Following on from yesterday's post, I spent a wee while (well actually a longish while) trawling through a web site set up some years back by an 'old boy' of the school I used to attend. The school itself no longer exists, although the buildings are now used by a preparatory school; it fell victim to the drive for inclusion and comprehensiveness. The great social levelling that took place in the 60s, 70s and 80s in England when anything that was small and people-sized was replaced by something sprawling and immense. Schools of 500 kids amalgamated into agglomerations of 2,000+ or little Victorian terraced houses and their gardens, ideal for a nuclear family, bulldozed and replaced by 22 storey high rises with ill functioning lifts and stairwells reeking of stale urine and rotting vegetables in a complete misapprehension of Le Corbusier.
It is undoubtedly very easy to look back and think that it was so much better then but it's hard not to think that, in many ways, it was. By the time I arrived in the school, it had a history spanning over 250 years. While it looked back and over at the 'halcyon days' of the English public school system, bending over backwards to turn out middle class, educated snobs from the raw materials supplied (working class oik, in my case), there was a quaintness and charm and a sense of belonging (if you wanted to) which I think disappeared from the 'state system' of education when the last of the old style grammar schools disappeared.
In many ways it was like stepping back in time, the school bell (a real bell) rung to signal the end of break-times, the lawned quadrangle and its 'Keep off the grass' sign, the 'Fives'* court, the 'house' system to encourage competition between pupils, the 'tuck shop', the 'Great Hall' with its oak beams and oak panelled gallery, the pipe organ, Founder's day and masters in their ermine fringed gowns. It really was a bit like stepping back into "Tom Brown's Schooldays", although the first years were not (thankfully) expected to 'fag'** for the prefects!***
It's difficult to conceive now that it would be possible to spend the last two years of your secondary education being taught for the most part in a one-to-one or one-to-two environment. 'Personal' tuition normally comes at a steep price and not just in financial terms. Do, can, teachers now adjourn to the local hostelry for lessons? Do pupils gather round a teacher's flat for lengthy discussions on Plato or Kant on a Friday evening over ever increasing quantities of vino collapso? Does a pupil get dragged off to an art gallery for no other reason than "it's about time you looked at some modern European art"? Perhaps but I just cannot see it happening outside of the 'private' education sector. The demands on teachers in state education are just too great I think.
While mooching around the site I came across a (the only) copy of a 'School Magazine', an annual publication detailing the activities of the school during the previous year. It was from a year some 18 months after I left and contained a reminiscence by a retiring, long serving teacher. Towards the end was this:
"Only the other day I reproved a first former (11 year old, Ed) for disorderly behaviour in the High Street near the school and called to him to come to me. He looked round, yelled, 'Why should I?' and passed on his way. A first former? What are we up against, and why should we bother?.........But comprehensive education will change all this, they tell me, so I had better say no more."
Poor John Roberts, adrift in a sea of rapidly changing mores, more at home in an earlier, less fluid time when respect and obedience were a given; no wonder he was so disillusioned with his profession's future. And did comprehensive education 'change all that'? Not really, the achievers still achieve, the under achievers don't, although perhaps there are more achievers now; opportunities are certainly greater but, judging by some of the English I see university students produce, it makes me wonder whether we just didn't lower the bar when it came to defining 'achievement'.
Ah well, it's the cross every generation bears. The older you get, the more resistant to change, and those rose tinted spectacles come in handy every once and a while :)
For those unused to the terms:
* Fives - sometimes called 'Rugby Fives' (after the English Public School). A game almost identical to squash but played with a gloved hand not a racquet. The court was a favourite haunt (along with the bike sheds) for the surruptitious smokers among the pupils :)
**Fag - an English public school tradition, junior pupils used as 'gophers' by senior ones.
***Prefect - senior pupils used as 'auxiliaries' to maintain discipline during break and lunch times. No corporal punishment was allowed but they could impose other punishments like keeping pupils back after school to write pointless essays or 'lines' (writing, eg 'I must not run down the corridor like a rampaging elephant', 500 times :)
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Postscript:
During my last years at the school, a teacher joined the staff. It soon became clear to all of us senior pupils that this individual had a 'predeliction' for junior pupils, although to the best of my knowledge, the Nelson eye was turned. Well, in 2001 he finally got his come-uppance! Three and a half years at 'Her Majesty's Pleasure' for indecent assault. Better late then never, Winky!
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