The armed cops who walked around around my high school had a hard enough time getting anyone to respect their attempts at discipline. I nearly fell on the floor laughing when I started trying to imagine our Class Pres and V.P.(both anoying little twerps) trying to discipline anyone.
End of Hijack
I went to a state school in the south-western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. However, it was a selective state school (entrance examination) that, in many ways, desperately wanted to be a private school. The school had about 300 boarding students (male and female; it was the only co-ed boarding school in the state at the time), and about 600 day students.
We had a male and a female school captain, a male and a female vice-captain, and a bunch of male and female prefects. These positions, held by Grade 12 students, were voted on by teachers and students. However, i believe the voting was weighted, so that a teacher’s vote was worth perhaps 10 points, while a Grade 12 student’s vote was worth 7 or 8, and a Grade 7 student’s vote might be worth 1 or 2.
The prefects who were boarding students had a bunch of duties to carry out in the boarding school, including inspecting all the dormitories each morning to make sure tha beds were properly made and wardrobes and dorms were clean and tidy. This was the perfect opportunity to abuse their power, because if they didn’t like you they could pull all the blankets and sheets off your carefully-made bed and make you start over, or open your wardrobe and pull all your clothes out on the floor and make you refold and reshelve them.
Also, when we entered the dining room for meals, there would be a prefect on each door making sure that we were neatly attired. If it was a weekday, we went to meals in school uniform - yes, even the evening meal, which was hours after school ended. You had to shower and change into uniform before dinner. The prefects would pull you out if your shoes were not clean or your tie wasn’t on straight.
In many other repsects in the boarding school, prefects didn’t have that much more authoriy than other grade 12 students. Each grade 12 boarder was a dormitory monitor. That meant that you lived in a little room adjacent to a dormitory of 6-10 younger students and made sure that they obeyed the rules. If the talked after lights out, for example, you could send them to the teachers’ residence, where they might be caned (boys) or given detention (girls). Talking after lights-out never worried me too much - i used to sit up and chat with the students in my dorm, who were in grade 10 and so only two years below be.
Prefects who were day students were expected to keep an eye on student behavior on the trains and at bus stops on the way to and from school. Because our school had an easily-identifiable uniform, any misbehavior on public transit invariably led to some member of the public writing a letter to the school principal. This would then be read out in all it’s petty detail at school assembly, accompanied by a fire-and-brimstone lecture that would have done a secular Jonathan Edwards proud.
During the school day, when boarders and day students were in classes and hanging out together, the prefects all had similar duties - keep a general eye on student behavior. They also had their own common room, which no other student was allowed to enter.
Despite the fact that this all sounds a bit like some sort of junior boot camp, i actually quite enjoyed my years at the school, where i was a boarder but never a prefect. Class of 1986.
By the way, if you want to see something really naff, twee, quaint, and downright embarrassing, check out our school song and our war cry.
mhendo, the old school song is class. I particularly like the association of Gallipoli with glory and this stanza is a classic:
We’ve sought the mighty liver fluke,
And learned about it ways,
And how it is and why it is Merino wool it pays,
And paced with and of microscope,
The fierce Amoeba’s gaze,
In the modern science room at Hurlstone
Those mighty liver fluke and fierce amoeba, I presume you have the stuffed head of one above the school fireplace. I suppose the ‘modern science room’ reference would have been a big seller in 1918. The height of a Hurlstonian’s ambition in 1918 appears be be sheep-herder or tin worker - no wonder they changed the song. Thanks for the laugh.
Yes, pretty funny, huh?
Back in the early part of the century, the school was largely concerned with taking in students from farming families and sending them back to the farm with a more secure scientific knowledge of agriculture than they were likely to get in the knowledge handed down by their parents.
However, while the school continues to have a working farm (dairy cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, bees, etc.) and to attract students from rural areas, it has also become an alternative for local students who have good grades but who, for financial or other reasons, don’t go to private school. I think the term used in the US is “magnet” school.
Quite a few of my friends during my time there have gone back to their family farms, but more and more return to agriculture in a different way. Some, for example, work for agribusiness as property managers, and my best friend works as a research director for a group called Meat and Livestock Australia, which is a clearing house for scientific research and a lobby group for the sale of Australian meat at home and overseas.
As you probably surmised from the links i posted, Hurlstone is a public school that has adopted many of the “traditions” and habits more often associated with public schols. When i was there, this included a system of “hazing” of younger students (or “plebs”) by older students. This was known by the innocuous-sounding name of “the preference system,” and sometimes included beating across the arse with a cricket bat and other similarly friendly activities. The teachers turned a blind eye to it until the mid-1980s. I think the arrival of female students in 1979 began to curb the more egregious examples of hazing and bastardization that went on before that.
The problem with a school like this is that it tends to develop a superiority complex in relation to all the other public schools in the area. Because it was a selective school, we did better than all the other schools in the area academically, and we also tended to win at sport. What no-one at Hurlstone ever bothered to acknowledge was that we did better than all those schools because we sucked up all the smart students in the area, so the other schools had to cope with the less academically-inclined kids, as well as the children from immigrant families whose English was not good enough to get through our entrance exam. In a region of Sydney with tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Lebanese, Greek, Italian and other Asian and Mediterranean immigrants, our school was Anglo all the way. I even remember a teacher saying to me he was glad that we didn’t have to deal with the Asians and the “wogs” at our school!!
As i said before, i enjoyed my own time there, but if i had kids of my own i don’t think i’d send them there unless it’s changed quite a bit since i left.