Bizarrest, bizarrer, and merely bizarre...

Within an interesting, as always, post yesterday (Bizarre notes, bizarre cheers), JSBlog commented that...

“... the more I read of US school/college traditions ... the gladder I am I went to British ones, where you can just attend, get your education, and leave. Ritual chants are just the tip of the iceberg of a set of effectively compulsory tribal systems...”

When I read it, I simply thought "hear, hear" (my limited observation of US academic life confirming my agreement) and read on. Having thought about it over the hours since, I still agree and just as strongly – but have also realised that British education is not itself free of bizarre undergrowth. While post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom (and more widely in western Europe) is certainly refreshingly different in that way from its US equivalents, there are oddities (I would personally say unhealthy oddities) further down the chain.

As a thirteen year old I moved from a coeducational Australian school where you sank or swam amongst your contemporaries according to the usual vagaries of children everywhere to a British single sex school. Here I had to be thrown into the fishpond. Teachers who would later send me home because I had forgotten my school cap showed no sign of noticing that green water running from my sodden uniform was forming a malodorous pool around my desk. The following day, I had to be stripped behind the fives court and then retrieve my clothes from the branches of various trees. Passing teachers again showed no surprise at seeing a slightly podgy boy climbing a tree in the nude to retrieve his underwear. I thought at first that this was dislike of me, personally; but as time and a half went by, I observed that it happened to all newcomers and staff even made jokes about it – except when a boy complained, in which case they made pompous remarks about the communal value of initiation ceremonies. Then there was the French teacher (reputedly an infantry colonel in the 1939 to 1945 war) who made us run around the grounds in our underwear, shooting each other with water pistols containing red ink ... and refused to teach us unless we took part. Let's not get into the strange behaviour (not, I hasten to add, paedophilic ... just ritualistically odd) of the games master during pre and post sports changing times.

Things have improved immeasurably in the decades since 1965 ... but I have heard of both the ducking and the stripping ceremonies in different schools within the past year, and while games masters are generally respected professionals, the occasional exception is not unknown.

Moving back in time, at ten years old I briefly attended a primary school on the Sussex coast. Daily assembly contained a number of mystifying rituals, including the singing (every day) of Sussex by the sea, then British grenadiers and finally Men of Harlech. (Each of these is available in different versions; the links are to the closest I can find to those we sang.) That sequence is interesting because, while all of them are of a martial cast, they become progressively more so. By the time we started the day's lessons we had imbibed enough blood and guts for a schlock movie. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from we who sang them daily. Sussex, I concede, was relevant; but the clearly male voice, culminating in “the girls so kind that we left behind”, was odd for a school whose students were 50% girls. British grenadiers had no obvious relevance to anything at all. Harlech was the other side of the British isles and several centuries; not to mention the other side of the Saxon/Celt divide.

No ... I still prefer the British model to the US one; it has more flexibility, more freedom to choose ideas, less pressure to rigid conformity; the US system is at the "bizarrest" end of the spectrum, the British equivalents "merely bizarre" ... but we are not ideally housed for unlimited stone throwing.