Sit up and listen... Trouble in class after the death of respect

CHILDREN in Scotland’s primary schools are markedly worse-behaved than they were half a decade ago. Youngsters are more likely to talk out of turn, duck assigned work, give their teacher lip, use bad language and quarrel with their classmates – and their teachers, doing daily battle with mounting insolence, have little doubt where the blame lies.

‘One common explanation was that inappropriate language and disrespectful treatment of others on social media has increased, and this type of behaviour has therefore been normalised in society,’ the Ipsos MORI survey reports.

‘It was suggested young people’s exposure to this means they are less able to determine the correct way to interact with others… Teaching and support staff felt some parents would assume that an incident has happened as a result of something the school has done rather than their child. This was linked to a wider societal blame culture.’

For those of us who completed our primary schooling in the Seventies – never mind before – all this sounds like some fantastic and distant planet.

We would never have dreamed of swearing in class, insulting the teacher or refusing to do some prescribed exercise – and not just because, until the abolition of corporal punishment in the mid1980s, we were dealing with men and women who could physically attack us.

In my entire primary career I only twice saw the belt wielded in class.

The knowledge that it was there, in the drawer of the teacher’s desk was enough; and teachers – at least in that pleasant, soft-spoken quarter of Glasgow – did not need it.

PERHapS I had exceptionally good teachers and, as one of my most respected old schoolmarms chuckled in my hearing earlier this year: ‘Good teaching is just a lot of hammy acting. It’s wonderful how much you can control a classroom of children with little more than your eyes…’

But we were also, 40-odd years ago, in a very different society. The essentials of the primary curriculum, and the way it was taught, had scarcely changed since the 1920s and we were then still very much in the solemnising shadow of the Second World War.

There have been three obvious changes. Scotland, even in the early Seventies, was a much more religious society than it is now. Church attendance was much higher and, on Sundays, city streets were otherwise deserted.

Most of us had some sort of church connection and I still remember the general consternation in my junior secondary class, as late as 1979, when it emerged that one boy had never been baptised.

Of course the mass of that religious commitment was a vague, blobby, Boys’ Brigade ‘churchianity,’ but in one respect it was extremely important: it meant that from infancy and for at least an hour once a week, we were trained to go out in public, gather quietly for worship with all sorts of grownups, sit fast and listen.

Few youngsters have that experience today, and its grounding in stillness, attention and dignity, and their classroom experience must suffer accordingly. But it also strikes me – and it is evident from memory, and from the many former school buildings now converted, demolished or derelict all over Scotland – that, 40 years ago, there were many more children.

Women tended to marry young and have larger families, which in turn meant that – mum being generally preoccupied not just with housework but the latest baby – there was general disapproval of us hanging around the house and ‘under her feet’.

When we were not at school, then, and unless the weather was absolutely appalling, we were briskly ushered outside and made most aware we were on no account again to present ourselves till it was time for dinner.

So our childhood experience was much more an outdoors one, I think, than it is for youngsters today; it involved much more interaction with other children; and it was far more physical – doing actual stuff, not gazing vacantly at a screen or jabbing at a device.

The third big thing was that there was still, then, a very strong concept of childhood, of children as a class apart and treated very differently from adults. as a glance at any Sixties snap of some busy Clyde resort reminds you, even on holiday children were dressed differently from adults.

We were reared to treat all grown-ups, even strangers, with profound respect. When our parents entertained, we were fed out of sight. We instinctively knew – and our teachers could assume – that our parents were on their side.

We read much more than youngsters do now – there were far more comics, and surprisingly intelligent weeklies such as Look and Learn; we ate meals at regular times, around a family table, and got a great deal more sleep, being ushered to bed at an early hour.

THERE was also a culture of what one can only describe as ‘moral hygiene’. In those days you never heard bad language in public.

Most families had only one TV set, invariably in the main living-room. What you were allowed to watch was closely supervised and it was switched off if visitors turned up.

We fret, now, about what children might view online or be up to on social networks as Snapchat, but I have never understood the mentality of parents who let a child have his own TV set in his bedroom – increasingly common from the late Eighties – and watch whatever he wishes without the least parental guidance.

as that Ipsos MORI study makes clear, the problem is not that a growing minority of Scottish children are bad, but that more and more are badly socialised.

We should increasingly question the untrammelled use of smartphones and devices. I am already encountering youths of 20 or so who cannot conduct anything like a coherent conversation and prefer to communicate by text or email.

It is disturbing to look around you on public transport – often in a lively city street or amid beautiful countryside – and see so many absorbed in their little screens; or, amidst the crowds in Nottingham who flocked to see Meghan Markle the other weekend, how many tried to film the moment rather than simply live in it.

We like to mock the ‘Me’ generation – poor little snowflakes with no respect for authority, whose doting parents will blame Teacher for any affronting classroom experience.

But my real fear is that it is a profoundly damaged one, at once moulded – and increasingly fragmented – by technology still in its infancy, with societal consequences still fully to emerge and beyond our worst imagining.