…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. There’s only so much money, if they have more, others have less. 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, you can hum Ion’s strophe as you’re wiping-up tables in the taverna.
——You would not dispute I think, that they teach you to read and write.
——That is at least true. Without that you wouldn’t have been able to write all that stuff sucking up to the Spartans. Can the Spartans read and write? Or is it only brutality on the curriculum there?
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. Something went wrong there if they were taught how to think.
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 mould the, naturally evil, young adults and teach them wrong from right; they often disagree on the details of this wrong and right. Xenophon, and indeed Plato, 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, to produce wealth and not pay their taxes, they will have to know things that they don’t teach in school. But they’ll send their offspring to the best ones anyway.
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 if 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 grammar and acquire facts. They’re very keen on facts. 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, in places technical and academic, and you can get proper get-a-job qualifications in them if that’s your type of thing. These would be the type of qualifications that they’d deem Mickey Mouse.
There’s a conversation to be had about what schools should be teaching, but I don’t see why we should give too much weight to the views of people who have an agenda, or are utterly ignorant of the facts.
Mass secondary education hasn’t been around for very long, Boroughmuir, and Broughton, were the first two, free, secondary schools in Edinburgh. You had to pass an exam to get into them, but if you were clever they were free. If you were very clever they might even give you a bursary so that your parents didn’t have to send you out to work. So we’ve only been teaching the masses for just over a century. Which isn’t that long a time when it comes to finding out the best things to teach our young adults.
What is taught today isn’t that much different to what it was in the past. I once found a syllabus from 1913 when I was rooting around in the school archives, which were stored in half a dozen cardboard boxes in a small room without discernible purpose off the library. It was just a broad outline, but it wouldn’t have been too out of place today. Some subjects like computing were missing and there was classics, now gone. When I started at Boroughmuir I noticed that there were a few teachers who didn’t seem to have a subject; they were, in want of a better word, spare. These were the old classics teachers, redundant since the school went wholly comprehensive, still hanging around. Much like the 1913 curriculum.
Why has so little changed? Mostly I think that it’s because if you don’t know what a young adult is going to become after school you need to keep things general. You teach a broad range of the basics, which some young adults will need, but will be useless for others. How many of us have ever successfully dropped an apposite Shakespeare quotation into a argument down the pub? But then what else are you going to do? Of course every so often people come up with an idea, an opportunity to teach, something really useful. Take for example teaching the young adults to touch type.
When I was grubbing around in the archives I was looking for pictures to put on the website. There were a whole lot of pictures. Quite a few were class photos of, what were called, the commercial stream. These were all-girl classes, girls deemed not academic enough to sit exams; they were being taught up to be secretaries, typing basically. Boys of the same ilk did technical drawing and woodwork. By my time there weren’t any typewriters in the school anymore but there were hundreds of old cans that had once contained typewriter ribbons. These were attractive things, which is why people had kept them, to store bits of string and pennies and pins. But now we all worked at the click-face would it not be a good idea if we taught everyone to touch type? For a while it was a popular talking point. It never happened, there probably weren’t enough teachers with the right skills. I’d never been convinced, most people can type fast enough to keep up with their thinking. Touch typing scores when you are typing out something already written down, and nobody really does that any more. And besides, in twenty years time, it’ll only be old folk who interact with computers via a keyboard, normal people will just ask them to do the things that they want done.
No, I think we’re pretty much stuck with what we’ve got. Someone in a hundred years time will probably find the curriculum much the same; there might be a few more flavours of computing — basics like how to stop your AI from going bonkers and wiping out humanity, and a few things will get dropped like classics was. I don’t think too much will get dropped, too much resistance to change, teachers don’t want to end up like the spare classics teachers I knew. There’s still a lot of people who want to bring classics back. Mr. D. was always musing about it to me. He’d had a big success getting Mandarin onto the curriculum at Boroughmuir. He’d worked hard at that, but he managed to blag a fact finding trip to China out of the deal. Perhaps he thought he’d get a trip to Rome as a reward for bringing Latin back?
People want to bring back Latin not because it’s useful, but because it, teaches you how to think. It might do, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never done it. But if you were looking for a subject that would teach you how to think I’d go for a proper maths course. Lots of people hate the maths they are taught and I can see why. It’s applied maths, with a wee bit of statistics, arcane recipes, without any obvious use. Not terribly exciting stuff. But a pure maths course? You could work your way through Euclid? You could teach a lot of it without pencil and paper, never mind a computer, it would develop the young adults’ mental muscles, which don’t get much of a workout these days. Even the little dip I did into pure maths changed the way I think — I became much more careful, I stopped jumping to conclusions, I checked my assumptions. It might even make maths fun.
