At the end of 2009 I commented on how when I was brought in to an advise a boy of 8 on how to live his life, I found myself turning to a combination of popular cultural references, a little bit of William Shakespeare and some Percy Sledge: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledge-shakespeare-poloniuss-precepts.html This month I found myself referencing 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' (2005 - the movie; I have not read the novels; the boy is still too young to have read them) to assist me. There is such a sharp division between adult and child culture, to some extent these days set by which technologies we use and how, but, also, as always, simply because we keep our culture to define where we are in our lives and keep the other groups out. Yet, fortunately, there are some things that straddle the ages and act as a decent shorthand or reinforcement for the point you are trying to make.
I do have issues with the Harry Potter series. I feel it lauds the elite public school system of the UK which already provides such a large percentage of leading people in all sectors of business and public life, and due to the policies of the current government is taking an even tighter grip on the reins of power. The Potter books teach ordinary children who go to comprehensive schools or even grammar schools and academies, to look up to those who are 'special' enough, magic in fact, and so entitled to attend the elite boarding schools. Hogwarts has all the trappings of Eton and beyond it Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities. Pupils wear gowns, they eat in wood-panelled refectories along long wooden tables, they have houses and common rooms and indulge in life-risking sports. The one saving grace is that ultimately Harry Potter fights a form of Fascism based on biological racism, but then again, have we really moved on from the writing of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their 1950s attitudes? I can enjoy the Narnia, Middle Earth and Hogwarts stories for their drama and adventure. I am able as an adult with a critical eye to sift out the hidden messages that I disagree with and not let them indoctrinate me in the way I fear the authors intended; though I think Rowling, unlike the other two, was writing what she thought publishers would expect rather than views she held.
Given my qualms about the Potter stories, why have I cited them as being useful for assisting a nine-year old boy. Well, it comes down to the less fantastical elements, that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, despite their old fashioned names and magical abilities, are often pretty much like children of today. The fact that schools all seem to be embracing public school behaviour, filtered through an American high school lens makes the gap even narrower. The scenario was that at the nine year old's school they were having a Valentine's disco. In contrast to in my era when you simply pitched up and hung around with your friends until you got enough courage to ask one girl for a slow 'side-to-side' dance (as Lenny Henry has so well characterised it), he was expected to ask a female partner to attend with him, as if it was the 1950s and it was some real-life version of 'Grease' (1978). Possibly this would work if he was 13, but at 9 it is really unknown territory. However, a realm which I fear is going to be very common. Returning to my sixth form college at the end of the 1990s I found in place of the very informal discos we had had fifteen years before, now there were formal 'proms' very much on the US style. This trend seems to be extending not just to secondary schools now but also primary schools. The boy informed me that apparently at his school 'ballroom dancing' with girls was not permitted until you reach Year 6 (aged 10-11). Perhaps all the ballroom dancing programmes on the television are encouraging this. Yet, it seems terribly unnatural in the 2010s as if fearing that our 9 year olds will behave like 13 year olds we try to make them into 63-year olds instead!
Anyway, the formality of the process which no longer simply involves him going to the school office to buy a ticket at lunchtime or after school, has thrown open a whole new set of questions for his acting father (me) to answer. Why when the law says that teenagers do not have the maturity to have sex, do we think they have the maturity to operate in a bewildering social melee. The poor boy was torn between wanting to do what the teachers encouraged and ask a girl (there is one in a particular he liked anyway) and yet he knew how boys' attitudes can turn so quickly and was fearful that asking a girl would then lead to ridicule from his male peers. Of course, there is the potential for ridicule from the girl he asks or her friends. All the stuff about when you ask and what to do if she says no, or something the school in its dated gender role model, seems to have not considered: what happens if a girl asked him, especially if he did not like her? All of this is tough when you are 13, four years younger seemed too young. Boys tend to think even their pseudo-fathers are the ideal men whereas in fact a lot of us, especially those who have taken over where another man has left, were never very good at this stuff in the first place. So humiliated and bullied in my youth I lacked the courage to ask women out until I was 29 and even then did not have sex until I was 34, so how could I ever be the kind of expert the boy was looking for?
In this circumstance, Harry Potter was my saviour. 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' features a ball to which the, by now, 14-15-year old male protagonists are expected to ask a female to accompany them to. Of course, Harry and Ron prevaricate so long that the two girls they would have asked are asked by other people and they upset the twins they invite as their 'substitute' guests too. With the boy having seen the movie multiple times, I could simply reference at length the interaction between Harry, Ron, Hermione (the one Ron really wants to ask), Cho Chang (the girl Harry asks to the ball too late) and the Patil twins (the two 'substitutes') and very quickly have communicated the pitfalls of such circumstances. Other movies in the series have been useful in addressing what it feels like to see someone you fancy going out with someone else, as occurs for Hermione in 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' (2009). I think the school were wrong for staging the event in this old fashioned formal way, especially for children so young. However, it seems they are prey to our societal trends which want us to go back in time in so much of how our society is run. Perhaps there are good elements in that, but do not suddenly thrust our 21st century children into the social and gender divisions of the 1950s or 1910s without equipping them first. Without Harry Potter to help I would have battled to find a way, so quickly to enculturate a young boy into social behaviour which was alien to my youth and was never expected to reappear.
As an afterthought, I was also reminded of how useful the Shrek series of movies has been. It might seem odd that young people have anything to learn from the story of an ogre. However, the four movies (2001, 2004, 2007, 2010) are very useful in outlining decent behaviour for young men. They show how to interact with women, what it feels like to be in love, feeling constrained by a relationship and the daily grind, dealing with in-laws and the challenges for young men of becoming fathers. There is stuff about getting irritated with your partner, your friends, your children, feeling down about your place in the world. Shrek is in fact very much an everyman for modern western society. Amongst all the adventures, jokes and songs, there is actually a lot of decent advice which is hopefully being drip-fed into young male minds to counteract the more insidious distortions of console games, music videos and online pornography. Much output from Hollywood features 'family values' but too often it is in a perfect vision in which everyone always has more than enough, does not have to work hard, is not exhausted from a day at work, is never sick or just fed up and the children are easily won over. A lot of such output shows you the vision of family and relationships, but rarely engages with the much harder reality. It is ironic that a movie about someone in a fantasy world (though often painfully like our own (especially in 'Shrek 2' with its spoofs of California and US real-life police series) actually provides better lessons for children about the challenges of the future in the kinds of life they are going to live. To some degree they all come down to saying that in this life we cannot really hope for much more than to have love and some good times.
P.P. 14/02/2011: It subsequently transpired that the 'rule' that each boy could only attend the disco if partnered by a girl had been made up by a set of influential Year 4 girls who were keen that one particularly popular boy ask one of them to the dance. I do not know what concerns me more about this: that given the strange things the school has come out with over the past 5 years that I was quite happy to accept this latest development or that 9-year old girls seem to have learnt how to pull off social plotting like devious teenagers, I imagine from watching some US high school drama. The boy from my house went to the disco and apparently enjoyed himself right until the end when other boys bullied him.
Setting this incident aside, I still believe that due to the fact that there are not a great deal of cultural aspects that me and the boy share in common ('My Goldfish Is Evil' or 'Trapped: Ever After' anyone?) and certainly ones that have life lessons that are useful and not poured on too thickly, I will be returning to Harry Potter and Shrek to help him resolve social dilemmas in the future.
Showing posts with label primary schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label primary schools. Show all posts
Friday, 11 February 2011
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
School Uniform in 21st Century Britain
This posting is really only going to seem relevant to parents of school-aged children, but I think it also says something about how British society sees itself and, as I have commented on before, how wedded to the past it is. As I have written before, a woman and her 7-year old son live in my house. The boy goes to a local Church of England school which seems to be caught somewhere between the obsession with being sued that is common in the 2000s and attitudes that were going out of fashion in the 1950s. It assumes all families consist of a mother, father and three children and that the mother does not work and is in a position to bake cakes and provide voluntary assistance throughout the year. As it was, many of the nouveau riche, formerly lower middle class parents who tend to send their children to the school (faith schools always draw on a narrow social as well as religious, and often ethnic, basis) are now having to send the mother to work to deal with the recession, especially as so many of the fathers are self-employed and small/medium enterprises (SMEs) are suffering.
Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.
In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.
People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.
Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.
In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.
People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.
Thursday, 23 April 2009
The Insidious Oppression of England's SATs
As regular readers will know in my house lives a woman and her 7-year old son. Yesterday evening the woman was ill and it was the evening when the boy's school was going to give a briefing about the SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) that the boy has to do this May and June. As I have commented before, the UK, particularly England (Wales dropped SATs 2002-5; Scotland and Northern Ireland have different sorts of tests), is obssessed with setting targets and testing children at many levels. I have commented on the government's attainment targets for babies, which open us to ridicule from other member states of the EU. However, more oppressive is the SATs system which sets tests at ages 7, 11 and 16. The results are used to create league tables of schools' achievement that take little consideration of the ability of the children when they entered the school (no I am not suggesting a test at 4 as well, but just pointing out that every school is treated the same whether it is in the poorest or the wealthiest district or has a majority or a minority of pupiles whose first language is English). The SATs for 11 year olds (Key Stage 2) were almost ended last year because the examining company could not cope. Such regular and stringent testing is not healthy and creates lots of pressures for children and divisions.
Erratically from the late 1960s through the 1970s, county-by-country most of the UK abandoned the 11+ exam which divided children at that age into two types of school: grammar schools and secondary modern schools. There was supposed to be a third strand, mimicking the West German model, with technical schools too, but as is always the case in the UK there very, very few of these. This system persists in the counties of Kent and Buckinghamshire and some state schools have mutated into grammar schools meaning they can have a selection test for entry. The 11+ system was very unfair. As girls are often more intelligent than boys at the age of 11, if you were an 'average' girl you were far less likely than a boy of the same ability to get into grammar school as there set gender quotas. Availability of places at grammar school also varied considerably from district to district. Near where my parents lived there were three grammar schools within 5 Km, in other towns there would often be one. So if you took the test in one town and got a particular grade you would easily get a place at grammar school but if you got the same grade and happened to live in the next town along then you might have to settle with a secondary modern school.
Not only was the system erratic, being a lottery based on child's gender and residence, it was very divisive. The curriculum at grammar schools was quite different from that at secondary modern schools. In particular foreign languages were not taught at secondary modern schools and the emphasis tended to be on technical skills rather than any opportunity to do science. So children put into secondary modern schools, the majority, were excluded from subjects which they may have excelled in. In addition, we know that children change in ability quickly through their teenage years, their interest in school fluctuates and they may become excited by a subject area, yet they were locked into a particular curriculum at the age of 11 and had not chance to break out of that. In addition, it made it very clear that the majority of children were being labelled 'second class' and effectively excluded from the chance to get 'A' levels or access university. Of course things have changed, the bulk of the UK has a comprehensive school system in which all children are exposed to the full range of the curriculum and with the National Curriculum introduced in 1992 they all have to teach the same subjects (with some regional variations such as Welsh language).
At one stage it seemed that with the growth of selective schools as if the SATs at 11 would mutate into a new 11+ exam and I am glad they are collapsing. However, even though that nasty development has been halted, I remain concerned about the amount and nature of testing of children in Britain. The briefing yesterday evening was presumably supposed to calm the nerves of parents but I must say I came away feeling utterly alarmed for the future of the boy in my house. The teachers said that we should not use the term 'SATs' around the children so as not to frighten them. However, in this media savvy era (the 7-year old told me why we needed CIF cream cleaner and Bounty kitchen tissue in the house the other day) children pick up on this and you cannot censor what older siblings who have been through the process will say. I have already seen the 7-year old crying over the huge list of spellings he has to master. The teachers madly spoke of 'spelling patterns' in English and I felt like leaping up and asking her about: 'here', 'near', 'weir', 'pier', 'peer' and 'kir', which all rhyme in British English and 'bough', 'cough', 'though', 'through' and 'nought' which all have different sounds (given the use of phonetics in spelling in Britain nowadays these are real challenges).
Here I am only talking about the Key Stage 1 tests which cover 7 year olds. There is loads of stuff on the higher level SATs which you can find all over the internet. At 7, the pupils can attain Levels 1, 2A, 2B, 2C and 3. With the usual bell curve patten the 'norm' is 2B. We were shown examples of Levels 1, 2B and 3 work and I was stunned at the levels expected. Of course they had a brief statement at the end that they 'celebrate' the achievements of children at all levels but it was clear that any child falling below Level 2B would be seen as 'falling behind'. Children working at Level 1 get 'tasks' rather than 'tests' so that they can give oral rather than written responses. However, this clearly will open them up to stigma from the children doing the 'proper' tests. The assessment is done by the teachers who are clearly sympathetic to the children, but it did seem very clearly, that they were being compelled to begin dividing children up on a very 'Brave New World' basis (in the novel people are categorised as things like Alphas, Betas, Epsilons, etc. by intelligence and physical nature and have access to various opportunities accordingly), they might as well go the whole hog and give the childen a big badge to wear saying '1' or '2B' or whatever. Societies, including children's classrooms, are harsh places when you provide even more tools for them to discriminate.
These children are expected to write for a total of 2 x 30-45 minutes in two sessions, not only developing stories or reports and writing postcards but spelling complex words correctly. Words like 'tantrum', 'suspicious' and 'suggestion' were shown to be expected to be in their level. They should use punctuation like question marks and exclamation marks as well as commas. Many adults I meet in professional life have challenges with this. The testing is not only about writing, but they have to read books of many pages on complex subjects (West African culture was one book we were shown) and then complete a long set of questions about the book. The children also have to make presentations which are assessed and be able to use complex phrases to explain things and respond to questions from the audience. This is a test of not being shy and again I see adults in business who find these things a real challenge and yet the government expects 7-year olds to achieve what many 27-year olds find hard.
The mathematics at first seemed more down to Earth with addition, subtraction, handling money, etc. Then we were told they had to use times tables (I did not even start learning times tables until I was 8 and not tested on them formally until I was 11, not 7) and applying mathematics to problem solving. They also have to discuss three dimensional shapes. In science they have to record results from experiments and also understand what makes a 'fair', i.e. consistent test with only one variable. Again, if you stopped a lot of adults in the street they would find this a challenge.
I felt as if I had seen a presentation about the Key Stage 2 SATs for 11-year olds rather than anything appropriate for 7-year olds most of whom find sitting still for more than 10 minutes hard and who write and draw things that we find almost impossible to recognise without explanation. It is no wonder that British children start school at 4 compared to aged 6 in Sweden. It seems impossible for the bulk of children in the UK to pack in all that the government expects them to know by the time they turn 7. This is not education it is a mechanisation of childhood with no clear need in sight. Despite such methods over the past two decades, we seem to have no improvement in Britain's competitiveness in the world and certainly none in ability to speak foreign languages. Instead we are creating very stressed children and that is very apparent. You just have to look at the Japanese system which comes closest to the current British approach to education to see how many suicides of young people it ends up in. The rise of teenage suicide in the UK cannot be divorced from the type of education system the country is running.
Reporting back afterwards the mother of the child was incensed. This came less from the expected level her son is supposed to be reaching for, as she pointed out, he cannot 'fail', the worst he gets is Level 1. What angered her was the list of work the school expects the parent(s) to do with the child ahead of the SATs. There is a long list of writing, speaking, reading, mathematics and science exercises (all of which need some (or a lot of) internet input, so creating a social divide immediately) that the parent is directed to do with the child. Already I have witnessed how much stress the spelling list is causing and that is without getting the child to presentations and experiments. Most households in the UK have two working parents who lack the energy, time and often intelligence to engineer the things the school is suddenly demanding. They are putting huge moral pressure on the parents that if they do not do these things they are failing their child. The woman in my house asked why, if she was expected to do all this at home, did she bother to send the child to school and that she might as well home tutor him. She asked why was the school not teaching to the SATs. Of course the trouble for the school is that they are compelled by the National Curriculum to teach a full spectrum of subjects including as diverse as ICT, PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education), religious education, geography, history, art, physical education and add extras like foreign languages as well as the English (which encompasses literacy, public speaking and writing), mathematics and science. By default the parents have to fill the SATs training that the school cannot jam into the day.
