When Was the Last Time You Set Foot in a School?

Many people leave school never to return. Unless you go on to have children yourself or have employment in a school, why would you return? If you are a British city dweller, you often find yourself walking past various large building complexes that supposedly serve to give children an education, but do you know what goes on inside them?

Everybody should care about what goes on inside schools. These places play a large role in shaping young minds, and it´s true what they say, children are the future (scary thought). Besides that, billions of British taxpayer money goes down the drain in trying to educate our youth. That alone should spark your interest. Who knows, maybe one day you´ll have no choice but to send your own offspring to one of these sad excuses for a school, or perhaps you already have done, in which case, I am truly very sorry.

Let´s take a trip down memory lane together in order to give you a first-hand idea. I haven´t gone back to a British secondary school since I finished my own schooling (I couldn´t get away fast enough), but I can clearly recall my school life as if it were yesterday. It´s hard to forget something so shocking.

My school was nothing special, it was not the best of schools nor the worst (another scary thought), it was a typical bog-standard British comprehensive that can be found up and down the country. The only aspect that was different was that it was new, unlike most secondary schools that have been standing since the fifties or earlier, my school had been knocked down and rebuilt to open for the 1999 academic year. This was done, I imagine, to accommodate London´s ever-increasing overpopulation. Some of my classes had as many as thirty students in them, spare a thought for my poor teachers. The fact that my school was new only serves to demonstrate further how much money is wasted on education, as you shall see.

So, dear reader, the year is 2004, Blair and Bush are bringing death and destruction to the Middle East, social media is still in its infancy, and the British public is enthralled by Big Brother. It´s the beginning of September and a much younger version of myself is excitedly putting on his new school uniform. He´s finally leaving school for little kids and joining the big boys. Little does he know the next few years will be some of his worst. They say your childhood is the best time of your life, but I´ve never been happier since I grew up and left school.

To enter my new school, I had to go through the front gate. That was a pretty uneventful place apart from one time of the day, the final school bell. When school starts in the morning, punctuality is pretty appalling, so there is a constant trickle of students who arrive little by little. As a result, the damage is spread out over a longer period of time. At the end of the day, however, all hell breaks loose.

At around 2:30 pm, almost two thousand students are released to terrorize the local neighbourhood. After a few years, they even had to get the local police, often on horseback, to patrol the streets outside my school. The kids would simply do the same thing they did within the school grounds, but this time among the general public, eventually, enough people complained to the authorities so they had to get the police involved. Screaming and shouting, vandalism, fighting, throwing footballs at cars and buses, littering, intimidating local residents, stealing from the local shops, the list goes on.

Walking down the corridors was often bedlam if you did so when the kids were all going from one class to the next. If you ended up in a crowded corridor at the worst times, it was genuinely a stampede. I have even seen a few kids fall and get trampled on. Thanks to health and safety rules, there were quite a few fire extinguishers throughout the school. I´m not sure how much was left in them though if you ever tried to use one. I have been sprayed multiple times by random kids messing around with them. It was not uncommon to find the odd broken window or door here and there, broken by accident of course.

Let´s take a look at a typical classroom. Upon entering the room, the first thing that strikes you is that the tables are often grouped together in a way that the children face each other instead of the teacher. In theory, this is to facilitate group work. In practice, this makes it easier to ignore the teacher and spend the class mucking about. During my years at school, New labour spent a fortune installing interactive whiteboards in all classrooms, in the end we hardly used them. Most of the time we barely got any work done, children in the sixties with nothing but a chalkboard learnt more than we did.

In all my classes there was a shortage of textbooks. More than enough books were bought by the school, the problem was that the children destroyed or stole them. Things were sometimes so dire I had to share one book with two other students. The textbooks that were left were often in a bad state with, let´s say, colorful illustrations left by other children, sometimes rendering them unusable. On any given desk you can find plenty of graffiti left by students who spent their lessons drawing on them instead of doing any work. If you peeked under the desk, you would be delighted to find it covered with chewing gum.

The classroom is the main battleground between teachers and students. My class reduced three different teachers to tears in front of us, and I am sure more cried in private. One class in my year group was so terrible that they simply abolished it. The students were divided into pairs and each pair joined a different class. That way, no teacher would have to put up with them anymore.

Let´s move on to P.E. We were required to do two hours of physical education each week, and this was the lesson I personally hated the most. I even used to play hooky on many occasions to get out of having to do it. The part where you do sport is generally tolerable, the problem is the changing rooms. The other kids can hide your possessions (your clothes, bag, etc.) as you have no choice but to leave them there unattended. Children would participate in cultured activities such as coming up behind you and pulling your trousers down and throwing things at your head. As with everything else, the children had no respect for any of the sports equipment, broken table tennis bats, smashed badminton rackets, punctured basketballs, etc. A colossal waste of money.

The music department had the fortune to possess a wide range of expensive musical instruments available for the children to use (guitars, pianos, keyboards, drum kits, etc.) We even had the “music rooms”, little soundproof rooms for us to practise in. The problem is, as I´m sure you can guess by now, the instruments were often broken. Pianos and keyboards didn´t work or had keys missing, guitars had broken strings, drums had holes in them, etc. Among the children, classes such as music were less respected compared to core subjects such as Maths or Science, so the behaviour tended to be even worse. Three years of music classes and I genuinely learnt nothing.

I.C.T was another class where I learnt nothing. The computers were meant to block websites that were inappropriate but it was easy to find a way around it. Lessons consisted of causing havoc, playing video games, and looking up pornographic material.

There are now few experiments left in science class thanks to health and safety. Having said that, many of the students do carry out their own experiments. Students mess about and ruin the class for everybody, get away with it, then repeat it again the next day. They then draw the conclusion that they can do whatever they like and there won´t ever be any consequences. The sad part is, their conclusions are correct.

Finally, let´s have a look at the playground and school grounds. The playground (as well as the corridors) at break time and lunchtime, like a prison yard, tend to be the most dangerous part of your day. You have over a thousand kids let loose with very little adult supervision (not that adult supervision makes much of a difference anymore). This is where most fights take place, and where you´re most likely to be assaulted or have something unpleasant done to you. The place tends to be a pigsty too. Depending on the time of day, you can find litter thrown all over the place; plastic bottles, chocolate wrappers, crisp packets, soft drink cans, etc. It´s no wonder they can´t sit still in class.

I could go on but I think you get the point. If you think I´m exaggerating, I´m not. Everything I have written is one hundred percent true. Never in history has society been so wealthy, yet an incredible amount of it simply goes to waste. It´s astonishing how many people are still so naive regarding modern schools, many still believe what the government tells them on the issue. Until a large-scale cultural movement takes place, nothing will change. Schools are as bad now as they were when I went to one and I don´t have much hope for the future.

Related posts:

The Butterfly Pea Flower, or butterfly pea flower Ternatea, is a beautiful and exotic flower native to tropical and subtropical regions of the world. It is a perennial vine with bright blue flowers…

Recuerdo una vez le dije. “Ni de lejos.” is published by José Manuel Cuevas in Poesía en español.

Graphic design is a form of visual communication that involves creating a visual representation of a message, idea, or concept. One of the most important aspects of graphic design is abstraction…