There’s also the problem that no one school can ever provide an optimal education for every young adult. Despite what some people, who don’t work in education, will tell you there isn’t a right way to teach the young adults. What works for one won’t work for everyone, no one size fits all. Young adults are just like older adults, all very different. Ideally there would be a range of different subject choices and a range of different types of schools to choose from. That’s never going to happen, unfortunately there are always going to be some young adults for whom school is going to be an utter a waste of time. You might think you could throw money at the problem, that doesn’t always help — look at the former Prince Andrew, he had the best education that money can buy, and how did he turn out? A repulsive individual and inordinately thick.
So when it comes to what we teach the young adults nothing very much will change I think. So let’s leave it be and look at some other aspects of the educational life.
kids weren’t like that in my day
When people say this they usually mean in a negative way — the young adults of today fall short of the behaviour that was expected, when I were a nipper. People throughout history have been complaining about the feckless mendacity of their young, it’s not a new thing. The untranslated Etruscan inscriptions we have left are probably all about the waywardness of youth and how this is going to lead to disaster. It might even be a primate thing, Chimps likely grunt similar complaints as they’re picking bugs off one another. If the young adults of today behave differently that’s because they’ve been brought up in different circumstances. We complain that they’re always on their computers or phones, well we didn’t have those. I do remember much moaning about the amount of time we spent watching the telly.
I doubt that the inner life of a teenager has changed much over the centuries. Think about your teenage years, would this sum it up?
Impressing my mates – finding a partner – my stupid parents – all these new feelings – am I normal? – finding a partner – spots and acne – exams – finding a partner – am I attractive? – am I abnormal? – finding a partner – what’s going on in my underpants? – greasy hair – finding a partner – do I smell? – finding a partner…
With a few variations and some sex-specific bodily woes I think that’s pretty close. Humans, wherever and whenever they’re born suffer much the same teenage hells. We tend to forget that we had them and don’t imagine them for the teenagers that we know. Not that we can really help, they wouldn’t thank us for talking about these things — adults are soooo gross! Teenagers might look normal on the outside, inside there’s a scared child bobbing in a raging sea of hormones.
So how are our young adults? How do they compare with those saints of yesteryear? When people find out I’m a janny they seem to make the assumption that I must hate children. So when I say that I think that the young adults of today are better than those of the past they’re surprised. Now I’d probably say they were better even if I didn’t thinks so, just to wind people up, but I do think that they are better. They’re nicer, they’re kinder, they certainly work harder, they behave better in general. They aren’t as violent as we were, they’re more thoughtful, the sexes mix better, until vaping came along there wasn’t much smoking and they don’t drink like we did. Of course that’s in general, you can still find plenty of examples of out-of-control feral youth. Still, on the whole better. Much better I’d say.
How can this be true? The papers are full of stories about assaults on school staff; the statistics are grim — schools are hotbeds of violence. How can I think that the young adults of today are better? Well, both things can be true at the same time. Most of the young adults can be hard working, kind people, perhaps only a few are responsible for all this beating of teachers. Perhaps the few bad apples have just upped their game?
Certainly I’ve recently run across young adults who I’ve struggled to control. I remember one Saturday afternoon in particular. I was in the school alone, well the Turkish school were there, but there were only a few of them, only a couple of adults. A group of young adults, about six of them, twelve or thirteen years old, not mine turned up and tried to get into the school. I had the doors locked and tried to warn them off, they weren’t having it. As I say I had the doors locked but people were coming in and out. I tried to stop them, they just pushed past me, so I retreated. One of the worst things that you can do with feral young adults is to get close to them, they’ll hit you, or you’ll hit them. Neither of which you want. I phoned security, who were supposed to have my back. Guess what? They didn’t answer the phone. I phoned the police, who did answer the phone but weren’t going to be there for a couple of hours. I did eventually get rid of them, but not before they’d rampaged around the school for a while.
This was a big dint to my confidence — never before had I been in a situation involving young adults where I didn’t have, at least some, hold over them. Even when I worked in special schools I could interact and keep some measure of control. This time they completely ignored me, they had no fear of any consequences, I might as well have not been there. My after-match in-head analysis was bleak. I might have handled it slightly differently, I could have been more friendly, but in the end it didn’t matter, they were out for trouble and were going to get it, no matter what. These were a new kind of young adult, the type who attack teachers.
Why are these, off the wall, young adults appearing now? There might be a lot of reasons but I think that we might take a good hard look at that big gray thing in the corner of the room…
what covid wrought
What harms have the young adults suffered for being locked up for the best part of two years? Young adults are robust, they’ll put up with a lot, you see them on the news in Gaza, still playing games amongst the rubble. But being locked up with their families for such a long time is almost bound to leave some scars. There’s a reason that we lock people up when they’ve committed a crime — it’s a horrible punishment.
