Will pupils really stand up for teachers?

David Cameron is a kind man, I think too kind for politics, perhaps. He was in the papers this week because he wants the nation’s education system to toughen up. He wants “real discipline, rigorous standards, hard subjects”. As opposed to “half-arsed discipline, sloppy standards and babyishly easy subjects”, his wish-list sounds pretty sensible to me. But I am not normal, I think. If you are born in the North to a Northern mother, who used no grace notes whatsoever in her daily discourse, you’re sure of a big surprise when you come to the soft South. I eventually grew used to meeting grown-up women who referred to their mothers as “Mummy” in conversation, and mothers (when I met them) who called their daughters Darling, even when they were jolly cross, and cajoled them to do things rather than telling them. All the mothers I knew gave orders. One leapt up to obey. David Cameron is not that normal either. He is from a very small percentage of the people of Britain whose schooling was in one place and whose parenting in another. His schooling, therefore, could be as hard and “Northern” in its discipline and rigour as my mother. While his mother didn’t need to be anything but totally sweet, darling. Cameron also, reportedly, wants “children who stand up when their parents or teacher walks in the room”. Charitably, I’ll assume that last bit was misreported, because he cannot have picked up that sort of grammar at Eton. It would have been ironed out of him long before, at his prep school (Heatherdown, in Berkshire, an Eton feeder school which also educated the Duke of York). Heatherdown closed in 1982, and I haven’t discussed it with either the Duke or the PM, but from tribal memory it was one of those fairly Sloaney schools where boys were allowed a lot of den-building, tree-climbing and running around the countryside (strictly “the grounds”, obviously, but a bosky and expansive 30 acres) while doing lessons “in hard subjects” even on Saturday mornings plus lots of prep in the evening in disciplined and rigorous silence. You can bet boys shuffled off their bottoms and assumed an upright position if teachers or parents walked into a classroom. Had they not, no Heatherdown boy would have got through the Eton interview. Cameron said: “Give head teachers and their staff the freedom to teach and run their schools; give parents greater choice and transparency about schools and their results and you can see fantastic outcomes. These things happen if you trust in schools, believe in choice and give parents more information.” Maybe he’s right. Me, I’m not so sure. Discipline is not a universally admired virtue in 21st-century Britain. Much of the methodology that got me through school would be vilified today by any sane member of the teaching profession. Learning by rote (once they’re past the age of four, and singing Five Fat Sausages Sizzling in the Pan) is seen as hopelessly Victorian. I had to learn passages from poems and speeches from plays. Maths teachers would come in and bark: “One to 20, come on now, hurry up, question one – Janet if you don’t start now you’ll get nothing out of 20 – number two, what is 37 multiplied by 14?” My daughter, now 30, went to a boarding school in Bristol where children stood up fairly smartly when visiting parents were whisked into classrooms by a pupil-guide. “And we stood for the headmaster, but not for other teachers at all.” Before that, she was at the local primary as a very little thing. “We had to say good morning to Mr Martin every morning in assembly, and to Mrs Freeman in class. There was a definite tune to the lacklustreness of it. Rising on the 'good’, higher on the 'mor’ then down the scale again all the way through '-ning miss-der mar’ and a slight rise on the last '-tin’. It was soul-destroying. One day he made us say it again three times to try to stop the singsongness of it.” No discipline, you see.