Were teachers in the 60s like the Spanish inquisition?



Pick Nickering said:
Sadistic sums it up for me. Hitting in infant school, cane and other weapons like sand shoe and ruler in the juniors and anything goes in the seniors including punch in the ribs, dead arm, shaking, hair pulling and bitch slaps.
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Horrible old French teacher in pennywell comp,looked like the sort who knitted while sitting beside the guillotine in Paris,grabbed my hair and banged my head off the desk a few times,she was a “Miss” so had no kids of her own I hope 🙄
 
EchoMan said:
Are you sure they were clogs. My Missus used to wear those Scholl sandals with the wooden base. They could give you quite a wack as well mind as I can testify. Those were the days.
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You are right, she definitely had those and they were easier for her to keep a grip on, thick wooden soul. (She did have clogs for a bit like)
 
Pnematic1 said:
Brutal -( 1969 to 1974 )- seen lads punched , kicked , ruler , strap , cane , slipper , heads banged together and general bullying and humiliation.

The punishment was severe and wrong but the tough lads attitude was I did wrong. , got caught ….. I m going to get a beating. The smart money was on not getting caught.

A lot of teachers would be jailed now - old school bullies . The new wave 60s students started to filter in as teachers about this time with more liberal attitudes.

Me ? Kept my nose clean and head buried in books .
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Pretty much how I remember it during that era, Brayed so hard across the head you nearly saw stars, caned or rulered across the knuckles (ouch). Then as you rightly say the new, younger more liberal teachers came in, the ones who would let you call them by their first name etc. They were pretty much regarded with disdain by the old guard.
jcrossan said:
Some real sadistic bastards back then.
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At the time I just saw them as complete twats. In hindsight you're right. They were sadists & I'm convinced some got a kick out of it
 
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Luna17 said:
Don't mention the Spanish inquisition🤣
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Aye, you'll wake up Cardinal Fang.

I was schooled 60's and 70's, seen people hit in the head with thrown board wipers, smacked round the head with textbooks, punchings, slappings etc.

Saw two lads punched square in the face, one as a result of being the butt of a practical joke, he was a first year told to go and ask for the deputy head by his "nickname".

Without being blasé, that's how it was and no-one else gave two fucks about it.
 
I think the reason for being a teacher is constantly changing.
Pre 80s it's was poorly paid but so easy and you could hit kids.
90s pay was better , attracted more educated and professional teachers, who started to care.
00s to 2010s as a result of Blair getting everyone to go to uni , there were lots of people with a degree but nothing to do with it, so took up teaching.
2010s to 2020 workload becomes crippling, too many older teachers leave, so massive bribes given for people to teach.
Now. In secondary schools, you will be lucky if your teacher is qualified in the subject they are teaching. There is a real chance they have a supply teacher, who may be completely unqualified other than a dbs, maybe don't speak English well enough to be understood. Schools get charged about 250 pound per day by supply agencies , they will then keep 100 to 150 of that fee themselves.

Ask your kids
1) is your maths teacher also a PE teacher
2) how many of your teachers are supply teachers.
3) do all your teachers speak clear English.

You could be shocked , and should ask the school why

That's my "leftie" input
 
Cyrus said:
maybe don't speak English well enough to be understood.
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We had one of those in the early '80s at Pennywell Comp.

He was from Rowley Regis in the Midlands and had the most incomprehensible accent we'd ever heard at the time - he had to print out the lesson content and hand the sheets to us at the start of every lesson.
 
I attended an all boys secondary school during the l960's and I think it's fair to say that a significant number of the (entirely) male teaching staff had either done National Service or had been in the services and had seen action during WWII. (The latter would have only been in their late 40's at the time).

The approach to teaching those days therefore tended be based upon the rather banal values of a minor public school mixed with some military discipline. For example kids were only ever referred to by their surnames when they got to secondary school - it was always Smith Brown or Jones or whatever.The teaching staff whould never ever use a kids first name even if they has two or three Browns or Smiths in the same class. I was a strange form de-personalisation that I suspect was meant to prepare you for your adult life.

I have to say however the that any influence of Marxist Leninism and its derivatives were noticable absent throughout my childhood education. I do remember though that for some unknown reason religion especially that of the Church of England appeared to be regarded as being of great importance. This was so much the case that the Education Act at the time required the whole school to attend daily indoctrination sessions every morning .
 