When the lockdown was over, and some normalcy had returned, we all agreed that the young adults were different. We struggled to put our finger on what this difference was, but we all agreed that it was there. There were a few obvious things — they had more energy, they were rougher with each other, they made more noise and took longer to settle down. One of the things that I noticed was that the boys started playing football in the playground at break times. I hadn’t ever seen that before. When I went to school we played football in primary school, when we got to secondary we gave it up. So this was new. But these were surface things, they gradually wore off. But important years had been missed.
Primary one and two are the years where the basics upon which the future is built on are learned. The young adults are taught to read and write, without which you can’t do very much else. But there’s also the matter of socialization. For the next decade or more the young adults are going to spend a good part of their lives sitting in a classroom, with thirty others, learning stuff. That doesn’t come naturally, it has to be taught. There are other things. When I worked at Craiglockhart one of my jobs was to oversee the dining hall. At the start of every new year I needed to introduce some of our younger young adults to some basic concepts, like sitting at a table to eat and using a knife and fork. Many social skills are learned, or re-enforced, in the first two years of school.
Such things can be picked up later, but it’s best to do it in primary one and two. The earlier they learn the deeper it sinks in. There’s also the fact that the teachers who normally do this are fairly specialized. They’re usually young, recently qualified, they have a shelf life, after a while they’re moved up the school, and they are notoriously bad spellers. Other primary teachers can do this, but they lack the experience, and the energy frankly. It’s a really hard job.
Primary seven is another big year. For one thing the young adults are now the biggest, they get treated differently, they get fussed, they have a party — the qually. They start to think they’re grown-up. Nowadays they get their own special hoodies and they’re give some responsibilities, in the playground and the school. The idea is that they develop some confidence before they move up to secondary. They’ll need it, your first year of secondary can be a very bad year.
Nowadays great care is taken with the transition between primary and secondary. In my day we visited one afternoon, for a quick tour and a lecture, that was it. Now there are many visits and towards the end of the summer term you spend three days in the school, being introduced to your teachers, doing proper lessons. If it’s felt that you’re going to need a wee bit of help, you’ll get a visit on your own. If it’s felt that you’re going to need a lot of help there’s a summer school at the end of which you’ll have to make a banner for the school. The first time they did this I liked the banner so I hung it up prominently on the top floor above the dining hall. I then made every other summer school make a similar banner, by the time I left there was a wee collection. I hope they’ve kept the tradition up.
All years in secondary matter, choosing your courses for S3 & S4, the same again for S5 & S6. If you were involved in distance learning at the time, your teachers won’t know you quite as well, they won’t be able to help you quite as much. S3 turning into S4 is another infection point, suddenly exams get real and the future has to be thought about. S3 is always the most difficult year for a staff to deal with, they’re now bigger, and keen to throw their weight about. They calm down when they get to S4. The S3s who hadn’t had a proper S1/2 needed a lot of careful handling, some of them were fractious, others had formed a shell.
The other big year missed is S6. It’s not an essential year academically, some people never do it after all, but it’s a fun year for the nearly adults, and it’s a safe place to do some growing up. A lot of pairing up goes on, I suspect that many virginities are lost. It’s odd to see the wee girls and boys you knew in first year become so grown up. That was another thing that we noticed had changed after covid.
In normal years at the beginning of sixth year you see a big change in the young adults. Over the summer holidays a metamorphosis has occurred — the skien of childhood has been sloughed. The new sixth years seem older, more mature, you see the first signs appearing of the adults that they are going to become. When causes this phenomenon I don’t know, but it always happens. After covid it didn’t, they came back much the same as the year before. By the end of the year in most cases it had happened, but it wasn’t the same.
So what of the future? How will the plague have affected our youth? The academic side will be caught up on and most of the young adults will adapt. But there will be a few, who might have been helped by the normal processes to cope better with this world, who have and will suffer, and perhaps cause suffering for all of us. There’s no vaccine for this I’m afraid.
exams
We all hate exams, well most of us, so why do we do them? What other way do we have to measure success? We judge the young adults by them, it’s the main way we judge schools. That they’re a blunt tool, slightly unfair and a poor way of judging what a person really understands is just something we have to put up with.
During covid (remember that?) the exams got disrupted, so we were forced to fall back on other methods — coursework and individual teachers’ assessments of their own pupils. There were problems. As you might expect the main one was chicanery.
