on school

…of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, verse 12

Nearly everyone has some experience of school. Usually they’ll have been to at least one, maybe two, maybe many. You might have been a parent, fretting hopelessly as your children went to one. You may have worked in a school, maybe you’ve even been or are a teacher. So you know what schools are, what they’re for; you know what they do and why the do it. At least in part. Do you? Do you really?

I’ve spent most of my life in schools — seven years in primary, six in secondary, two as a cleaner and thirty-eight years as a janny. That’s fifty-three for those of you who didn’t pay attention in arithmetic. That’s a long time, and I’m still unsure what schools are or what they’re for. Shall we attempt a bit of Socratic dialogue?

——So Xenophon, you say that you know what schools are for?

——Indeed Plato, it is to prepare the young adult for his fit place in the world.

——Is there something wrong with your voice? You sound a bit odd.

——No, that’s how I always talk.

——Do schools employ soothsayers then? That they can tell what the young adult will become?

——No, of course not. But all adults properly schooled can live worthy lives.

——And what then is a worthy life?

——One where they may use their talents to good ends.

——Doing what?

——Well, they depends upon the person…

——And what if they don’t have any talents? And what do you mean by good ends?

——They may excel in commerce…

——That’s a good end for them then, to make a lot of money.

——Well, yes.

——Doesn’t really help anybody else though. Besides I don’t remember a course on how to be a shyster…

——That was a mere example. They may enter politics…

——Again the shyster course would have proved useful.

——They may become artists, or craftsmen…

——Or work in shops, or deliver kebabs. A lot of people do that nowadays.

——They learn mathematics.

——Trigonometry? Who ever used trigonometry outside of school?

——You miss the point, what is learnt at school enriches ones life.

——Yes, a knowledge of Euripides must be of great comfort when you’re wiping tables.

——Sod off you fat git.

——Ooooh! Hark at him! With his funny voice…

——Stitch that chubby. A squalid struggle breaks out.

We’ll leave it there. The Greeks have rather let us down. I do think that Plato had the best of the argument — it’s surprisingly hard to come up with an answer to what schools are for. At best you’ll get a lot of airy waffle about learning the basics and teaching the skills needed for adult life. What these basics and skills actually are, beyond reading and writing and some basic maths, is never made very clear. The ability to weigh evidence, the sifting of fact from fiction, the importance of a scientific methodology are often mentioned. Teaching people how to think. Yet I still meet people who believe the royal family are Lizards and that the Holocaust was a hoax.

There are two groups of people who claim to know exactly what schools should be for. Let’s give them names so that we can spot them for the future and so that any mud we throw will stick. We’ll dub then Utilitarians and Moralists. Utilitarians believe that schools should be solely concerned with preparing the young adults for their working lives. So that their future employers won’t have to train them, or pay them decent wages because there’s a glut of them about. Moralists believe that it’s the job of schools to discipline the, naturally evil, young adults and teach them wrong from right; they often disagree on what the details of this wrong and right. Xenophon above would have approved of both of these — the Moralists way being fit for aristocrats, the Utilitarian scheme being just the job for slaves.

In public we’d all agree that all humans have worth. In private Utilitarians aren’t so sure. If you listen closely to their arguments you’ll notice that the education system they’re talking about isn’t meant for their children, just the common ruck. Their children will have a private education. They’re to become the employers, the wealth producers, they will have to know things that you, don’t learn in school and you can’t read in books.

At the bottom of the Moralists code, you’ll often find some god. Not one of the peace and love kind. Young adults need to be brought to know the truth, with crook and flail. Even where these aren’t necessary. Sparing the rod being a good deal less fun than laying it on. They’re more prone to this type of thing in the USA, or they’re more prone to saying it out loud. In this country it’s more common for them to stress the need to learn of our proud history, to be patriotic, to know one’s place, not to question your betters. If god’s involved here he’s the C of E kind, hence he’s British and wears a cardigan.

Both types agree on some things. They are fond of proper discipline, the muscular kind. They think that teachers today all hate children and want to indoctrinate them with their left-wing values, by which they mean anything that they disagree with or dislike. And, of course, that things were so much better in the past.

They both share an ignorance as to what schools actually teach nowadays; they’re not alone in this, most people, outside education, don’t seem to know what schools do. You’ll often hear moaning that British history isn’t taught any more. A glance at the curriculum should be enough to falsify this. The young adults are fat, this is the schools’ fault, they don’t do gym any more or teach young adults to cook. Again a look at the curriculum might help. They’re called Physical Education and Health and Food Technology, they’re compulsory and you can get proper qualifications in them if that’s your type of thing. These would be the type of qualifications that they’d deem Mickey Mouse.

