© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Eton College is arguably one of the most prestigious schools in the world. The England school is credited with teaching 20 out of 56 British prime ministers. On Saturday, journalist and author Sam Bright tweeted about a controversial question that appeared in the school’s King’s Scholarship entrance exam for the year 2011.
The hypothetical question asked the competing students to write a speech while pretending to be UK’s Prime Minister in the year 2040, against the backdrop of civil unrest prompted due to the severe petrol shortage caused by the oil crisis in the Middle East. To control the protests, the government deploys the army which helps bring the rioting under control but leads to the death of 25 protesters within two days. The contestant has to write a PM’s speech for a national broadcast justifying why the army deployment was “both necessary and moral.”
Many netizens found this question insensitive, while some thought it made for a fascinating exercise in critical thinking.
Commenting on Bright’s tweet, a Twitter user wrote, “The worst thing about this to me is that it says ‘The Government has deployed the army’ and ‘You are Prime Minister.’ Meaning, that you are absolved of that decision. But you have to deal with the issue from only an optics/comms view. So much wrong here.” Another Twitter user wrote, “To pass the entrance exam for Eton, students are required to role play as the villain in a ’70’s Judge Dredd comic.”
Back in 2013, when this question first made headlines after the paper was leaked, Tony Little, Eton’s headmaster, justified the question to HuffPost UK and said, “We are looking for candidates who can see both sides of an idea and express them clearly – both directly and through more imaginative writing. High ability candidates at this level are often asked to put themselves in other people’s shoes. In that regard this is no different from a GCSE English question which might ask “Imagine you are Lady Macbeth, write a diary entry to express your feelings on receiving your husband’s letter.”