There’s a great deal of security around exams, as far as they can be made secure they are made secure. Take for example the exam papers, which I played a part in. They arrived at the school security-sealed, I transferred them to the invigilators’ (who weren’t school staff), and locked in a room to which the head invigilator had the only key. (Exam stationary was treated in the same way, you couldn’t sneak in a pre-done page, it would be on the wrong paper). After an exam the papers were collected by crash-helmeted guards in security vans. The whole process is like that, cheating is nearly impossible.
The fallback methods were easier to meddle with — coursework could be, helped with, teachers’ judgements might become skewed. Some dolts got unexpectedly good marks. Most of these cases, where people got caught anyway, seemed to involve fee paying schools. Which suggests two things — if you’re taking money to get good marks there’s more incentive to improve them, or that the teachers at fee-paying schools were just worse at cheating as those in the mainstream. Given time, and thought, ways could be found to cut down on fraud, but you couldn’t eliminate it, as you can with exams.
Another problem was that it took so much time. Teachers could decided on their evaluations fairly quickly, it was the gathering of the evidence to support their judgement that ate up the hours. This was needed for two audiences. One, the exam board, they’d need it so that they could ensure that the marks given were fair and that teachers across the country were using the same standards. And, two, to show to the parents when the inevitable complaints came in.
Pushy parents eh? Not really. Parents can be a hassle but on the whole schools like them to get involved in the education of their young adult. Things that might have been missed can get found out. Never feel that you are, bothering the teachers, good ones like to talk to parents and bad ones should get found out. No, it was expected that parents would dispute marks, standing up for their offspring is their job after all. It took time to assemble the stuff to show them that poor little Jimmy really was that thick.
This, the extra time, was available during the lockdown, in normal times it isn’t really there. Something else would have to be skipped — homework? teaching time? are we willing to pay the teachers for the extra hours that they’d need to put in? No, I’m afraid we are stuck with exams.
So, could we make exams fairer? Get them to judge the young adult’s knowledge better? Attempts have been made. There are now things like extra time, scribes, you can get your paper read out to you, computers can be used. Some people see this as a bad thing, an example of falling standards, mollycoddling, such people are idiots. Even with these measures exams are still unfair. And there’s always the problem that exams can be taught towards. You can make a reasonable guess about the type of questions that are going to be set, so you train your pupils to answer these sort of questions. They don’t have to understand the question, they just need to be able to answer it. Most teachers will do this a wee bit, but they’ll also try make sure that the young adults have an understanding of the subject.
But what happens when getting your cohort through their exams with the best marks possible is all that you care about? You can end up with pupils who achieve excellent grades who understand just about nowt. They know all the facts, and if the questions are put in the right form they’ll give you the right answers. But if you change the questions slightly? Feynman came across an extreme example of this when he was lecturing in Brazil. So it’s a problem, I don’t know how much of one it is, but it’s there. I do know that when I went to university I met people who were surprisingly thick, how did they get there?
The only thing that I’ve ever come up with to cope with this is what I call, my star system. You set a general question about the subject, you don’t get marks for it, but if you make a good attempt you get a star attached to your grade. For example, for history, you might ask, why might having too much evidence for a historical period be as bad as having too little? If you knew something about the way history uses evidence you could make a good stab at it. If you just knew the facts you might be stumped. This is probably too hard to do in practice but it would have benefits. Say you were an employer looking at two candidates, one with straight A’s and one with straight B*’s, you might be tempted to look at both of them? As I said, won’t happen, we’re stuck with the unfairness of exams.
paying for it
Around a fifth of Edinburgh’s young adults attend fee paying schools, what do their parents get for the money? Well, for one thing good exam results. They could get those a bit cheaper by hiring private tutors I would have thought, so unless these parents are stupid, it can’t only be that. So what else is there?
At one point in Trainspotting Renton is forced, to keep his dole money, to apply for jobs. For some reason, at an interview, he pretends that he went to Watsons, which was a mistake, because it seems as if he might get the job. Why might he get the job? Because he went to Watsons. Here might be a reason for going to a fee-paying school — people who went to fee-paying schools get the best jobs because the people handing these jobs out went to one too. Whether this is really the case I don’t know, but most people that I know in Edinburgh assume that the best jobs in Edinburgh go to those who went to, the right type of school.
