Tally-ho, chums, it’s open season on rich white men! Grab a musket and ready the hounds. You’re under attack from clickbait-seeking journalists armed with “tantalising memetic cliches”, and you now have permission to shoot on sight.

Before you head out, lads, can I suggest you fortify your reserves with a quick perusal of The King’s School Institute’s journal Leader? I wholeheartedly commend it to you. Issue 01, volume 01 is a ripping read, all 144 pages of it. (In the interests of full disclosure, I confess I might have skimmed over some of them last night. I got waylaid by a contumelious five-year-old demanding honey on his fish fingers.)

The King’s School’s headmaster Tony GeorgeCredit: Sydney Morning Herald Getty Wolter Peeters

I did, however, enjoy slogging my way through the six-page “call to empathy” from The King’s School headmaster Tony George, which cited everyone from the Apostle Paul to Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, whose work I plan to familiarise myself with after I finish binning the honey barramundi.

Back to Tony George, though. In his wide-ranging essay, he canvassed the need to aspire to “the formation of men who are empathetic leaders”, but then moved adroitly to a spirited excoriation of “sections of government and the press [who] seem intent on deriding independent boys schools …[while] invariably referencing the kind of clickbait memes that tantalise memetic cliches”.

In addition, the head of the $43,560-a-year private school fumed, these poison pen-wielding populists focus far too much on the price of school fees (sorry Tony, it just slipped out, I swear).

It’s hard to argue with the crux of his thesis, that the world needs more kindness. But as a call to “empathetic leadership”, it reads more like a thinking man’s raspberry to any journalist with the temerity to report private school-related matters of no public interest whatsoever, which presumably include his 2022 plan to build a plunge pool at The King’s School’s headmaster’s residence.

And let’s certainly not revisit the other tabloid beat-up that resulted after he signed off on four business-class flights to the UK so he and his deputy and their spouses could watch the Royal Henley Regatta. Would someone please call the Anti-Discrimination Commission? White privileged males are under attack again.

Where George’s argument comes unstuck, in this clickbait-chasing, private school fee-paying scribe’s view, is that much of the newsworthiness of private schools emanates from the culture of the institutions themselves. There was nothing tantalising about the Four Corners episode two weeks ago, which aired allegations of a sexual assault at Cranbrook School in Bellevue Hill. Other reports in recent years, detailing shocking behaviour from students at other independent schools across Sydney, have also formed the basis for similarly dreadful headlines.