An object lesson in why school is much more fun these days

IWAS up early yesterday, out on the road with a mug of tea, as the children – the smallest escorted by their mums, the biggest resplendent in their blazers – at last returned to class.

It was the deepest, most stirring sight after a crisis that cancelled school, cancelled summer, cancelled normal and, profoundly, cancelled childhood itself.

In the library of my old school at Jordanhill, the largest and most popular fiction section is a great book case labelled only ‘Dystopian’.

After months of the real thing, I suspect pupil demand will fall off a cliff.

Even now, 37 years after I last had to knot that tie and show up for registration, August still brings a certain tightening of the tummy.

Early in that moist, fly-blown month – and it must have been like herding cats – my mother would remorselessly round us up and haul us down town by the Blue Train to kit us out for the latest session.

Cheap trousers, polyester shirts… and it seriously mattered where you bought your Jordanhill blazer.

Those who could afford it donned the A1 quality number from a store called Paisleys. Those of slender means had to brave their peers in one with a slight hint of purple from Birss’s of Partick.

In G13, where high doh in domestic crisis is, these days, where best to secure raspberry wine vinegar for your radicchio, details like this really mattered.

There was, too, the related drama of acquiring other essentials, from HB pencils to blotty cartridge pens. To this day, I still cannot glimpse an Oxford Set of Mathematical Instruments without looking wildly around for a weapon.

AND, within days of our return to the sacred precincts, my mother had by school decree to jacket our every last jotter in brown wrapping paper. It was a different age. Save for Wednesday registration, every school day began with morning assembly – a collective act of worship, including prayer, a hymn and a Bible reading by some quivering sixth year.

Mr Branston, our headmaster, a veteran of Hitler’s war, had a taste for particularly violent hymns. Our anchors held in the storm of life, soldiers of the cross arose, we did fight the good fight with all our might and yielded not to temptation, for temptation was sin.

Our music master, the memorable Nimmo Davidson – whose task it was to play the piano at assembly – was once asked what he would like to give Mr Branston for Christmas.

‘A copy of the Church Hymnary,’ he replied heavily, ‘without I Feel the Winds of God Today, Today My Soul Will Lift…’ It was another world.

Last year, a room in the school building was kitted out as a ‘Safe Space’. Pupils can retire to it after being triggered by some micro-aggression by a total ageing loser who forgot to check his white male heteronormative privilege.

I can imagine the soft furnishing, a framed inspirational quote or three and the gentle, lowing soundtrack of whalesong. In my day, we had so much jolly, genial violence. Younglings of today cannot imagine a school order where teachers could physically attack you, enjoyed a sly fag in the school corridor and threw operatic fits of rage. In 2017, I enjoyed an afternoon of reminiscence with one of those splendid personalities.

‘What you must remember, John,’ said Miss McArthur, who had spent her retirement exploring China and, in her 80s, taken avidly to Sudoku puzzles, ‘is that teaching is really just a lot of hammy acting.’ In those days the classroom really was a stage, teachers enjoying none of today’s electronic wonders – though I do remember the excitement, about 1977, when our school acquired a Betamax video recorder.

Nor was there then a culture of children working together in huddles. We had to sit in rows facing the mistress and, at least at my school, with boys and girls in separate groups.

We then were made to learn much simply by copying things down from the blackboard or out of a book and chant all sorts of things by rote – multiplication tables, rules of spelling and grammar and, later, Latin declension.

Even then, one knew that much of it was unlikely to be of much use in adult life.

Not since I was 17 have I had to identify part of a sentence as a ‘subordinate adverbial clause of time’ and, though I do remember that Avogadro had a number, I am afraid I have forgotten it. If the 1930s was ‘that low, dishonest decade,’ the 1970s was a strained and tawdry one, where traditions such as churchgoing, decent language and dressing formally still enjoyed lip service, but the beliefs and values behind them were rapidly disintegrating.

Much has passed away that we need not lament. Few would wish to see corporal punishment return to classrooms and teachers are, today, strongly discouraged from shouting at their charges.

GIRLS now enjoy an equality of opportunities few schools offered four decades ago, when they were too often steered away from things such as physics or technical drawing. Schools today are brighter and a great deal cleaner. Most subjects are taught more imaginatively and with strong emphasis on communication.

If there are regrets, one would be the tilt away from the three Rs and humanities to ‘Stem’ subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths.

This has been at the decree of successive governments, but such subjects as history and modern languages are in sad neglect and the writing skills of too many school leavers are not what they should be. Looking

back, the 1970s was an era when most adults loathed children, probably because there were so many of us and we were strangers to what most of our seniors had endured 30 and 40 years before. School today, from what I can gather, is far more fun.

Teachers are better trained, classrooms now enjoy wonderful technology, adults no longer prowl around in black gowns brandishing the belt and sixth years enjoy bouncy castles and face-painting on their last day. All I got was tea and a ham sandwich in the library as I was patronised by the principal teacher of modern languages.

Most of us would now, in hindsight, agree the decision in March to close all our schools was a grotesque overreaction – save those Trots in the teaching unions still trying to weaponise the issue, if only to bring down the Government. Yet no teacher anywhere, the world over, has caught coronavirus from a pupil.

We let our children down badly, this 2020 – robbed them of education, of sport, of swings and roundabouts, of their very privacy and of the vital physical presence of their peers.

But it’s still so funny, if you’re my age, to watch them hurtling back for the first day of a new session and without a hint of trepidation.