Another reason might be that it is a better experience for the young adult, an experience that will result in a better kind of adult. One that will produce a more rounded, more confident, more focused, blah, blah, … they just mean better, adult at the end. The adverts I see for these schools lay a heavy stress on this, turn out superior adults motif. And character, they often stress that they will develop character. I take it that they mean the type of character that is paired with upright, rather than in sense that Boris Johnston, a product of Eton, is a character. You certainly could never use upright in a sentence about Boris unless you were telling some sort of joke. It’s assumed that their young adults are already morally superior to the common herd anyway. That might be so, but I notice that the Tesco near Watsons still feels the need to throttle entry and have a security guard on the door when they are on their breaks. So, at least, some of them indulge in normal teenage pastimes like shoplifting. So are the products better human beings? I don’t know, I’ve never really met any of them. And there lies my problem with fee-paying schools — right from the start the young adults are divided into two streams, the one with rich parents and the rest of us. We’re not to mix, we’re not to get to know one another.
I first met people who had been to fee-paying schools when I went to university. They were nice, pleasant and sociable, they didn’t flaunt the superiority that they clearly felt, they worked hard, they were organized, they ended up with degrees. I liked them but we didn’t socialize much. They moved in different circles and they were destined for a different type of life. By that stage the barrier between them and us had already come down. The worst thing about this was that we didn’t understand each other.
This ignorance of each other is a problem, one that cuts both ways. It leads to mistakes that shouldn’t be made, people get hurt, not by intention, but because the real situation was unknown.
Take for example, the changes to the inheritance taxes that farmers have to pay. I’ll bet that a lot of people thought, boo hoo when they complained. I myself had a bit of a smile at one picture — a group of farmers, all wearing at least one Barbour jacket, standing with their children, children who were driving around in expensive looking mini-tractors. They didn’t look as if they were short of a few bob. That’s a false view I think. When we think farmers, we tend to think of lord Yaxly with his two billion acres. I’ll bet he’s an outlier, most farmers probably live quite close to the edge, struggling to hold onto a lifestyle they love. Taking away their tax allowance might have felt like the last straw. I imagine that the idea of cutting the allowance was about stopping millionaires buying land to escape their taxes. There were other ways of doing this. We could make laws like the French — if you buy land you must farm it, and you must have a farming qualification. Penalizing farmers wasn’t the intention I assume, it just turned out that way. The whole fiasco wouldn’t have happened if there had been someone who understood farmers, and their problems, involved in drawing up the plans. But they all went to a different type of school.
So we should outlaw private education? Stop people spending their money to give their offspring a head start? Are we going to ban private tutors too? No, you can’t tell people how to spend their money, once you start down that road you’ll end up with stupidities like suggesting that people on benefits can’t spend their money on beer. The good things in life will always be hogged by the wealthy, the only real answer is to make us all rich. For now all we can do is accept that some people have been taught to think differently from us.
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. I couldn’t see the artwork — I was asking how? and why?
That’s not my normal process for judging a work of art. First I’ll think about what it looks like, how it’s affecting me. Maybe, after a while I’ll look to see how the artist has done it. How they’ve laid down the colours, I’ll examine the brushwork, I’ll think about the layout. I might even ask myself what the artist was trying to achieve, maybe they were saying something? This is exactly backwards from the way that I judge schools — I always want to know how they’ve done stuff first. Then why. Then I’ll ask if it was it successful, in its own terms, or mine. Then I’ll see if I can judge the cost of the outcome, in education success can be bought at too high a price.
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, at least somewhat, I assume. There were government ministers on the board of governors so I expect they had some cash. (I wonder if their young adults went there?) In the circumstances creating a strict routine wasn’t that 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. Can’t argue with that. (I’d be interested in a long-term follow-up to see if this helped the young adults in their lives.) I hope that it was worth it because, from what I read about the discipline, the young adults led brutal lives. Normally you’d have had to have committed some sort of crime or taken a monastic vow to be treated that way. They’re to be silent, to walk about in files, no more than four people can assemble in one place. If an employer required this of their workers?
All schools need discipline, you can’t teach without it, but there’s discipline and discipline. And in most schools it’s varied according to circumstances — you can behave in the playground in the way that you can’t in class. And different schools need different types of discipline — if the playground contraband is knifes and drugs rather than vapes and johnnies it doesn’t do to be too laissez-faire. (Although in the case of vapes I’m on the harsh side of brutal. You have no idea how angry I am that our governments allowed this — we’d almost eradicated smoking, now every second child has a vape in their gob. I don’t often agree with what Singapore does, but when it comes to banning vapes I’m on their side.) Good schools will find the right level, poor schools will get it wrong. They’ll over or under react.
I’m not against strict discipline, where it is necessary, which sometimes it is. The young adults are particularly sensitive to the feeling that their adults aren’t in full control. They need to be confident that their adults can protect them from their major predators — other young adults. When I was at school this wasn’t the case. I remember being dumped, face down, in a cleaning trolley by some fat git because I wouldn’t go and buy him some chips. It took me ages to get out, there was nobody there to help. A wee bit of discipline there would have been nice.
