Memories: The terror of the 1980s

 

Corporal punishment when he was at school in the 1980s was terrifying, says Chris Britcher, a local newspaper columnist in England, writing in 2022.

When I attended a secondary school in Kent in the 1980s one teacher saw his long and illustrious career come to a grinding halt when he bashed the head of a pupil against the wall of a classroom. Repeatedly.

Clearly he wanted some gem of wisdom to get through the teenager’s thick - albeit now bruised - skull.

It did, if nothing else, underline this particular teacher’s reputation which had long since made its way into the corridors of the various feeder schools which funnelled kids into this particular establishment; putting the fear of God into us all in the process.

It was a tad extreme, but an incident, as you can imagine, which caused enormous excitement among those of us who had avoided such treatment yet could revel in the drama.

In truth, it was the sort of thing which gave you a certain respect for the staff - they could bite back.

In the same school, a friend of mine had his hand pierced by one of those big blackboard compasses being hurled by a maths teacher who wanted him to pipe down. It worked. Well, up until he started writhing in agony and pulled the offending piece of equipment out of the fold of skin in which it had embedded itself.

I can’t remember quite what the outcome of it all was, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, his parents kicked up a fuss and, as far as my time at the school lasted, I never caught wind of him launching any piece of geometric gear at a student again.

So a lesson learnt at least.

While, in a less violent example, one teacher cut himself during a biology lesson and then memorably smeared the blood from his wound on the page of a pupil’s exercise book.

Ruddy funny at the time, I can tell you. But slightly terrifying too. The lesson I took from it all was that it was probably best not to mess with the teachers.

But then I’d attended a primary school on the other side of the county where a misdemeanour would see you sent to the headmaster who, in his arsenal of punishments, had the ability to whack you with a cane.

Frankly, it had the desired effect on me - which was that I never stepped over the line enough to warrant what seems now like such draconian action.

Yet this was an era when teachers would have few qualms about breaking the ice (literally) on the outside, unheated. swimming pool (state schools, remarkably, seem to all have them back then) and then pretty much pushing you in only for parts of your body to shrink back into where once they had come.

Or you were all forced to strip naked and have a shower while a teacher watched on.

Strange times really, viewed through today’s eyes; just something to endure for those of us who experienced it. If that’s what we were instructed to do, well, that’s what we did.

As published on Kent online, 31 December 2022

Picture credit: Generated by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)

 

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