independent school students, even though just 7% of the general population attend a private school.
Boarding fees at Stowe School are £12,697 per term.
Reacting to his comments, a spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism, told the Press Association: “Tasteless Holocaust analogies do not belong in the debate about education in this country.”
He added: “Nazi propaganda against Jews was used to generate public support not only for exclusion from education but also for brutal beatings, boycotts, degradation and eventually the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women and children.”
Eight of the UK’s top schools get as many students into Oxford and Cambridge universities as three-quarters of all schools and colleges put together.
Analysis by social mobility charity The Sutton Trust last year showed just eight schools sent 1,310 pupils to Oxbridge over three years, while over the same period, 2,894 other schools sent just 1,220 students between them.