So why DID we stay silent about the monsters that lurked in our classrooms?

THE projectile flew out of the science teacher’s hand and whistled past my left ear. It missed its intended target, sitting behind me in the second row of the classroom, clattered against the workbench in the third row and fell to the floor.

Only when our educator went to retrieve it did I realise the missile was a wooden blackboard duster, thrown in rage because someone was not paying attention.

On this occasion, his aim was poor. What, I wonder now (but didn’t then) did the aftermath look like when he scored a direct hit – or was so off target the duster slammed into the forehead of the wrong pupil? How does a teacher explain throwing bits of wood across a classroom at a 12-year-old?

Dangerous

I have mentioned this incident in St Andrews to contemporaries who grew up in other parts of Scotland and, on each occasion, they have nodded in recognition and recounted similar tales.

In the early 1980s, dangerous objects regularly flew across Scottish classrooms as an expression of teachers’ ire. We all saw it – and that was not the worst of it.

I saw another teacher beating a boy about the head as the youngster tried to shield his cranium with his arms. The attack came without warning after Sir spotted the boy playing the word game hangman with his pal when he was supposed to be hanging on the teacher’s every word.

It was an ugly scene then and it grows uglier as the years pass: 30 witnesses sitting in silence as a 6ft man assaults a defenceless child.

Weeks earlier, a teacher I remember more fondly gave me a row for playfully hitting a schoolmate over the head with a jotter. He knew it was only high jinks, he told me, but some children’s heads are ‘eggshell thin’.

How many times over the years have I looked back and juxtaposed those two incidents? The mindful teacher, acutely conscious of his responsibility for the welfare of pupils in his classroom – and the out-of-control one, lashing out in fury, heedless of the potential consequences for the boy or his own career.

I suspect a great many of us will have pondered our school years this week after BBC presenter Nicky Campbell, 61, devoted his Radio 5 Live show to reflections on his time at the Edinburgh Academy during the 1970s.

He spoke of incidents from 50 years ago which he had thought about ever since, yet rarely discussed and never made public.

One teacher beat him black and blue, tossing him around ‘like a rag doll’.

The same man brazenly performed a sex act on a terrified pupil right in front of Campbell in the changing rooms after rugby practice.

Another teacher used to put pupils over his knee and tickle them in front of class, putting his hands in highly inappropriate places.

The memories were seared into Campbell’s consciousness and shaped the man he became. He says he can never ‘unsee’ them. And yet, when he asks himself why most of what he witnessed went unreported, he comes up short.

‘Why didn’t we as little boys tell anyone in power what was happening? I don’t know.’

I am a few years younger than Campbell. That may partially account for the fact that the worst behaviour I witnessed at my secondary school was milder than that which haunts the BBC presenter’s memories.

Scots who are years older than him may live with still more grotesque recollections from childhoods sullied by sadists and perverts who, inexplicably, were trusted to be in the same room as them.

By and large, the direction of travel in education is towards safer classrooms and more stringent vetting of those whose motives for being around youngsters are questionable.

But the question Campbell struggles to answer applies equally to us all. Why didn’t we speak up?

‘Mum, today our science teacher threw a wooden duster across the classroom at a boy. It nearly hit me. Should that be happening?’

‘Dad, the teacher beat up Graham today. He was playing hangman when he should have been listening. I was scared. Sir didn’t seem to be in control.’

Did we stay silent because, even in our pre-pubescent innocence, we understood the regimes in our parents’ schools were less sparing still? Was it because we had grown up on comics depicting Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx et al receiving six of the best on their bottoms from monsters in mortar boards? Did we, in those days, not consider the assailants monsters?

I cannot say with any certainty. What I can say is, if my daughter had come home telling similar tales to the ones I didn’t tell, her school would have known all about it.

Scandal

She didn’t, of course. Teenagers of the 1980s weathered a degree of teacher misconduct that was normalised in their era. In hers it would have been a scandal.

The teacher I think about most often was a preening, middle-aged man who had an unhealthy fascination with boys of a certain age.

I sat in his class for two years and didn’t twig until they were nearly over that he barely even noticed the female pupils present, stared straight through them.

After that, as Nicky Campbell might say, it was impossible to unsee.

The day I was told to see him at lunchtime for the crime of failing to wear a tie at morning assembly has never left me. I was ordered to the back of the class and told to take a round biscuit tin from a cupboard. Disappointingly, there were no biscuits in it.

Coiled inside was a pristine brown tawse – still legal in Scotland in those days – which he ordered me to remove and hand to him. Then I was to assume the position.

For forgetting my tie? This wasn’t discipline. It was gratification. He should not have been alone with children. Still less should a child have been alone with him.

Mercifully, my school’s motto, ‘The old order changeth’ was on the money. His kind were a dying breed and fantastic teachers abounded.

Memories

Two random memories from my sixth year at secondary always cheer me up.

During a free period in the library, I guffawed loudly just as an English teacher walked past. He froze, turned and demanded to know what I thought was so funny.

‘I’m reading Catch-22,’ I said, flashing the book at him.

‘Ah well,’ he said, delightedly, ‘you’ll be laughing a lot!’

Another English teacher once told our class she was insanely jealous of us all.

‘How much Shakespeare have you read?’ she asked.

‘Macbeth? Romeo and Juliet at a push? You don’t know what I wouldn’t give to have all that wonderful reading still in front of me, you lucky, lucky so-and-sos.’

We were growing up. The teachers’ tone confirmed it.

And we were indeed lucky. Our schooldays were nearly over and most of our educators had excelled. We’d remember them with affection and gratitude.

But shadowy figures imbue memories of state secondary too and, the older we get, the more we understand who they were and why they have stayed in our heads longer than we ever imagined. These, after all, were formative years.

Discipline may not be modern schools’ strongest suit. But there are worse things than that.