It is clear I should never have attended the briefing evening because the stress on mother and child has been immediate. There is three months of this, with the half-term break, until the SATs saga is over and clearly a lot more tears from mother and child along the way. It is clear that in this household and I am sure hundreds of thousands of others, it is in fact going to be detrimental to the child's development in terms of learning, let alone emotionally. The mother asked me why the government inflicted SATs on children and I said it was clear that at age 7 it was simply to enculturate them into the incessant testing that they are going to experience for the following 11 years (as with the school leaving age rising to 18, there are exams at 17 and 18 too). Abstractly I thought SATs were a bad thing in principle. What I have come to recognise this week, is that expected levels are totally unrealistic and put immense pressure on parents, teachers and children which is detrimental to all of them. Even if SATs are not abolished they need to be set at a level appropriate to 7-year olds, not trying to force them all to be geniuses at that age and attain levels which many adults find challenging (and yet function perfectly well in society). My father argued that the benefit of SATs is assure that teachers are working hard enough (he has a very negative view of anyone involved in education), but in fact they do not do that, they actually disrupt teaching immensely and sap the moral of teachers and their pupils.
I was stunned by what I saw is expected of 7-year olds. We need people to speak out not only about the unsuitability of all of this testing but also how dangerously inappropriate the levels of expectation for young children are. We are rapidly screwing up the rising generations of British people and all of us will pay the price in the years to come.
Erratically from the late 1960s through the 1970s, county-by-country most of the UK abandoned the 11+ exam which divided children at that age into two types of school: grammar schools and secondary modern schools. There was supposed to be a third strand, mimicking the West German model, with technical schools too, but as is always the case in the UK there very, very few of these. This system persists in the counties of Kent and Buckinghamshire and some state schools have mutated into grammar schools meaning they can have a selection test for entry. The 11+ system was very unfair. As girls are often more intelligent than boys at the age of 11, if you were an 'average' girl you were far less likely than a boy of the same ability to get into grammar school as there set gender quotas. Availability of places at grammar school also varied considerably from district to district. Near where my parents lived there were three grammar schools within 5 Km, in other towns there would often be one. So if you took the test in one town and got a particular grade you would easily get a place at grammar school but if you got the same grade and happened to live in the next town along then you might have to settle with a secondary modern school.
Not only was the system erratic, being a lottery based on child's gender and residence, it was very divisive. The curriculum at grammar schools was quite different from that at secondary modern schools. In particular foreign languages were not taught at secondary modern schools and the emphasis tended to be on technical skills rather than any opportunity to do science. So children put into secondary modern schools, the majority, were excluded from subjects which they may have excelled in. In addition, we know that children change in ability quickly through their teenage years, their interest in school fluctuates and they may become excited by a subject area, yet they were locked into a particular curriculum at the age of 11 and had not chance to break out of that. In addition, it made it very clear that the majority of children were being labelled 'second class' and effectively excluded from the chance to get 'A' levels or access university. Of course things have changed, the bulk of the UK has a comprehensive school system in which all children are exposed to the full range of the curriculum and with the National Curriculum introduced in 1992 they all have to teach the same subjects (with some regional variations such as Welsh language).
At one stage it seemed that with the growth of selective schools as if the SATs at 11 would mutate into a new 11+ exam and I am glad they are collapsing. However, even though that nasty development has been halted, I remain concerned about the amount and nature of testing of children in Britain. The briefing yesterday evening was presumably supposed to calm the nerves of parents but I must say I came away feeling utterly alarmed for the future of the boy in my house. The teachers said that we should not use the term 'SATs' around the children so as not to frighten them. However, in this media savvy era (the 7-year old told me why we needed CIF cream cleaner and Bounty kitchen tissue in the house the other day) children pick up on this and you cannot censor what older siblings who have been through the process will say. I have already seen the 7-year old crying over the huge list of spellings he has to master. The teachers madly spoke of 'spelling patterns' in English and I felt like leaping up and asking her about: 'here', 'near', 'weir', 'pier', 'peer' and 'kir', which all rhyme in British English and 'bough', 'cough', 'though', 'through' and 'nought' which all have different sounds (given the use of phonetics in spelling in Britain nowadays these are real challenges).
Here I am only talking about the Key Stage 1 tests which cover 7 year olds. There is loads of stuff on the higher level SATs which you can find all over the internet. At 7, the pupils can attain Levels 1, 2A, 2B, 2C and 3. With the usual bell curve patten the 'norm' is 2B. We were shown examples of Levels 1, 2B and 3 work and I was stunned at the levels expected. Of course they had a brief statement at the end that they 'celebrate' the achievements of children at all levels but it was clear that any child falling below Level 2B would be seen as 'falling behind'. Children working at Level 1 get 'tasks' rather than 'tests' so that they can give oral rather than written responses. However, this clearly will open them up to stigma from the children doing the 'proper' tests. The assessment is done by the teachers who are clearly sympathetic to the children, but it did seem very clearly, that they were being compelled to begin dividing children up on a very 'Brave New World' basis (in the novel people are categorised as things like Alphas, Betas, Epsilons, etc. by intelligence and physical nature and have access to various opportunities accordingly), they might as well go the whole hog and give the childen a big badge to wear saying '1' or '2B' or whatever. Societies, including children's classrooms, are harsh places when you provide even more tools for them to discriminate.
These children are expected to write for a total of 2 x 30-45 minutes in two sessions, not only developing stories or reports and writing postcards but spelling complex words correctly. Words like 'tantrum', 'suspicious' and 'suggestion' were shown to be expected to be in their level. They should use punctuation like question marks and exclamation marks as well as commas. Many adults I meet in professional life have challenges with this. The testing is not only about writing, but they have to read books of many pages on complex subjects (West African culture was one book we were shown) and then complete a long set of questions about the book. The children also have to make presentations which are assessed and be able to use complex phrases to explain things and respond to questions from the audience. This is a test of not being shy and again I see adults in business who find these things a real challenge and yet the government expects 7-year olds to achieve what many 27-year olds find hard.
The mathematics at first seemed more down to Earth with addition, subtraction, handling money, etc. Then we were told they had to use times tables (I did not even start learning times tables until I was 8 and not tested on them formally until I was 11, not 7) and applying mathematics to problem solving. They also have to discuss three dimensional shapes. In science they have to record results from experiments and also understand what makes a 'fair', i.e. consistent test with only one variable. Again, if you stopped a lot of adults in the street they would find this a challenge.
I felt as if I had seen a presentation about the Key Stage 2 SATs for 11-year olds rather than anything appropriate for 7-year olds most of whom find sitting still for more than 10 minutes hard and who write and draw things that we find almost impossible to recognise without explanation. It is no wonder that British children start school at 4 compared to aged 6 in Sweden. It seems impossible for the bulk of children in the UK to pack in all that the government expects them to know by the time they turn 7. This is not education it is a mechanisation of childhood with no clear need in sight. Despite such methods over the past two decades, we seem to have no improvement in Britain's competitiveness in the world and certainly none in ability to speak foreign languages. Instead we are creating very stressed children and that is very apparent. You just have to look at the Japanese system which comes closest to the current British approach to education to see how many suicides of young people it ends up in. The rise of teenage suicide in the UK cannot be divorced from the type of education system the country is running.