But there’s a problem with too strict a regime, it raises the barrier between adult and young adult higher. One of the biggest problems that you have in a school is to get your young adults to tell you when things are going wrong. They’re being bullied; there’s trouble at home; they’re being sexually harassed. And that’s just the big stuff. The stricter you are the less confident the young adults are going to be at sharing their troubles. Something that they don’t want to do in any case. I know that it’s anecdotal but I think that it’s telling that nearly every case of past sexual depravity that’s been uncovered recently has involved schools that were proud to run a tight ship.
So you should try to get away with the lightest discipline possible. What you don’t do is start out like your running a gulag.
how we teach
If you were paying attention you’ll have noted that there was a suggestion, when I started this bit, that how we taught was important, and then I seemed to forget all about it. That was deliberate, well a bit, I wanted to introduce the Micheala school first — it uses some teaching methods that I wanted to comment on. Not because they are bad, but because, if they are telling the truth, they’re being well over-used. Lets’s look at some of them —
Children sit in rows. Yes I’ve seen that, quite a few teachers did that at Boroughmuir
They learn by rote. Again something I’ve seen, mostly in primaries but okay
Staff at the school tend to reject most of the accepted wisdoms of the 21st century. Like what? Are they saying that we’ve learned nothing new when it comes to teaching in the last hundred years?
Pupils write several essays a year. Show me a school where this doesn’t happen.
Pupils memorize poems. Why?
Pupils read five Shakespeare plays in three years. Much the same as I did
The school aims to teach a culture of kindness, which includes helping each other and their families, and offering adults their seats on buses and the Tube. Remember that they aren’t supposed to talk to one another, do they give supportive glances? Culture of kindness my arse
Where it isn’t fairly normal it’s all very back-to-the-basics, which will play well with their audience — people who know little of schools but have strong opinions. I suspect that much of their teaching is fairly normal — teacher at board explaining, class writing it down. They’ve just added some terror of failure into the mix. I don’t like the memorizing and teaching by rote much, it feels a bit too much as if they are doing the teaching towards exams that I mentioned above.
Once teachers get through their probationary year and are registered they can teach how they like, they can set up their desks in rows or in groups. Teachers teach in a style that suits them, as long as their results aren’t too out of sync with the others in their subject they’re pretty much left alone. Throughout their school career the young adults will be exposed to a variety of teaching styles. Bad teachers will be spotted, when a class moves on the next teacher will be able to see if there’s a problem — the young adults won’t be where they should be academically. Apart from egregious misbehavior teachers can’t be got rid of, but other pressures can be applied. For one thing they’ll only get classes for a year at a time, in the less important years. And they’ll get more than their fair share of the bastard classes that every school has.
Did I mention that one size doesn’t fit all? I think I did. What matters most is that a teacher can generate an interest in their subject, that they can make the young adults want to learn. Think about the teachers who you remember, the ones who enthused you. Some were pretty strict I expect and some were more like your friend. In some classes it was just the teacher enthralling you with stories, in others there was more interaction, a conversation was going on. I’ll bet none of them were wannabe gauleiters, made in a factory, making you recite things you didn’t understand. There’s no one ring when it comes to teaching, it’s foolishness to pretend that there is. I’m not sure that how you teach is as important as who is doing the teaching.
teachers, eh?
That people dislike teachers is natural enough I suppose. We spend our school years locked up all day, being forced to learn a load of useless rubbish, to do homework, and gym teachers are just bastards from hell. A few years of at school tends to give most people a jaundiced view of the profession. Most people never shake off the idea that teachers were in some way punishing them, in particular, with all this learning. Sometimes, when I was in a classroom, the teacher would ask me about some question on the board. Which I would answer.
——How does he know that? Some wide-eyed wee young adult would ask.
——I went to school too. Or did you think that it is just you who has to learn this stuff? They’d continue to think just that.
I’m a janny, I’ve spent my life around teachers, teachers who seemed to be going out of their way to make my life hell. I have no very rosy view about teachers. But they’re treated like shit.
These days all knowledge based professional are suspect. Doctors, in hoc to big pharma, shill pills for imaginary diseases and treat symptoms and not the whole man; scientists, in hoc to big wind, have made up global warming, so that you have to re-cycle and drive electric cars; lawyers, of course, have always been crooks. Still, at least it’s accepted that they do have some expertise and that they personally profit from their evil deeds. Teachers know squat about teaching and their malice gets them nothing, they ruin young lives for no rational cause. And they hate children.