That people dislike teachers is natural enough I suppose. Locked up all day, being forced to learn a load of useless rubbish, to do homework, and gym teachers are just bastards from hell.

kids weren’t like that in my day

They were. They really were. The might seem to behave differently, but if that is really the case, it’s because they’ve grown up in a different world.

there’s a lack of discipline…

You may, or may not, be familiar with Damien Hirst’s magnum opus The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Indeed, like myself, you might have formed a view as to it’s artistic merit. But it wasn’t its aesthetic qualities that struck me on first sight. My initial reaction was to ask, how did he make that? and what for? That he sold it for eight million quid may have been one of his reasons for making it. As to the making of it, I doubt he was hands-on involved. He didn’t catch the fish, and I’ll bet that he didn’t make the box. He came up with the concept. I’m fine with that — artists don’t have to be craftspersons, but in this case the disconnect between the artist and the artwork was too in-your-face for me to ignore; the contents of the sausage were out there in plain sight, the taste was affected. Schools aren’t artworks, when judging them my first questions are always those that I asked of Mr. Hurst — how? and why? The result interests me, but the process involved and the reason for doing it are the essential thing.

So when the Michaela School started making waves in all the medias these were my questions. We’ll take the how first. On first read I was impressed by the sheer technical achievement. I’d assumed that it had been a failing school turned round by a new and bustling head (all new heads bustle). The new ethos was on rigid discipline, always popular with certain people, but quite hard to achieve in practice. How did she sell this to the parents? get the staff onside? cope with the push back from the pupils? When I looked closer I saw that something else going on.

The school was new. The initial intake was small, the staff and pupils were picked I assume, government ministers were involved. In the circumstances creating a strict routine wasn’t a major task. The school was a creation, set up to prove a point. Interesting, and something to think about, but not a panacea, you can’t build an entire educational system like that. You can try, you’ll have some successes but on the whole you’ll end up with a lot of failing schools filled with unhappy people. I’ll state it again — no one size fits all.

Which leads us to the why — among the best GCSE results in the nation.

what covid wrought

What harms have the young adults suffered for being locked up for the best part of two years?

feeling safe

When I was at primary it wasn’t uncommon for us, singly or in groups, to wander off about the neighbourhood at breaks and lunchtimes. There was nobody to stop us, as long as we were back by the bell nobody cared. When I started as a janny at Bruntsfield this wasn’t allowed anymore. You were still on your own in the playground.

It’s unusual for teachers and jannies to be actual friends. Not round your house for dinner type friends anyway. Like the mother superior said of addicts, they are acquaintances. There’s an invisible dividing line in a school staff. On one side there’s the teachers, on the other, the jannies, the cleaners, the dining room staff. You can see it in how the staffroom get used. In a primary school the staffroom is strictly for the teachers. In a secondary I could go in there, but it wasn’t comfortable. Nothing was said, there were no rules about it. Still I never used the staffroom.

There’s an unspoken class divide. I’ve had plenty of good friends, just no truly close ones. I didn’t have the personal conversations with teachers in the same way I would have done with a janny, or a cleaner.

So I haven’t really got any stories about teachers. Except for this one, which I wrote years ago…

David

Back when I worked in the primary school, whose playground I still live in, there were only ever two men on the staff. One of whom was me. Most of these, other, men were much younger than me, just starting out as teachers. That made things a wee bit tricky. I was their father’s age but I was only a janny and they were a teacher. What kind of relationship should we have?

Primary schools are like families. You take on specific roles vis-a-vis the other staff — mother, father, brother, aunt. To the kids I was always the slightly-deranged older brother. I ran a toy soldier club, I had the best collection of Pokemon cards. I tried to look after them and if they had troubles they could come to me. But I wasn’t their friend. I was still an adult and when I used the voice and pointed then the thing that they had been doing stopped.

My relationships with female staff were based on our respective ages, I was old in janny terms even then. Some were my aunts, some my sisters, some my wee sisters — wee sisters who I spoiled.

David was my brother, we liked the look of each other at first sight. We were around the same age and shared a warped sense of humour. To annoy the female staff we formed the school male support group, Our Bodies Ourselves, dedicated to maintain the masculine, in the face of this monstrous regiment of women. We had a catchphrase, aw o' them?. Which related to a story that David had. He'd been a taxi driver and some other driver had said, "aw women are f—— mad", to which some other taxi driver had replied, "what? aw o' them Rab?" Actually it wasn’t really a catchphrase, it was more of a way of us signaling to each other that we thought that what was being suggested lacked sense. Or a way of trying to get the other to laugh inappropriately.

I remember one particular Christmas (a huge thing in a primary school!). It was a tradition that the entire staff put up the decorations one evening; so that the kids came into a joy the next morning. We were decorating the dining room. I was at the top of a ladder trying to arrange a string of kid-made stars such that mother, the head, was satisfied. David was at the bottom of the ladder feeding me the needful. Julie, I think it was, came over and asked us to do something. I forget what. The following conversation occurred…

——Me: I don't think that's my job.

——David: Nor mine.

——Julie: Why not? Tetchy, very tetchy.

——David & Me (together): Because that's women's work.

There was general shouting and laughter from all corners of the hall. David and I were pelted with whatever was to hand, which we returned in kind.

David always biked to and from work. I have a fixed mental-image of him doing it; when I saw him I always started thinking about how we could wind people up. Tonight as I was walking back from the shops dwarmingly realizing that I’d made a stupid mistake in my topology TMA I saw him cycling out of the school. I may have smiled. Then I remembered. It was just someone who looked like him. David was gone.

David died of some aggressive cancer a couple of years ago. By the time I found out he was so ill he was refusing visitors, he was in such humiliating pain. I wish I could have visited, perhaps it was for the best, all my memories of us are all ones of laughter.