Reporting back afterwards the mother of the child was incensed. This came less from the expected level her son is supposed to be reaching for, as she pointed out, he cannot 'fail', the worst he gets is Level 1. What angered her was the list of work the school expects the parent(s) to do with the child ahead of the SATs. There is a long list of writing, speaking, reading, mathematics and science exercises (all of which need some (or a lot of) internet input, so creating a social divide immediately) that the parent is directed to do with the child. Already I have witnessed how much stress the spelling list is causing and that is without getting the child to presentations and experiments. Most households in the UK have two working parents who lack the energy, time and often intelligence to engineer the things the school is suddenly demanding. They are putting huge moral pressure on the parents that if they do not do these things they are failing their child. The woman in my house asked why, if she was expected to do all this at home, did she bother to send the child to school and that she might as well home tutor him. She asked why was the school not teaching to the SATs. Of course the trouble for the school is that they are compelled by the National Curriculum to teach a full spectrum of subjects including as diverse as ICT, PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education), religious education, geography, history, art, physical education and add extras like foreign languages as well as the English (which encompasses literacy, public speaking and writing), mathematics and science. By default the parents have to fill the SATs training that the school cannot jam into the day.
It is clear I should never have attended the briefing evening because the stress on mother and child has been immediate. There is three months of this, with the half-term break, until the SATs saga is over and clearly a lot more tears from mother and child along the way. It is clear that in this household and I am sure hundreds of thousands of others, it is in fact going to be detrimental to the child's development in terms of learning, let alone emotionally. The mother asked me why the government inflicted SATs on children and I said it was clear that at age 7 it was simply to enculturate them into the incessant testing that they are going to experience for the following 11 years (as with the school leaving age rising to 18, there are exams at 17 and 18 too). Abstractly I thought SATs were a bad thing in principle. What I have come to recognise this week, is that expected levels are totally unrealistic and put immense pressure on parents, teachers and children which is detrimental to all of them. Even if SATs are not abolished they need to be set at a level appropriate to 7-year olds, not trying to force them all to be geniuses at that age and attain levels which many adults find challenging (and yet function perfectly well in society). My father argued that the benefit of SATs is assure that teachers are working hard enough (he has a very negative view of anyone involved in education), but in fact they do not do that, they actually disrupt teaching immensely and sap the moral of teachers and their pupils.
I was stunned by what I saw is expected of 7-year olds. We need people to speak out not only about the unsuitability of all of this testing but also how dangerously inappropriate the levels of expectation for young children are. We are rapidly screwing up the rising generations of British people and all of us will pay the price in the years to come.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Remembering the Bullies
One effect of having a 7-year old child resident in your house is that the things he is experiencing often trigger of memories of events in your own life. I am not entering into the debate around 'false memories' and abuse, but I am going to look at how hearing about bullying of this child has often brought back memories of (unpleasant) things that happened to me, that I had somehow compacted and stored away in a part of my brain where I tend not to go. I was not abused in my childhood, but my father was harsh, sometimes for a few moments violent and certainly often frightening. My mother often humiliated me, but in a way which I think was motivated by what she felt was the right thing to do though it has left scars that have remained for decades. This is partly as I have a real phobia of humiliation not only for myself but for others whether real people or even fictional ones, so I imagine that these things have lingered longer for me than they would for the bulk of the population.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Monday, 25 February 2008
Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 2: Teachers
While I was ill last week I was haunted by memories of those teachers who humiliated me in my youth. I am sure everyone has teachers who made their young lives a misery. I realised that this blog was the ideal environment to purge myself of those ghosts that for more than thirty years have angered me for what they inflicted on me in my youth. I know what they did will probably seem very minor to many people, especially those who suffered harsh abuse, but I think it is important for me to get them out there and away from my psyche.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
Friday, 8 February 2008
The Regimentation of British Youth
I have realised that I am beginning to feel rather guilty that a lot of my postings are simply responding to news items I see on television, the internet and in a single newspaper. I feel that I should be out there scooping up much more of what is going on from a range of sources. If you live in the UK and travel abroad and watch the news as I often do, say in France or Germany, you are very much aware of how many more news stories they cover in an average bulletin. In the UK we often have the view that 'there isn't much news today' when in fact there is always tons it is just the UK channels cannot be bothered, do not have the interest or the resources to report it. This does not only go for international news (I have not seen anything on Afghanistan or Iraq or Zimbabwe or Pakistan reported for many days now, though I am sure that a lot is currently happening in all these countries) but also within our own country. The clearest example of levels of news in a country, that I have seen, is in Belgium. There you kind of step down the hierarchy from international to national to regional to your town news. While there I literally watched the news for the town I was staying in. They also have specialised news sections, for example, I saw the military news section of the programme and they have weather for people sailing as well as standard weather reports. You might say Belgium is small and has to make the most of what news it had. However, I would argue that all towns have things going on and in the UK often you do not find out about them even though they may impinge on you more immediately than big international stories.
Sorry, I am well off track now, the news was not the focus of today's posting, rather it is a report that I heard of today which fits in with many of the themes I have been exploring over the past few months about British society and especially education within it. If you do not know, whilst the legal age that UK children must start school is 5, most now go to proper school at the age of 4 to join 'reception' which proceeds Year 1 but is no less rigorous and certainly my housemate's young boy was expected to be able to write in joined-up handwriting before he even reached Year 1! Reports today contrast this start date with Sweden which has much better academic results despite the fact that the children do not start school until the age of 7, three years after their British counterparts. At the age of 7 in England (Wales and Scotland have scrapped this, but England covers 83% of the UK population) they sit their first exams, called SATS. They do more at 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The age of 18 is now the age children are permitted to leave school in the UK. English children are the most examined in the world, now even outstripping the Japanese. Whilst see these tests as much a monitor of the quality of teachers (and according to government statistics 17,000 'incompetent' teachers are in post teaching 100,000 children in total) they also put immense pressure on children from the start. There is no appreciation of the different ways in which children learn or the different ranges of abilities with different skills or the differences between girls and boys which is very sharp at this age (notably the desire for discussion vs. desire for activity).
The British government, however, has dismissed the latest findings because they go against their whole philosophy of constant testing and people attaining 'standards'. I would be happy to be corrected, but as far as I know the UK is the only country to have set targets for children under the age of 5. Yes, there is the so-called Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum which was launched in March 2007 and covers anticipated levels of achievement for children aged 0-5. Nursery schools who do not comply with the targets for 3 and 4 year olds will lose state funding. Apparently handwriting should begin between 16-26 months old! If you are interested in the targets, 'The Daily Telegraph' newspaper has an online list of them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/14/nedu114.xml
I think one motive for the government supporting children starting school at 4 is because as I have commented before they want more mothers in the workforce and effectively they see schooling as childcare, given that the cost of actual childcare is beyond the incomes of most even middle class people let alone working class ones. The Blair governments and the Brown one which has followed also have long clung to the belief that quantitative measures of things equals qualitative gains. Of course that is sometimes (or often depending on the circumstances) not the case. Human nature cannot be squeezed into tick boxes. None of us want a poor education system but neither do we want every aspect of a child's life from the moment they come out the womb under scrutiny. I can envisage that before long we will have guidelines about what music should be played to the foetus to help its language skills development.
There is no evidence that the government's requirements are bringing any benefit to English school children. We still have the highest level of teenage pregnancies in Europe; we still have half our pupils leaving school with not a single qualification. I accept that many of these things are caused by the anti-learning attitude prevalent in UK society. What we do see is record numbers of suicides among teenage boys and whilst much of this may come from societal pressures, given that such behaviour is characteristic of Japan which for decades is renowned for the pressure it puts its young people under, there seems to be some connection. I know this government's simplistic attitude is that to slacken requirements is to lead inexorably to increased failure. However, we are dealing with people not machines. The USSR tried to plan its economy through 5-year plans throughout its history and ended up with an entirely wrecked economy. The UK is trying to plan its children's personal educational development and I fear is going to (or is already) facing a similar outcome to the Soviet economy. The British population is increasingly obsolete in global markets and this attempt to pursue regimentation of children along some 'Brave New World' model seems to doom them to even worse standing. The government needs to swallow its pride and look at the more relaxed and far more successful examples of successful educational approaches which are around us in Europe let alone across the world. Of course the Blair regime wallowed in utter arrogance which allowed it to concede nothing to any challenge and the Brown government has remained as hard-faced and as short-sighted.
