British schoolmasters: still as terrifying as this Monty Python scene?

Factual Questions
1

There’s a wonderfully funny scene in the Life of Brian where the poor guy re-lives a schoolboy experience.
He makes a mistake with Latin grammar, and is corrected by a Roman soldier speaking like a classic British school master, while the student quakes in his boots. The school master makes the boy (Brian) conjugate his verbs while causing him physical pain (by pulling on his hair) and correcting him mercilessly at each step, while the boy winces in pain and fear, trying to remember his verb tenses and noun declensions…

For those of us the same age as the Monty Python actors, who attended the same kinds of schools…that scene is funny because it brings back a shared experience .

But what about the younger folks in the audience?
So my basic question is : Do British school teachers still act this way?

2

Teachers are generally wary of making any kind of physical contact with pupils nowadays, so the ear twisting etc is probably right out. I’m sure the sarcasm and lecturing still happens.

3

That was not the schoolmaster scene that I was expecting.

4

Well, we’ll just take the foreplay as read then, shall we?

5

The British school system is very different now. Grammar schools have largely disappeared and the comprehensive system is predominate. Some of the public schools (for some reason fee paying schools are called ‘public’ here) have retained their traditions but the days of the fearsome school master are largely dead. One of the reasons for this is that foreign students make up a substantial and lucrative part of the public schools roster and as such have to tone down behaviours.

It’s a shame. We built an Empire off the backs of young men who had the life frightened out of them by horrific school masters in antiquated public schools.

6

There was a sea change in public policy regarding teaching in the mid 1980s. Corporal punishment was banned after some pretty grim cases of abuse became a national scandal. Before then it was endemic, not only in fee paying schools, but in state funded schools as well. Sometimes teachers would hit everyone in the class with a leather belt across the hand, just for the Hell of it.

Here is a pretty accurate depiction of what it was like in a working class school.

These days the power relationship has completely reversed and teachers often feel threatened by their pupils and live in fear of career ruining accusations levelled against them.
7

How did that practice continue as late as it did? Did British parents really think nothing of sending off their kids to be bullied and tortured?

8

That happened, of course, but mostly when a teacher was willing to step in with the cane or even a slipper the bullying and torturing could be nipped in the bud.

Or, to put it another way, the dread - never realized - of a caning and the apprehension - justified - of the occasional whack with some lesser object was very, very small beer indeed compared to the grief your peers could and would give you. I think I know what bullying and torture mean, and the corporal punishment handed out by teachers was not within a long sea-mile of it.

9

I mean, “bullied and tortured” by their teachers, not their peers. The OP’s statement that it brings back a shared experience seems to suggest that a teacher torturing and bullying a student for a minor infraction was par for the course. And parents put up with it?

10

Shoot. Even in America: When my old man was in school 1947-60 you could count on corporal punishment in school, and heaven help you if the football coach decided you needed a slap for mouthing off–if that got back to Dad you’d get worse from HIM! I did Elementary school 1972-78 and the principal had several actual paddles hanging on his wall, and they were used (on my brother mostly) routinely. I vaguely recall the occasional parent grousing about their kid getting smacked, but mostly I recall my smacked friends hoping with all their might the school didn’t call home to report the incident.

So, in Missouri and Washington at least, corporal punishment including but not limited to swats, canes, and awkward sitting positions against the wall, were not unheard of even fairly recently. In fact it was all more or less expected and often supported/augmented by the parents. No reason GB would be substantially different.

11

It was just the norm at the time. It didn’t seem strange.

12

The past is a different country.

It was so common to be whacked by teachers. Some of them were proud of being disciplinarians. It was very seldom that parents objected.

Maintaining discipline in this way in schools has been standard practice for generations.

The Monty Python guys all had private educations in the ‘Public schools’ and went on to Cambridge. They draw a lot of their material from that background.

If you had a privately financed education in the UK, the schools were designed to prepare boys for service in the British Empire. They drummed into them loyalty to the group and personal integrity. The idea was that these guys could be relied upon to represent British Interests in far flung parts of the Empire. Bear in mind that the parents of the boys may themselves have been abroad or serving in the Armed Forces. The schools were often way out in the countryside.

Just as British Empire was not held together by chains of daisies, the discipline in these schools was rigorous and violence was routine. They used to say that if you ‘spare the rod you spoil the child’.

Teachers would often delegate the maintenance of order in a school to ‘prefects’ - senior pupils who maintained order over the younger ones. A recipe for institutionalised bullying if ever there was one.

Here is the movie ‘If’ which gives you an idea of was it was like in one of these schools. I think you can tell that the director probably had a few issues. It is a bit of a hatchet job on the whole system.

On the positive side, the people who went through this (if they weren’t permanently scarred by the experience) became part of a social network that would keep them in plum jobs for the rest of their lives. The Old Boy network is still very much alive and kicking. Most the members of the current UK government went to these schools. While some boys thrived, others were crushed by the experience.

The whole corporal punishment thing came to end in the mid 1980s after some particularly bad cases of brutality were exposed.

These ‘Public’ schools have evolved and are no longer like concentration camps. They are more academic and their market is the sons of the elite from all over the world. They even take in girls these days, which might go someway to normalise personal and social development.

In state schools, physical bullying by teachers is now thing of the past and they have to rely on psychological and emotional manipulation to maintain order in class. Kids these days will claim that their Human Rights have been infringed if the version of the software in their smartphone is out of date.

Somehow I don’t think the school bully has disappeared. If he is not waiting at the school gates for victims, he or she is probably out there on the Internet stalking the social media.

Is this progress?

13

Im not saying you are wrong but I remember the banning of corporal punishment being a more natural event. It was more a long term “debate” on the rights and wrong of such punishment rather than cases of its abuse which lead to its banning.

14

There was a case that was pursued all the way to the European Court by two Scottish mothers. The Court ruled it was against the Human Rights for a child to be punished without the permission of its parents. That was in 1981, legislation was passed in the UK a few years later.

However, there was a general cultural shift going at the time. Away from the principle of teachers acting ‘in loco parentum’ and a steady decline in the unquestioned support for institutions like schools. So I think you are correct in that respect.

Apparently corporal punishment stills goes in the USA.

15

When I posted the OP, I knew that caning had been made illegal in the 1980’s.( The old prefect system had been abandoned even before that, I think. And in any case, I think it only existed in boarding schools. I lived in England for a few years, and the public school I attended in the 60’s had no such thing, and though caning was occassionally threatened, it was virutally unused.)

But I was also asking about the general attitude of teachers to pupils,—respect vs fear?
Today’s teachers don’t pull the hair or twist ears, but do they still make such sarcastic comments, and treat the pupil as a lower life form? For that matter, are they still called “masters” or are they called teachers?

16

There are a few reality TV programmes that give you an idea of what it is like now.

17

It’s not just British schoolmasters.

Found it. Gotta love QI.

18

I was a prefect at my school in the UK. I left in 1992. As far as I know they still have them. I had limited power, but at the very least could hand out lines as punishment.

19

My old Scottish comprehensive still has prefects, and as far as I know their duties are the same as ours was in the eighties: supervising the dinner time queues in the cafeterias, and mentoring/befriending kids who need a bit of support (eg someone who is new to the area and might not have made friends yet). We didn’t have any punishment powers at all.

20

Did you recognize the wife in that scene? It’s Patricia Quinn, who also played Magenta in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I just started reading John Cleese’s autobiography, and he mentions that one of his earliest memories was being bitten[sup]*[/sup] by a rabbit.

  • Well, gently nibbled, really.