This week’s killing in The Kerryman newspaper this week.
The Rose of Tralee is over; congratulations to the Laois Rose, Katelyn Cummins on winning this year’s title.
The summer tourist season is drawing to a close and in its place school uniforms are appearing on the highways and byways across the county; school buses are on the roads again. It’s back to school time; I still remember those lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like it, which was the play on the curriculum the year I sat the Intermediate Certificate. Name change to Junior Certificate happened in 1992.
‘And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school.’
No mention of the girls going to school or maybe it was that they were far more delighted about heading to school. I doubt it.
This time of year, always prompts me to think of the so-called ‘good old days’. They were anything but.
When I see children going and coming from school I’m flabbergasted to see how happy and jolly most of them are. We have come a long way on the educational road.
My father, who was a quiet and gentle man, born in 1909, would on occasion speak about the cruelty he saw in his school days, though I never heard my mother talk negatively of her school days, indeed, over the years she kept in touch with some of her former teachers.
I remember having a teacher in sixth class rise on his toes so that when slapping us with the leather there would be more force when it landed on our hands. I saw and experienced horrendous violence and cruelty in my school years. And that went on until corporal punishment was stopped in 1982 but only became a criminal offence in 1997. I place that date with the introduction of free secondary education as one of the two great milestones in Irish education.
Shakespeare is giving us a hint of what must have gone on in English schools too.
It was pure barbarity. In later life I met that teacher, who practised the art of the tippy toes method to inflict as much pain as possible. That behaviour was meted out to little children of 10/11/12 years of age.
When I mentioned it to him he looked profoundly sad and said; ‘please, don’t embarrass me’.
I remember a teacher putting a boy’s head in a wastepaper basket.
I imagine for the top stream pupils they enjoyed learning but for the majority of children they learned their lessons because if they did not know them the next day they would be subjected to violence.
Imagine learning poetry out of fear; can there be a better example of an oxymoron.
I know from my own teaching days, the teachers who never had to revert to any form of violence were the best teachers.
Teaching these days is not easy but the good teacher, the teacher who has prepared and done the homework will be appreciated and respected by the vast majority of pupils/students.
It takes many generations to undo such violence
It’s a miracle to see today’s children running me
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