Sorry, I am well off track now, the news was not the focus of today's posting, rather it is a report that I heard of today which fits in with many of the themes I have been exploring over the past few months about British society and especially education within it. If you do not know, whilst the legal age that UK children must start school is 5, most now go to proper school at the age of 4 to join 'reception' which proceeds Year 1 but is no less rigorous and certainly my housemate's young boy was expected to be able to write in joined-up handwriting before he even reached Year 1! Reports today contrast this start date with Sweden which has much better academic results despite the fact that the children do not start school until the age of 7, three years after their British counterparts. At the age of 7 in England (Wales and Scotland have scrapped this, but England covers 83% of the UK population) they sit their first exams, called SATS. They do more at 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The age of 18 is now the age children are permitted to leave school in the UK. English children are the most examined in the world, now even outstripping the Japanese. Whilst see these tests as much a monitor of the quality of teachers (and according to government statistics 17,000 'incompetent' teachers are in post teaching 100,000 children in total) they also put immense pressure on children from the start. There is no appreciation of the different ways in which children learn or the different ranges of abilities with different skills or the differences between girls and boys which is very sharp at this age (notably the desire for discussion vs. desire for activity).
The British government, however, has dismissed the latest findings because they go against their whole philosophy of constant testing and people attaining 'standards'. I would be happy to be corrected, but as far as I know the UK is the only country to have set targets for children under the age of 5. Yes, there is the so-called Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum which was launched in March 2007 and covers anticipated levels of achievement for children aged 0-5. Nursery schools who do not comply with the targets for 3 and 4 year olds will lose state funding. Apparently handwriting should begin between 16-26 months old! If you are interested in the targets, 'The Daily Telegraph' newspaper has an online list of them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/14/nedu114.xml
I think one motive for the government supporting children starting school at 4 is because as I have commented before they want more mothers in the workforce and effectively they see schooling as childcare, given that the cost of actual childcare is beyond the incomes of most even middle class people let alone working class ones. The Blair governments and the Brown one which has followed also have long clung to the belief that quantitative measures of things equals qualitative gains. Of course that is sometimes (or often depending on the circumstances) not the case. Human nature cannot be squeezed into tick boxes. None of us want a poor education system but neither do we want every aspect of a child's life from the moment they come out the womb under scrutiny. I can envisage that before long we will have guidelines about what music should be played to the foetus to help its language skills development.
There is no evidence that the government's requirements are bringing any benefit to English school children. We still have the highest level of teenage pregnancies in Europe; we still have half our pupils leaving school with not a single qualification. I accept that many of these things are caused by the anti-learning attitude prevalent in UK society. What we do see is record numbers of suicides among teenage boys and whilst much of this may come from societal pressures, given that such behaviour is characteristic of Japan which for decades is renowned for the pressure it puts its young people under, there seems to be some connection. I know this government's simplistic attitude is that to slacken requirements is to lead inexorably to increased failure. However, we are dealing with people not machines. The USSR tried to plan its economy through 5-year plans throughout its history and ended up with an entirely wrecked economy. The UK is trying to plan its children's personal educational development and I fear is going to (or is already) facing a similar outcome to the Soviet economy. The British population is increasingly obsolete in global markets and this attempt to pursue regimentation of children along some 'Brave New World' model seems to doom them to even worse standing. The government needs to swallow its pride and look at the more relaxed and far more successful examples of successful educational approaches which are around us in Europe let alone across the world. Of course the Blair regime wallowed in utter arrogance which allowed it to concede nothing to any challenge and the Brown government has remained as hard-faced and as short-sighted.
Monday, 21 January 2008
Charity Begins At School 2: Some Additional Points
Further to my post of last week, I came across some more interesting figures on private schools and the damage they are doing to education in the UK. This comes from the BBC News website where they point out that whilst private schools take 7% of pupils, they employ 14% of the teachers in the UK, so are 'creaming off' the best teachers from the education system that 93% of the population will go through. These teachers have been trained by the state and increasingly have been given generous bursaries for subjects like mathematics and modern languages. The staff to student ratio in private schools is 1 teacher: 9 pupils, in the state sector it is apparently 1 teacher: 18 pupils, though in fact that usually translates into 1:30 in most classes. In addition more male teachers (and more of them who have more than one degree qualification, i.e. an MA/MSc or a PhD) go into private schools, which you may argue allows women to progress better in the state sector (female teachers earn 7%-22% less than men if they teach in the private sector, depending on the subject area they teach), but at a time when the lack of positive male role models for boys in schools is a clear problem, it might be healthier to keep more of them in the state sector.
Apparently parents who send their children to private schools are complaining they pay twice, once in taxes to the state school system they do not use and once again to the schools directly, so they seem to be expecting some rebate. On the same basis I expect a rebate for the nuclear weapons I do not use or the health care system in Scotland or troops sent to Iraq, none of which I have use for. The arrogance of these parents is stunning, but possibly not surprising.
The only solution I see to the parasitic nature of private schools is to close them down. You need to wipe out their charitable status immediately as they are profit-making businesses. You need to stop them recruiting any more pupils and feed the money saved from the end of their tax breaks improving state schools. With parents who have previously exempted themselves from caring about their local communities by sending their children private, actually now having to pay attention to local state schools we can expect an improvement in the support and resources they receive, though unfortunately in the already prosperous parts of the UK. Scrap private schools now and help the future of the UK and its people.
Apparently parents who send their children to private schools are complaining they pay twice, once in taxes to the state school system they do not use and once again to the schools directly, so they seem to be expecting some rebate. On the same basis I expect a rebate for the nuclear weapons I do not use or the health care system in Scotland or troops sent to Iraq, none of which I have use for. The arrogance of these parents is stunning, but possibly not surprising.
The only solution I see to the parasitic nature of private schools is to close them down. You need to wipe out their charitable status immediately as they are profit-making businesses. You need to stop them recruiting any more pupils and feed the money saved from the end of their tax breaks improving state schools. With parents who have previously exempted themselves from caring about their local communities by sending their children private, actually now having to pay attention to local state schools we can expect an improvement in the support and resources they receive, though unfortunately in the already prosperous parts of the UK. Scrap private schools now and help the future of the UK and its people.
Saturday, 19 January 2008
The Normality of Violence in UK Schools
One thing about having a housemate who has a 6-year old child is that you get exposed to some of the goings-on in schools today, away from the distortions of the media. Back in the early 2000s I used to volunteer to read in schools to show children that men actually read (seven of us men used to go from our work once per week as all the staff and governors at the school next to the works were female and schoolboys, many of whom had no fathers at home, saw reading just as something that girls and women did), so was aware at least of the happenings in one school, but nowadays I am dependent for any information on UK education for the various media and other sources such as the child in the house. This latter source is revealing quite startling developments in UK education.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
Friday, 18 January 2008
Charity Begins at School
One recent government announcement I welcomed is the review of the charitable status granted to private schools. It seems odd that profit-making bodies which charge fees so hight that only wealthy people can afford to send their children to them get charitable status in the UK which means they get tax breaks which saves them millions of pounds per year. They trumpet their academic success, but it is unsurprising when they have such high staff to student ratios; most children would benefit from having greater time in class with their teacher. In the average school lesson of 45 minutes, with the common class of 30 pupils, each pupil will have an equivalent of 1.3 minutes with the teacher, if you take out the time it takes for them to come in and settle down. Every time another pupil is disruptive they effectively steal this time from their fellow pupils as the teacher has to take out time from teaching to deal with it. Of course typically pupils are taught together, but with smaller class sizes in private schools each pupil is far more liable to get individual attention and their education will benefit. As I have noted in previous postings pupils from richer families benefit educationally even when they are in the public sector let alone when in schools with a selected intake.