Why, if you disliked young adults, you’d take up teaching has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It’d be a bit like taking up boxing when you had a morbid fear of being hit. I’m pretty sure that most teachers like children. So why else do you go into teaching? Those who hate teachers think that it’s because a) they’re marxists who wish to indoctrinate the young adults and have them re-assign their naughty bits or b) they’re useless and they can’t do anything else or, c) they want an easy life. None of these make sense.
Schools are unpolitical places, they’re a bit like some pubs — no politics, no team favours, no party songs. If you went around spouting your opinions you’d be quickly told to stop. You might try to get away with it in your class, you’d be wasting your time. Getting the young adults to learn is difficult enough, trying to indoctrinate them? Not going to happen. The Jesuits claimed that if they got a child into their clutches they’d turn out a right thinking man. But then they all their teachers singing from their hymn book, and controlled your entire lifes. They didn’t always get it right, think about some of their famous alumni, Voltaire, James Joyce, Bill Clinton… You might be able to indoctrinate the young adults, but it’s chancy, and there’s no way that you can achieve it on your own.
Have you ever met anybody who claimed to be useless? I ask because if you think that people who decide to teach a subject do it because they think that they’re bad at it, then you don’t understand people. I don’t know what motivates teachers to take up the job, I’m pretty sure that it’s not because they think they are crap.
If you come in to teaching for an easy life you’re in for a terrible, terrible shock. Teaching is hard, and if you’re bad at it your failure is clear, it’s in your face, class after class, day after day. I’ve seen bad teachers, they’re not happy people. Being a teacher is not an easy life.
Theachers don’t know how to teach? Yes they do. They’ve had a least a year’s training, to keep up their registration they have to do courses. They know the theory of teaching very well. They set targets, they make lesson plans, (the idea that teachers make it up as they go along is risible), they assess the results, they go back if they think that it hasn’t gone in. Teachers know what they are doing. They learn to teach better as they go along.
Teaching is a tacit thing, you need to teach to learn how to teach. Teachers are like fine wine, they’re better for a bit of aging.
Usually jannies don’t go into classrooms where people are teaching, most teachers don’t like it, it unsettles their class. But sometimes we have to. I remember one afternoon going into a class — the teacher was perched high on a stool having a conversation with their class. In French. He asked me, in French, what I wanted. It was clear that I had to use French too. I’d come to unjam his window, Le finestra I pointed to the window through which was blowing a gale. The class laughed at my accent, he gave them a very French look so that they settled, and told me to carry on. This was in the old school, the windows were huge old sash and case ones. Unjamming them often involved me swinging like Tarzan on the sash cords. I wasn’t something you could really ignore. So they talked about me. In French. All of them, the teacher suggesting new words and phrases for what was going on. Here was a classroom of young adults having a good time, subtly learning to speak good French. The teacher was coming up for retirement, he was a genius, but most of it was experience, he hadn’t been able to do that straight from the off.
As I said I don’t know what motivates teachers to take up teaching, but I’m very glad that something does. Without good teachers we’d have virtually nothing. That’s why it annoys me when I hear them being disparaged. Only I am allowed to do that.
clubs
When people ask me, as they sometimes do, what they should look for when they are trying to choose a school for their young adult I always say, try to go there at the end of lunchtime. What they should see is the young adults having fun, perhaps making a lot of noise, but when the bell goes it should become quiet and everyone should quickly head to class. I’ve seen people who work in education see this, and be impressed, at Boroughmuir. It’s a sign that everything is under control, that everyone is, on task. You can’t usually do this, so then I tell them, there should be a lot of clubs. School clubs play an underlooked role in education.
There are nearly always the sports clubs, the football teams, boys, and these days girls. Boroughmuir had loads of these, they had things like gymnastics and modern dance. I don’t know much about sport, I played rugby at school for six years, I really don’t know why. Before he died my dad seemed surprised about this —
——Did you play rugby?
——Of course! Where do you think I was going on all those Saturday mornings?
He might have been winding me up, but maybe not. What kit I had I bought with my pocket money, so maybe he really didn’t know. No parent today will be unaware that their young adult is involved in a sports club — they’ll be mired too deep. If only for money and transportation. Sports clubs aren’t what I’m talking about when I say clubs.
The clubs I’m talking about are more like the chess club, the book club, the craft group, the dungeons and dragons coven. Clubs unrelated to education, hobbies and pastimes you might say. At Boroughmuir there were some clubs which you might call educational, the codes and cyphers club and the maths club. But even if they weren’t educational they had their part to play.
they’ve removed god from schools
When I was in primary we said the lord’s prayer each morning and every few weeks a short fat minister, who looked like he’d escaped from a cartoon, would appear at assembly, smelling of sherry, to rebuke us for something, citing some tale from his book. I think he was the minister at St.Oswald’s, which was a real church then, before it became part of Boroughmuir. I can still recite the lord’s prayer, but then I can still remember my mum’s co-op divi number too. So there wasn’t much god to be taken out of my school.
