A few years ago, I was standing at the bar in a smart gastropub in the exclusive village of Elie in the East Neuk of Fife, when a girl ran in from a game of cricket she had been playing on the beach, to enquire of her mother in a loud voice: “Mummy, what’s the name of the other school in Glasgow?”
In an instant, the city’s wide variety of almost 200 educational establishments had been reduced to two of the largest independent institutions in the city, The High School of Glasgow and Hutchesons’ Grammar School. In the girl’s world and her parents’ worldview, the other schools didn’t exist.
I imagine that if any Edinburgh schoolchildren wake up to receive an edition of their own city’s Monopoly board game on Christmas morning, they may have a similar feeling of deflation as I did in Elie. Unless they attend either Merchiston Castle School or George Watson’s College, that is, as these fee-paying schools are the only two in the city that have made it onto the Monopoly board.
The not-very-subliminal message is that, if it isn’t on the Edinburgh edition, your school isn’t special - and if your school isn’t special, perhaps you’ll think that neither are you. (I’m still waiting for my own former school in the East End of Glasgow to have its own Monopoly, where the “get out of jail free” cards come at a premium.)
I know that in a game promoting cut-throat capitalism I shouldn’t really find it surprising that independent schools should be promoted onto the board above all others. But it is sort of depressing that in a game aimed at children aged 8 and above, they have to be confronted with the realities of the haves and have-nots when they should just be having fun bankrupting their parents.
Still, it is an improvement on Monopoly Empire, where locations were replaced with consumerist brands. Swapping the shabby glamour of Old Kent Road with an advert for a Nerf gun really is the unacceptable face of capitalism. When faced with that dystopian alternative, maybe we should just be happy to have any schools on the board.
Gordon Cairns is a teacher of English in Scotland