Whilst I sympathise with the argument that the UK should have no private schools and certainly no 'public' schools (as in the weird UK definition, i.e. elite private schools, as opposed to state schools which are free and open to the public), you can argue that if someone wants to set up a business teaching people they should be free to do so. The difficulty for private schools is the buying power of the middle class has fallen. If civil servants and teachers had as much buying power as they did in the 1950s they would be annually earning over £80,000 (US$157,600; €111,200) whereas they earn around £25-30,000 per year. This means it is difficult for private schools to charge high enough fees to fund the number of staff they want because otherwise they would lose many of their middle class clients who in many cases are the bulk of the parents using some of these schools. This is why financially they have to retain charitable status. Many grant scholarships and open up their facilities to neighbouring communities, but that is the least that should be expected, as the bulk of us pay for state schools through our taxes and are also paying for private schools through charitable status tax breaks even though our children will never get the chance to go to the school let alone be a pupil at it.
Allowing the private school sector to contract from its current standing (2500 private schools in the UK taking 6-7% of school-aged children) would benefit education as a whole across the UK. The schools do not have to teach the National Curriculum which means that the pupils often miss out on in particular the social education which is important in making the pupils tolerant and open-minded, something which is important to have among the people who will make up our elites in the decades to come. Secondly, money saved from not granting all these tax breaks could be channelled into improving schools and their buildings and paying state sector teachers decent salaries. Many schools are suffering from decaying buildings and over-crowded classrooms, partly because money is being siphoned off to grant tax breaks to private schools. A third benefit is that it would make comparatively well-off middle class parents send their children into the state sector and with it bring funds and support for many ordinary schools which will benefit them. The top echelons of the middle class do not care about ordinary state schools or how far they decay because they exempt themselves from that system; they are rich and articulate so can turn their strengths into these ordinary schools. In addition, their children will mix with ordinary people which hopefully will begin to break down the barriers in our society which are painfully harsh; maybe the rich children will despise the ordinary ones, but the ordinary pupils will see that the elites are in fact just human like themselves. It would also provide a more level playing field for ordinary pupils as those pupils who otherwise would have gone to private schools would have to work for their education and their qualifications rather than being led through it by one-on-one tuition in their small classes.
Thus, I urge the government to strip all private schools and certainly all public schools, of charitable status immediately. The collapse of the private education sector cannot come about fast enough (I imagine many private schools will find ways of wriggling out of it, but even if we lose 30-40% it will begin to help change occur) if we are going to achieve a truly well-educated and less socially-divided UK.
Whilst I sympathise with the argument that the UK should have no private schools and certainly no 'public' schools (as in the weird UK definition, i.e. elite private schools, as opposed to state schools which are free and open to the public), you can argue that if someone wants to set up a business teaching people they should be free to do so. The difficulty for private schools is the buying power of the middle class has fallen. If civil servants and teachers had as much buying power as they did in the 1950s they would be annually earning over £80,000 (US$157,600; €111,200) whereas they earn around £25-30,000 per year. This means it is difficult for private schools to charge high enough fees to fund the number of staff they want because otherwise they would lose many of their middle class clients who in many cases are the bulk of the parents using some of these schools. This is why financially they have to retain charitable status. Many grant scholarships and open up their facilities to neighbouring communities, but that is the least that should be expected, as the bulk of us pay for state schools through our taxes and are also paying for private schools through charitable status tax breaks even though our children will never get the chance to go to the school let alone be a pupil at it.
Allowing the private school sector to contract from its current standing (2500 private schools in the UK taking 6-7% of school-aged children) would benefit education as a whole across the UK. The schools do not have to teach the National Curriculum which means that the pupils often miss out on in particular the social education which is important in making the pupils tolerant and open-minded, something which is important to have among the people who will make up our elites in the decades to come. Secondly, money saved from not granting all these tax breaks could be channelled into improving schools and their buildings and paying state sector teachers decent salaries. Many schools are suffering from decaying buildings and over-crowded classrooms, partly because money is being siphoned off to grant tax breaks to private schools. A third benefit is that it would make comparatively well-off middle class parents send their children into the state sector and with it bring funds and support for many ordinary schools which will benefit them. The top echelons of the middle class do not care about ordinary state schools or how far they decay because they exempt themselves from that system; they are rich and articulate so can turn their strengths into these ordinary schools. In addition, their children will mix with ordinary people which hopefully will begin to break down the barriers in our society which are painfully harsh; maybe the rich children will despise the ordinary ones, but the ordinary pupils will see that the elites are in fact just human like themselves. It would also provide a more level playing field for ordinary pupils as those pupils who otherwise would have gone to private schools would have to work for their education and their qualifications rather than being led through it by one-on-one tuition in their small classes.
Thus, I urge the government to strip all private schools and certainly all public schools, of charitable status immediately. The collapse of the private education sector cannot come about fast enough (I imagine many private schools will find ways of wriggling out of it, but even if we lose 30-40% it will begin to help change occur) if we are going to achieve a truly well-educated and less socially-divided UK.
Saturday, 15 December 2007
UK Society: Divided and Lacking Social Mobility
Regular readers of this blog will know I am acutely aware of the difficulties of British society and how a lot of these are driven by corrosive attitudes and obsessions, notably over property and the very self-centred, consumerist attitudes so prevalent in the UK today. To some extent, people in Britain have been lulled into a false belief that the social divisions of the past have begun to be eroded. Apparently in the 1970s (a time when sociology was really developing as a research area) the UK was one of the most socially divided industrialised countries in the world. This was despite having had free education for a century and a welfare state since the 1940s.
One key difference between the UK and neighbouring states in Europe was that the UK had neither had a revolution nor had it had suffered the upheaval of either being occupied by a foreign power or being under a dictatorship. All of these factors disrupted the societies across Europe. Ironically people from ordinary backgrounds stood more chance of advancement under a Fascist, Nazi or Communist dictatorship than they did in British democracy. Partly, as I have mentioned before, this is because the UK is not a true democracy, half of its parliament is unelected and the prime positions in the Civil Service, Government, Military and its established Church, go to people (still predominantly men) who have attended a small number of select fee-paying schools called 'Public Schools' (ironically very exclusive and certainly not public). The next layers beneath the highest in each branch of British public life are held by people who attended less exclusive and a bit cheaper private schools. The highest that a person who has gone to a free state school can rise is to something like a senior doctor in a hospital or a chief constable (i.e. in charge of all the police of one county) or a brigadier in the Army or possibly their Naval equivalent (the airforce, the RAF, is more exclusive). Given that you have to be put on the lists of these schools the moment you are born and the annual fees are far higher than the average annual salary of people living in the UK, unless you have very wealthy parents you stand no chance of getting in and thus no chance of moving into the higher levels of British society.
Now, I accept that other European states have nobility and very wealthy families, the UK is not unique in this, it also applies to countries elsewhere in the world. However, if one looks at comparator industrialised countries, there are exclusive schools, but, say for example the Grandes Ecoles in France, even the poorest, intelligent pupil can get into them. In countries without a monarch, an ordinary person can rise to be president. In addition, middle ranking people who in the UK may never rise above being a low-level lawyer or civil servant or doctor or bank worker, similarly can reach higher positions. This means there is something to aspire to and you are not ruled out of so many areas the moment you are born. The USA has also suffered from social division. It has wealthy families who are politically powerful, but again it has structures that allow people to advance, no matter what their backgrounds. Show me the black people in the UK who have attained the level of power that Colin Powell or Condaleeza Rice have obtained; this is despite black people coming to Britain for at least the last 2000 years. In public service, the military and so on, as an ordinary person you can rise in a way that you could never do in the UK.
What the UK resembles is the post-Communist states like Russia, Poland, China (which is now really only Communist in name) where influence in political circles and so access to money from the break-up of the state machinery can give you an unfair advantage. To some extent social mobility in these states for those coming up in enterprise is currently greater than such small business people struggling in the UK. Many successful British entrepreneurs come from outside the UK especially from Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, rather than from within Britian. That is because they can draw on resources unfettered by British constraints. In addition they have often had access to the best education that their British equivalents are denied. This is one explanation for the growing percentage of people from an Asian background working as doctors in the UK. Ordinary white and black British people simply do not have access to sufficiently high level schooling to even aspire to be doctors and the wealthy whites in Britain lack the altruistic attitudes of their Asian-background counterparts to do something as beneficial as care for people.
