The Golden Age of Education By Mark Pollard

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Anyone who regularly reads the letters pages of The Hull Daily Mail is probably aware of a serial contributor by the name of Lionel F. Cerny. I think he's probably a retired teacher, because one of his major, recurring letter-writing themes is the state of today's education and today's children, within which he tries to adopt a lofty, expert tone. He believes we should abandon trendy teaching methods and go back to basics by returning to the approaches used in the so-called Golden Age of Education. The three Rs. Corporal punishment. Probably thinks Latin should be compulsory, too. Excramentum.

The fact that the vast majority of the population have had at least some experience of education, either as a pupil or a student, means that they are entitled, and possibly qualified, to pass an opinion on the subject. However, most people haven't actually worked in or studied education, and I worry that they might be rather too easily convinced that the likes of Mr Cerny are right. Statistically, many of them will be readers of the Daily Mail or Express, and will therefore be even more easily convinced by his conservative and backward-looking philosophy. So, my aim here is to shatter the myths of this Golden Age of Education.

Great Myth Number One is that a return to classroom values of the past would solve the problem of poor pupil behaviour. Wrong. I would go even further, and say that the methods employed in the past were actually a major cause of many of today's problems. Let me explain. I have taught in a couple of challenging inner city secondary schools, and one of the problems we faced was that of dealing with the children of parents who were not just apathetic towards the notion of education, but often antagonistic.

Anti-education and anti-teacher, in fact. Everybody knows that education is a good thing, and that parents should be supportive of what schools are trying to achieve for their kids, but I lost count of the number of times I contacted parents to discuss their kids' poor conduct, only to be met with a wall of defensiveness. They were often more keen to find out exactly what other pupils, or even I, had done to cause their child to behave badly, rather than face up to that bad behaviour and help to come up with ways of avoiding any repeats in the future. But he wouldn't have told you to fuck off three times without a good reason now, would he....? That's right. How unfair of me to keep asking little Billy to stay in his seat and get on with his work without distracting others…….

So why are so many parents so openly hostile? One of the reasons is that, like me, they probably went to a school where it was considered normal for a grown adult (usually large, surly and male) to physically assault children as young as eleven, in front of their peers, with pieces of wood. Sounds fucking awful when it's written down like that, doesn't it? I didn't even go to a rough school - South Holderness, out in the sticks. Nice, rather than tough.

They still brutalised us though. I remember one guy in particular, a music teacher - we'll call him Mr X. Actually, bollocks to the anonymity; he never afforded us any when we had to drop our trousers to be caned in front of 30 other kids for giggling while he droned on about tones and semi-tones. His name was Riley - George Riley, I think, and he was a sadistic son of a bitch. Not only did he clearly take great pleasure from whacking kids to the point of tears, but, like a number of other teachers at the school, he revelled in his reputation of being seen as a bit of a bastard. It seems that one of the characteristics of many teachers from this era was that they had to have a genuine dislike of other people's children.

I'm a grown man now; not only that, but I've worked as a teacher for the best part of ten years myself. I swear though, if I met this fucker Riley in the street tomorrow I would be sorely tempted to shake him warmly by the throat. The fact that he'll be a very old man (if not dead) by now would probably spare him.

That's just one story. How many thousand other kids were similarly affected by teachers from that era? No wonder so many have gone on to become anti-teacher parents. I'm lucky; from working in education I know that things are very different today - teachers are simply not allowed to behave like that any more. Most parents don't have the benefit of that extra insight though, and many of them probably think that their kids only misbehave because they've been humiliated or provoked by some cruel bastard like George Riley. That's the legacy of The Golden Age for you.

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