What is education for? Ideally it should provide some moral context; what are we otherwise but wolves in clothes, barely deserving of iPads? So it was odd to hear this week from Dr Anthony Seldon – historian, biographer, and the headmaster of Wellington College – on discrimination.

What would he say? I expected some sensible comment, perhaps a murmur that his students, educated at a cost of £31,500 a year, were, to use an old-fashioned word, lucky, or at least privileged. Not so. This was an educator singing in a doleful prison cell; Seldon, the Birdman of Berkshire. "Positive discrimination in favour of state school people has become the hatred that dare not speak its name," he said, stealing Alfred Douglas's desperate line on homosexuality in its age of criminality, of all things.

And what is the nature of this discrimination? After many years of tutoring in the arts of politesse, 62 of Seldon's students are, he judges, clever enough to get into Oxbridge but only a third actually will. (The rest, I presume, will rot on the tills at Costcutter.) How intelligence is concentrated among the affluent! I wonder if Seldon would have the courage to say it to the ghost of Martin Luther King, or to a room of state school students, presumably none of whom are clever enough to make Oxbridge, having not been educated at Wellington. In any case, call privilege discrimination and you cease to be a historian. History denotes context. You become a historical re-enactor in love with the past.

If the masters of England's great public schools are busy forming Self-piteous Anonymous, there are many good candidates for entry. Also this week Frances King, the head of Roedean School (£28,200 a year), who I always thought was an actual hockey stick, announced that she is fed up of feeling like a terrible person, and is flouncing off to the College Alpin International Beau Soleil in Switzerland. (For the Swiss narrative on the inherent benevolence of all money, and how that benevolence increases in direct proportion to the money possessed, apply to Dr Seldon. He knows about history.)

"It is quite hard work to continue to be always on the negative side of public opinion," said King, which makes me wonder if she has ever talked to the unemployed, or the disabled, both victims of a government smear campaign designed to sell the annihilation of the welfare state. I imagine they don't talk about that at Roedean. Public schools sell self-possession, not self-awareness. That could, as George Monbiot has pointed out, be fatal to the project.

In 2011 Vicky Tuck, the head of Cheltenham Ladies' College (£29,421 a year) went the same way, to the International School in Geneva. Sulking in Switzerland seems to be a trend for the blue-stockinged newly oppressed, who have only just thrown off their false consciousness, like a tiara in the mud. I fondly imagine that Tuck and King were both copying Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; he too fled to exile in Switzerland, when he couldn't take the inequality any more.

Tuck's sobbing swansong was that she would not "miss the problem of us having to defend ourselves". She claimed to have been made to feel "slightly immoral". Can she not see the connection between a class-ridden society and a healthy annoyance with it? When did the British public school, historically so dedicated to the repression of emotion, become quite so hysterical? But that is Britain – class-obsessed still, in 2013. Not studying at Oxbridge is, for these creatures, a kind of death.

There was a lone voice of perspective this week from Dr Stephen Spurr, head of Westminster, the "clever" school. He hasn't noticed any discrimination, he says, because he got 89 happy youngsters into Oxbridge this year. But this may just be a dig at "thick" Wellington, which takes us no further on.

These are not revolutionary times; they are reactionary ones. And this reaction, so ambitious in scope, has a novel tick. It seeks, as Seldon showed us, to steal the language of the oppressed. The elite wants everything for itself nowadays, it seems, even the clothes of victimhood. And why not? If you steal your enemy's very language, how can they assault you? What words remain? In 2011 the Tory MP Dominic Raab wrote an idiotic article, saying that it is men, not women, who are discriminated against in modern Britain. The headline was "We must end feminist bigotry". Its statistics were breathtakingly skewed; reading it, you could only wonder what Raab's (Oxbridge) education was for.

Some Christians do the same. For centuries Christianity enjoyed hegemony in Europe; now it shrinks slightly, and some – not all – cry persecution. Of course Christians are persecuted – but not in Britain. So these Christians confuse persecution with the law's refusal to uphold their own bigotry. Language is all.

So here we are – white men, Christians and the very wealthy – all beleaguered, all stamped on, like a pile of suburban Christs. It reminds me of the final scene of the film Les Misérables, in which largely privately educated actors stand on the barricades and wave the Tricolore. That was nonsense too.

Twitter: @TanyaGold1