The sharp divisions in Britain were exacerbated in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90) infamously said there was no society, just families and individuals. However, her policies reinforced the social divisions in the UK. She was the daughter of a grocer and had only attended grammar school (i.e. a free school, though in the upper educational category) in her youth and yet made it to be prime minister, something I doubt will be repeated in the UK in coming decades. Her obsession with property-ownership wrecked the state housing sector (which in Scotland had housed 60% of the population) and pushed people to own property or to be seen as irrelevant. The rise in house prices increased homelessness, rising the numbers of people living on the streets or temporary accommodation and also removed from many working class people affordable housing permitting them the money to spend on improvement for themselves and their children, especially in terms of education. In addition, Thatcher scrapped grants for students to attend university substituting loans instead. Working class people have less access to credit and a greater aversion to debt than people in other classes so again it closed down what had been becoming at least one way for working class people to get on through education. This was worsened anyway by budget cuts on education and pressure on local authorities who ran schools at the time to cut their expenditure too. Certain schools were encouraged to leave the local authority system and it was these elite 'grant-maintained' schools which received direct, generous government money whilst the so-called 'bog standard' schools that most children attend could only survive by not repairing buildings, by selling off playing fields and fund-raising events.
Whilst the UK, like the rest of the industrialised world was facing shifts in industrial patterns, the economic policies of Thatcher led to a very abrupt closure of manufacturing industries leading to unemployment of over 4 million people (about 16% of the working population of the time). Whilst work in manufacturing and related industries, such as fuel resources, was varied there were many skilled jobs that had paid well in the 1960s and 1970s. In their place came low-skilled, low-paid service jobs, so cutting household incomes among working class people and also destroying the ladder for improvement through skill development and hard work. In a call centre you come and leave without having gained new skills and there is little chance for promotion. Similarly the casualisation of labour has increased with large numbers of even office workers being on short-term contracts. If they lack the skills needed when a company changes methods they are simply laid off and other workers employed. Businesses constantly whine that they want schools and universities to train workers to exactly match the skills they need; yet seem entirely unwilling to see a role for themselves in that process, again another difference from comparator countries, notably France and Germany.
Thus, through the 1980s the few opportunities for a solid base for the working class (the majority of the population) and their chances to rise up the societal ladder were pretty quickly smashed. John Major (Prime Minister 1990-7) who worked as an ordinary bank manager and rose to the highest position in the UK liked to talk of the UK's 'classless society' (for those unfamiliar with UK terminology 'class' in UK usually refers to socio-economic groupings, commonly working, middle and upper classes and sub-divisions in these; since the 1980s we have also had the 'underclass', people who are deemed to have dropped out the bottom of society and are usually homeless). In the early days of his regime Blair also spoke in the same terms, though it is notable that it did not survive his first time of office (1997-2001). It is clear that any reference to classlessness was a fantasy. Unemployment has fallen in the UK since the end of the 1980s, but the restructured economy is still very rigid in preventing people rising socially.
Why am I going on about all of this now? Well, it is because some people have been shocked by evidence that has appeared this week that brings how the reality of it. At the age of 5 the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds score far higher than the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds in terms of communication skills and other scholarly measures. By the age of 7 however, the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds exceed even the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds and from then on the poor children never catch up ever again and throughout the rest of their schooling never match less intelligent rich children. Partly this stems from the way British schooling works with the emphasis on projects and getting internet resources; the heavy encouragement to take additional classes outside of school hours and increasingly that children need to have home tutors too, all of these things are beyond my budget (and as I keep saying I earn 50% more than the average annual salary so am far from 'poor') let alone the average working class family's resources. With secondary schools being increasingly selective, when they reach 11, the poor children lose out in entrance tests to rich children who on an objective basis are less intelligent than them. Again partly this is because the tests are focused on knowledge common in the middle and upper social classes rather than the experience of the working class. It is not surprising then that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (reckoned to be the best universities in the UK) still take over 47% of their students from private schools (there are about 2000 private schools in the UK out of a total of around 30,000 schools of all kinds; primary schools tend to be much smaller so there are 22,300 of these whether state or private alone). More politicians for example have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge than any other university, so being blocked from them means you are often effectively blocked from parliament and alternative routes of the past such as coming through a trade union to being a member of parliament have been weakened as trade unions were hammered under Thatcher and have haemorraged members in an era when people are on short-term contracts and fearful of not being re-employed if they are politically active.
What has alarmed the government (and it is good to see that they are alarmed rather complacent) is that despite all the policies of the last decade under a Labour government (which coming from a Socialist background is supposed to be equality of opportunities for all) and an awareness of the need to challenge social division at least going back to the Labour governments of 1964-70, as a UK citizen it is as unlikely that your standing in society will improve during your life as it would have been 33 years ago. You could walk into a maternity ward at a hospital today and accurately predict the kind of work all the babies there will be doing in 2025 just by looking at their parents. (In fact whether you chose a state-run hospital or a private one would give you a good clue for a start). None of those babies will be able to improve on the level of income or education that their parents have.
Recently there was commentary on the novel by Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' (1932) which tends to get overlooked when referring to dystopian novels in favour of '1984' by George Orwell (1948). However, the novel shows a society driven by consumerism and in which happiness comes in the form of a pill. For this posting, though, is the fact that all children born in the UK of the novel (they are all test-tube babies) are categorised from birth into a range from Alpha to Epsilon depending on their mental abilities. That is effectively what we have in the UK today, except that an Alpha-intelligence baby from a poor family will be beaten in life by a rich Epsilon-intelligence baby. Our current dystopia is not even based on how beneficial a child can be to our society in terms of aptitude the way Huxley's was, it is far more arbitrary than that, it is simply based on who your parents are, nothing more.
If birth is the only qualification for success in the UK no wonder we are lagging behind rival countries. We effectively exclude millions of talented people from ever getting into a position to use their talents. How many people working in call centres in the UK, could instead be running successful businesses or government departments, if they had simply been born to richer parents? The UK would rather adhere to almost feudal mentalities than shake these up to benefit itself. I recognise that other industrialised countries do not have all the solutions, but if I was going to have a child I would want them to be born in one of those countries and at least feel that they could get as far as they have the ability to do so rather than being held back by the unbreakable caste system which denies them so many opportunities simply because of who I am rather than who the child is.
One key difference between the UK and neighbouring states in Europe was that the UK had neither had a revolution nor had it had suffered the upheaval of either being occupied by a foreign power or being under a dictatorship. All of these factors disrupted the societies across Europe. Ironically people from ordinary backgrounds stood more chance of advancement under a Fascist, Nazi or Communist dictatorship than they did in British democracy. Partly, as I have mentioned before, this is because the UK is not a true democracy, half of its parliament is unelected and the prime positions in the Civil Service, Government, Military and its established Church, go to people (still predominantly men) who have attended a small number of select fee-paying schools called 'Public Schools' (ironically very exclusive and certainly not public). The next layers beneath the highest in each branch of British public life are held by people who attended less exclusive and a bit cheaper private schools. The highest that a person who has gone to a free state school can rise is to something like a senior doctor in a hospital or a chief constable (i.e. in charge of all the police of one county) or a brigadier in the Army or possibly their Naval equivalent (the airforce, the RAF, is more exclusive). Given that you have to be put on the lists of these schools the moment you are born and the annual fees are far higher than the average annual salary of people living in the UK, unless you have very wealthy parents you stand no chance of getting in and thus no chance of moving into the higher levels of British society.
