Looking back on education in the 1980s

No doubt in 30 years’ time, my current charges will discuss me and my colleagues: "You remember that bald chap who wore those awful black crepes and laughed at his own jokes," they may say. Well, that’s the hope: that we are remembered fondly once we are in career decline, and they hit their occupational peaks.

I used to have a French teacher who I didn't think was very good. In fairness, neither was I, as my current linguistic Francois skills still amount to being able to tell a random Pierre my name, where I live, and to ask them to point me in the direction of the nearest boulangerie. This teacher looked like Neil from the Young ones, with long greasy hair, as he called everyone ‘man’ and smelt of exotic herb. He was also an advocate for Deep Purple and wore the widest flares I have ever been unfortunate enough to witness in the flesh. While he was writing something about French cats on the blackboard, I climbed under his desk with a ruler and measured the girth of his trouser hems, much to the merriment of the rest of the disengaged. At the end of the lesson ‘Neil’ had a ‘chat’ which resulted in him lifting me clean off the ground as he held me against the wall and told me in no uncertain terms that his ‘flares were not to be measured’. I took the hint and had a grudging respect for him after, as he gained a well-deserved reputation as the hardest hippy in town.

As well as the dress sense, which has come on leaps and bounds since teaching in the 1980s (I have only once seen a leather elbowed jacket in my entire career…and yes, it was a geography teacher), the one major change, thankfully, is the eradication of violence meted out to kids at that time which, strangely, the parents never seemed to kick off about. Violence, nay fear, nay ‘discipline’ was viewed differently then, and the backing would generally fall on the side of the teacher, who would have had ‘just cause’ for such sadistic outbursts.

A typical example of teacher chic. Pixabay

There were no computers: I spent a total of about 10 minutes on one until the age of 23 when, at university in my second year, I had to go in and ask some young bucks ‘how to turn this thing on’ and ‘get that thing you write on, on the screen’. Instead, many hours were spent by educators in science writing up lessons on acetate and then projecting them onto a white wall, as we watched the dust particles float past and wished we were back in French. Running barefoot through the fields if you forgot your PE kit was accepted practice, as was the daily slap around the head.

And so, we move on: such practice has, mercifully, been assigned to the education dustbin of history. Your kids are genuinely safeguarded, from my experience, and treated in the main with the utmost respect, but maybe we have, as a collective, gone too far:

As I believe I may have mentioned in these pages before, aged around 15, I was called into the school hall with three others (and by God, we were thankful as we got away from the smells of the lab and the teacher with the dark green sweat patches on his underarms) to ‘speak to an old man who fancies a chat’.

We spent a good couple of hours in his company as he asked questions and did these random, yet hilarious comedy skits with funny voices, faces and walks as his eyes glistened through being appreciated by his intimate audience, despite their being a definitive sadness behind his eyes. Nowadays if a random old man turned up at the school for a chin wag, he would no doubt be carted off to the nearest police station.

Upon arriving home, having had a pleasant afternoon after legitimately skipping Science, I told my dad about the old chap. ‘Who was he’ he asked. ‘Not a clue…Spike something he was called’. ‘Milligan?’ he asked. I responded in the affirmative before I got a telling off for not knowing I was talking to one of the comedy greats. That said, I was thankful the old fella didn’t slap me around the head with a blackboard rubber, for my unfortunate teenage oversight.

• Brett Ellis is a teacher