Lord Potts said:
I have to say however the that any influence of Marxist Leninism and its derivatives were noticable absent throughout my childhood education.
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There was a history teacher at Pennywell called Walsh - 'Walshy the Bolshie' - who made no secret of his political affiliations.

He was an excellent teacher though - and taught us a lot about how economic and social conditions had a huge influence on the major events of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

For my GCE O-level course work he set me a 10,000 word essay on Trotsky, which was typical of him 🤣. It was, however, very interesting to research and earned me something like 40% of my final mark.
 
Jap Stammer said:
There was a history teacher at Pennywell called Walsh - 'Walshy the Bolshie' - who made no secret of his political affiliations.

He was an excellent teacher though - and taught us a lot about how economic and social conditions had a huge influence on the major events of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

For my GCE O-level course work he set me a 10,000 word essay on Trotsky, which was typical of him 🤣. It was, however, very interesting to research and earned me something like 40% of my final mark.
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Was that in the 1960's? All the O level (and A's) I ever took were by final examination only. There wasn't any of that course work nonsense until later. Even my Hons degree was by 20 final examination papers

It was definately the Bolshies who came up with the idea of course work though- most of the smarter kids got their mam's to do their "projects" anyway
 
Lord Potts said:
Was that in the 1960's? All the O level (and A's) I ever took were by final examination only. There wasn't any of that course work nonsense until later. Even my Hons degree was by 20 final examination papers

It was definately the Bolshies who came up with the idea of course work though- most of the smarter kids got their mam's to do their "projects" anyway
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No - early '80s.

And there wasn't a hope in hell of coursework (or homework) being done by parents, not in our house. I am proud to say it was all my own work.
 
PinzaC55 said:
Dunno about the 60s but in the 70s my experience was that there was a hard core of male teachers who got some kind of thrill out of inflicting pain on teenage lads who couldn't fight back without getting expelled. I'm sure some of them were nonces .
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Mine too, PE teachers in particular, bullies of the highest order. Belittling kids that weren’t naturally gifted at sport rather than encouraging them to find something they enjoyed as they were paid to do. Hated the f@ckers.
 
I'd say they were mixed
Once they closed that door they did wtf they wanted . Some were great (70s) . Not sure if they could be compared to the SI as I'm not that old
 
Not violent but very humiliating.

I was made to sit with my left hand behind my back and eat with my right hand because the female headteacher at my primary school saw that i was left handed. It was the early 70’s, i had no idea what i’d done wrong and the rest of the kids of course laughed at me as i failed badly to eat much, the headteacher then lambasted me for making a mess of my uniform and face. To that point i hadn’t realised i was “different” being left handed as at home my parents didn’t make any kind of thing of it. Was humiliating and made me a target the f@cking old biatch.

First day in secondary school i was in PE with the whole year sat on the floor in the sports hall, the PE teacher asked if we had siblings at the school, anyone that had put their hand up and was asked their name. He got to me and i said my sisters name, her second name was different to mine as her dad had been killed when she was a baby and my Mam them married my Dad. He said stand up boy, i did and he made me explain why her name was different to mine in front of the whole year, he thought it was hilarious to bollock me because in his opinion i should have just used my second name for her to save him the bother of asking. Again pinned a target on my back that never left me, kids thought it was funny that my sisters dad had died and that she had a different name and never let it drop. Total w@nker that i would have liked to bump into as an adult.
 
I attended school from 1965 to 1978, the latter two years in sixth form. Plenty of oddball teachers although not many violent ones. Two notable:

Metalwork teacher who’d trap one of the bad lads lugs in a bench vice.

PE teacher who’d make anyone trying to skive by ‘forgetting’ their kit play rugby wearing a leotard
 
Al said:
One of the teachers at Durham Johnston in the 60s told us once that it was worse in the '50s - one of his colleagues had shouted at a lad walking down the corridor to get his hands out of his pockets and bashed him round the head a couple of times to emphasise the point. It turned out the lad was an apprentice plumber there to fix a leak in the bogs. They all had a good laugh about it.
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Reminds me of pre mobile phones years ago.
There were a couple of pay phones on the wall near the toilets at work.
A jobs worth bellend manager started shouting at a lad on the phone for all to hear,
"I've clocked you twice using the phones, blah blah, spending loads of time on the phones, blah blah, costing the company money, blah blah, I want your name and your department ".

Lad had just stood there unfazed letting him rant then replied "John Smith, I'm the BT engineer checking the lines" .
🤣

Big uproar and the manager fooked off with his tail between his legs.
 

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