Now, I accept that other European states have nobility and very wealthy families, the UK is not unique in this, it also applies to countries elsewhere in the world. However, if one looks at comparator industrialised countries, there are exclusive schools, but, say for example the Grandes Ecoles in France, even the poorest, intelligent pupil can get into them. In countries without a monarch, an ordinary person can rise to be president. In addition, middle ranking people who in the UK may never rise above being a low-level lawyer or civil servant or doctor or bank worker, similarly can reach higher positions. This means there is something to aspire to and you are not ruled out of so many areas the moment you are born. The USA has also suffered from social division. It has wealthy families who are politically powerful, but again it has structures that allow people to advance, no matter what their backgrounds. Show me the black people in the UK who have attained the level of power that Colin Powell or Condaleeza Rice have obtained; this is despite black people coming to Britain for at least the last 2000 years. In public service, the military and so on, as an ordinary person you can rise in a way that you could never do in the UK.
What the UK resembles is the post-Communist states like Russia, Poland, China (which is now really only Communist in name) where influence in political circles and so access to money from the break-up of the state machinery can give you an unfair advantage. To some extent social mobility in these states for those coming up in enterprise is currently greater than such small business people struggling in the UK. Many successful British entrepreneurs come from outside the UK especially from Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent, rather than from within Britian. That is because they can draw on resources unfettered by British constraints. In addition they have often had access to the best education that their British equivalents are denied. This is one explanation for the growing percentage of people from an Asian background working as doctors in the UK. Ordinary white and black British people simply do not have access to sufficiently high level schooling to even aspire to be doctors and the wealthy whites in Britain lack the altruistic attitudes of their Asian-background counterparts to do something as beneficial as care for people.
The sharp divisions in Britain were exacerbated in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90) infamously said there was no society, just families and individuals. However, her policies reinforced the social divisions in the UK. She was the daughter of a grocer and had only attended grammar school (i.e. a free school, though in the upper educational category) in her youth and yet made it to be prime minister, something I doubt will be repeated in the UK in coming decades. Her obsession with property-ownership wrecked the state housing sector (which in Scotland had housed 60% of the population) and pushed people to own property or to be seen as irrelevant. The rise in house prices increased homelessness, rising the numbers of people living on the streets or temporary accommodation and also removed from many working class people affordable housing permitting them the money to spend on improvement for themselves and their children, especially in terms of education. In addition, Thatcher scrapped grants for students to attend university substituting loans instead. Working class people have less access to credit and a greater aversion to debt than people in other classes so again it closed down what had been becoming at least one way for working class people to get on through education. This was worsened anyway by budget cuts on education and pressure on local authorities who ran schools at the time to cut their expenditure too. Certain schools were encouraged to leave the local authority system and it was these elite 'grant-maintained' schools which received direct, generous government money whilst the so-called 'bog standard' schools that most children attend could only survive by not repairing buildings, by selling off playing fields and fund-raising events.
Whilst the UK, like the rest of the industrialised world was facing shifts in industrial patterns, the economic policies of Thatcher led to a very abrupt closure of manufacturing industries leading to unemployment of over 4 million people (about 16% of the working population of the time). Whilst work in manufacturing and related industries, such as fuel resources, was varied there were many skilled jobs that had paid well in the 1960s and 1970s. In their place came low-skilled, low-paid service jobs, so cutting household incomes among working class people and also destroying the ladder for improvement through skill development and hard work. In a call centre you come and leave without having gained new skills and there is little chance for promotion. Similarly the casualisation of labour has increased with large numbers of even office workers being on short-term contracts. If they lack the skills needed when a company changes methods they are simply laid off and other workers employed. Businesses constantly whine that they want schools and universities to train workers to exactly match the skills they need; yet seem entirely unwilling to see a role for themselves in that process, again another difference from comparator countries, notably France and Germany.
Thus, through the 1980s the few opportunities for a solid base for the working class (the majority of the population) and their chances to rise up the societal ladder were pretty quickly smashed. John Major (Prime Minister 1990-7) who worked as an ordinary bank manager and rose to the highest position in the UK liked to talk of the UK's 'classless society' (for those unfamiliar with UK terminology 'class' in UK usually refers to socio-economic groupings, commonly working, middle and upper classes and sub-divisions in these; since the 1980s we have also had the 'underclass', people who are deemed to have dropped out the bottom of society and are usually homeless). In the early days of his regime Blair also spoke in the same terms, though it is notable that it did not survive his first time of office (1997-2001). It is clear that any reference to classlessness was a fantasy. Unemployment has fallen in the UK since the end of the 1980s, but the restructured economy is still very rigid in preventing people rising socially.
Why am I going on about all of this now? Well, it is because some people have been shocked by evidence that has appeared this week that brings how the reality of it. At the age of 5 the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds score far higher than the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds in terms of communication skills and other scholarly measures. By the age of 7 however, the least intelligent children from rich backgrounds exceed even the most intelligent children from poor backgrounds and from then on the poor children never catch up ever again and throughout the rest of their schooling never match less intelligent rich children. Partly this stems from the way British schooling works with the emphasis on projects and getting internet resources; the heavy encouragement to take additional classes outside of school hours and increasingly that children need to have home tutors too, all of these things are beyond my budget (and as I keep saying I earn 50% more than the average annual salary so am far from 'poor') let alone the average working class family's resources. With secondary schools being increasingly selective, when they reach 11, the poor children lose out in entrance tests to rich children who on an objective basis are less intelligent than them. Again partly this is because the tests are focused on knowledge common in the middle and upper social classes rather than the experience of the working class. It is not surprising then that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (reckoned to be the best universities in the UK) still take over 47% of their students from private schools (there are about 2000 private schools in the UK out of a total of around 30,000 schools of all kinds; primary schools tend to be much smaller so there are 22,300 of these whether state or private alone). More politicians for example have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge than any other university, so being blocked from them means you are often effectively blocked from parliament and alternative routes of the past such as coming through a trade union to being a member of parliament have been weakened as trade unions were hammered under Thatcher and have haemorraged members in an era when people are on short-term contracts and fearful of not being re-employed if they are politically active.
What has alarmed the government (and it is good to see that they are alarmed rather complacent) is that despite all the policies of the last decade under a Labour government (which coming from a Socialist background is supposed to be equality of opportunities for all) and an awareness of the need to challenge social division at least going back to the Labour governments of 1964-70, as a UK citizen it is as unlikely that your standing in society will improve during your life as it would have been 33 years ago. You could walk into a maternity ward at a hospital today and accurately predict the kind of work all the babies there will be doing in 2025 just by looking at their parents. (In fact whether you chose a state-run hospital or a private one would give you a good clue for a start). None of those babies will be able to improve on the level of income or education that their parents have.
Recently there was commentary on the novel by Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' (1932) which tends to get overlooked when referring to dystopian novels in favour of '1984' by George Orwell (1948). However, the novel shows a society driven by consumerism and in which happiness comes in the form of a pill. For this posting, though, is the fact that all children born in the UK of the novel (they are all test-tube babies) are categorised from birth into a range from Alpha to Epsilon depending on their mental abilities. That is effectively what we have in the UK today, except that an Alpha-intelligence baby from a poor family will be beaten in life by a rich Epsilon-intelligence baby. Our current dystopia is not even based on how beneficial a child can be to our society in terms of aptitude the way Huxley's was, it is far more arbitrary than that, it is simply based on who your parents are, nothing more.
Finally I have come to understand why in my teenage years my father encouraged me so strongly to emigrate. By then it was too late I was infected with the British fear of the unknown and instead shackled myself to a society in which I can never have any better standing than my father did. In fact in terms of income, adjusting for inflation, I earn much less than he did when he was my age.
If birth is the only qualification for success in the UK no wonder we are lagging behind rival countries. We effectively exclude millions of talented people from ever getting into a position to use their talents. How many people working in call centres in the UK, could instead be running successful businesses or government departments, if they had simply been born to richer parents? The UK would rather adhere to almost feudal mentalities than shake these up to benefit itself. I recognise that other industrialised countries do not have all the solutions, but if I was going to have a child I would want them to be born in one of those countries and at least feel that they could get as far as they have the ability to do so rather than being held back by the unbreakable caste system which denies them so many opportunities simply because of who I am rather than who the child is.
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