It is a conceit of most English public schools that they don't allow vacuum cleaners on the premises. The reasoning is that vacuum cleaners weren't around when the schools were founded and they managed just fine without them. Today's privileged (monetarily; emotionally they are, to a man, infested) are taught to do without until they go home for the holidays.
If the schools simply forwent carpeting, the consequences would be minimal. Public schools are built upon the ethos that you must break people down in order to build them up. Public schools are built upon the ethos that only those who didn't break down deserve to be built up. There are carpets as far as the eye can see as long as the eye doesn't look out of a window. There are people ruined.
On admission to whichever school they can afford, pupils are given a cricket box and a small piece of card with an array of variously sized holes. Once a week the school is to be cleaned from top to bottom. Cleaners do most of it, but the pupils are to do the carpets wielding only their box and card. The box is worn in the traditional manner, and the card is placed flat on the carpet and dragged along. This agitates the dust in the carpet fibres, and sends it up through the holes in the card, the intention being that it settles on the card's unholes. It doesn't work very well.
Any dust that remains on the card is to be stored in the box. Some years ago, fat, sweaty, mud-producing boys were beaten until they were thin and dared not sweat. This no longer happens. (They get them elsewhere though). Sweating on the collected dust is now not possible due to the plastic underpants that must be worn whilst collecting the dust. Their introduction was not designed to protect the sweaty, but to avoid lawsuits. The possibly apocryphal story is that in the days before plastic underpants betwixt box and balls, one boy, trying desperately to fit in with the overriding atmosphere of the perverse end of homosexuality, licked all the boxes that had been worn by his dorm-mates that day. He had an asthma attack so severe that he could barely finish his onanistic duties before passing out.
Traditionalists were up in arms about the use of plastic underpants. "What next," they wondered. "Vacuum cleaners?" They were invited to pay for all ensuing out of court settlements. For a while they paid, but the jumble sales soon became tiresome to all. Plastic underpants became required, but had to be provided by the pupils themselves, as a sop to those who objected.
When raised to view vacuuming as disallowed, and also have all desire to clean carpets by other means wiped out due to cruel excess, is it any wonder that ex-public schoolboys either have dirty houses, or hire cleaners to keep their houses clean and ride the scorn for doing what they won't?