At the moment this, urge to re-insert god (of the right kind) back into the classroom, is mostly an American thing. But I expect that it’s on its way here — we’ve imported all the other tenets of right-wing nutterism, why not go the whole hog and ship their kind of god in as well?
Religion has its place in life — so it should have its place in schools. I don’t mean those special mono-belief schools, where education comes a poor second to learning about how to worship the right god, in the right way. We have some of those in Scotland, catholic schools. I’ve worked in them, my mum taught in one, they’re not too bad, apart from the crosses and the strange pictures, the religious element isn’t huge. I still wish that they didn’t exist. Bigotry is still a thing in Scotland, siloing the young adults only ensures that we can misunderstand each other better because we’ve never mixed.
What, then, do I think is the place of religion in schools? Again we must thank the Michaela School for providing us with an example of bad practice that I can use. (It’s almost as if the powers that were set up the school to provide me with things to deplore.) They made the news by banning prayer rituals in the playground, people sued, the ban was upheld. Why didn’t they just give the young adults a classroom to pray in? That’s what we did at Boroughmuir. It would, undermining inclusion and social cohesion between pupils. Remember that this is a school that doesn’t allow groups larger than four. If it was undermining cohesion that was because you made a big fuss. I saw a lot of religion in Boroughmuir, nobody seemed to get miffed.
There were a lot of different gods in Boroughmuir. Classrooms were provided for prayer during ramadan; eid was a whole school thing; there were chalk mandalas and wee candles at the main door for diwali; there was always a non-denominational christian scripture group. We’d have made much more of easter if it hadn’t been a holiday; the sixth years all went to church at christmas. All of them, christian, muslim, hindu, atheist, sikh or jew. You could opt out if you wanted, as far as I know nobody ever did. Religion was there, it was a shared thing; we could enjoy other peoples’ beliefs and cultures, there was no risk to our own. I think that we had it about right.
So gods are still in some schools at least. But that’s not what they mean by, bringing back god is it? Sure they want a god there, their one, but that’s only part of their agenda. They plan to import satan as well. Satan with his dangerous heresies like rational thinking, tolerance and understanding. And you know what happens if you listen to satan? That’s right, you go to hell. Young adults must learn that believing the wrong things isn’t just a mistake, it’s evil, you’ll burn forever down below. Imagine terrorizing your children so that they won’t grow up to think differently from you. I’m not sure that even the god they claim to worship would go along with that. But maybe I’m wrong.
something must be done about this!
As I write this there’s a big push to ban the young adults from taking their phones to school. I have a suspicion that this is an example of the government doing something because, something must be done! I assume that the problem being dealt with is that the young adults are always on their phones. Which is somehow interfering with their education, and stymieing the development of important social skills. So, there’s a problem.
I’ll agree that there’s a problem if the young adults are using their phones in class. But that’s a discipline thing. At Boroughmuir, if you got caught using your phone in class, it was taken off you, and sent to one of the heads, where you could pick it up at the end of the day. If you were lucky. The head wasn’t going to hang around waiting for you. I was often asked to open up an office so, I can get my phone back. Which wouldn’t happen and you’d get a lecture about consequences for your trouble. True, this might be difficult for some schools, but a blanket ban from bringing phones to school? It’s a bit steam-hammer to shell peanuts. And there are actual dangers.
One of the more unpleasant experiences of my janitorial life has been the lost young adult. It happened regularly. About five o’ clock some poor parent would appear, their offspring hadn’t come home. There wasn’t much I could do to help. I’d lead them through some options, let them use the phone. Sometimes, when I knew the young adult, I could make suggestions about where they might be. At best I could calm them down a bit. Now, in the end the young adult was always found, but that was a couple of hours that the parent could have done without, and even the most well-balanced parent was going to give in to frothing fear-rage when the poor wee mite got home. Once phones were a thing this didn’t happen any more.
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 aren’t friends, they’re acquaintances. There’s an unspoken class divide. On one side there’s the teachers and classroom assistants, 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, I was never invited to share the Friday cake. 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.
I’ve had plenty of good teacher friends, just no truly close ones. I wouldn’t have the personal conversations with teachers in the same way I would have done with a janny, or a cleaner. Teachers were work mates, we went our separate ways when we went out the door.
So I haven’t really got any stories about teachers. Except for this one, for I did have one real teacher friend. I wrote this some 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.
