There is no one more impossible to reason with than a stupid person who is ignorant of his stupidity. Correction: there is no one more impossible to reason with than a stupid person who is ignorant of his stupidity because it has been disguised by forceful teaching.

Bristol University abounds with such people, the slow-witted but straight-A products of private schools. So does Edinburgh, Newcastle or any university that has been glitter-dusted with social cachet. These people may be good on the rugger fields or useful on the May Ball committee, but in academic terms they are a waste of space. A stupid person, who has been well-taught in the science of passing exams, is inoculated against thinking, immune from picking up new ideas, and a bore for tutors. They add nothing to the life of the mind; the purpose, lest we forget, of university.

They are currently very angry that Bristol wants fewer of them. But the university should not be afraid that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, the bastion of creamy-voiced whining, has declared a boycott, crying foul over alleged discrimination. Rather, Bristol should be glad to shake off its dated image as a drinking den for blazered Sloanes and Alice-banded bimbettes.

Let Bristol go farther to find bright children from state schools, pupils who have been boycotting the place for years, put off by its reputation. A pox on quotas and top-down silliness about targets — but any fool must recognise that a B from a bog-standard is worth an A* from St Cake’s; and any tutor would rather teach a student with untapped potential than some dried-up husk from a hothouse school.

Boo, this is “social engineering”, the headmasters cry. But what is private education other than a 5k-a-term exercise in social engineering? Let’s be clear about why the vast majority of parents who send their children to fee-paying schools do so. Bar the scholarly few or the seriously religious, parents do not send their children private because of an overpowering love of classics, or to suck in that vapoury thing called “ethos”. No, they want to buy their offspring advantage in the marketplace. A natural instinct. But if people choose to do so, that’s their affair, and it should not be up to the State to see that such “investments” pay off.

These parents also want to buy their children a place in life’s pecking order. The unspoken desire is to get the child into the “right” kind of school with “people like us”. The apogee of achievement is to see little Freddie or Eugenie prance, pink-cheeked, across Jennifer’s Diary with some Euro-trash heiress or Viscount Ovenden. Betty Kenward, the first Jennifer, was nothing but a purveyor of social porn, hooking people with lurid peeks at a tinselly world of self-congratulatory snobby social power.

Britain is still crippled by class — whole swaths of life are treated as a form of outdoor relief for the privileged and their progeny: toad-like they squat atop politics, Whitehall, the City, law, big business, the media. Even popular entertainment has been assailed by a legion of Davinas and Johnnies. Britain is ruled by winks and nods, the favouritism and leg-ups of a privately educated mafiosi. We might not be labouring under a caste system: but every nouve soon buys his children’s place in the system. Education should be the way of ending this; let Bristol University do its bit in freeing merit from the deadhand of social apartheid.

If the headmasters’ conference believes it is the victim of class war, then heads and their parents can only blame themselves if their gamble about choosing sides hasn’t paid off. Have no pity — at least they can choose which side of the social divide they live on.

The author’s application to study at Bristol University was rejected in 1991.