Those
who are familiar with David Gribble’s non-fiction work, Considering
Children – a parents guide to progressive education,
and more recently, Real Education
- varieties of freedom,
will be surprised, even shocked by this book.
The non-fiction is full of affection, gentleness, and optimism. His
novel, A Really Good School, is a whodunnit (and I challenge you to
guess the culprit) exploring, beneath a thin veneer of almost slapstick humour,
the deep unconcern and hatred that many teachers and some parents can feel
towards their charges. Gribble, after celebrating his years as a teacher at one
of our great progressive schools, Dartington Hall, returns to his earlier
experiences as a pupil of Eton and perhaps more pertinently as a young teacher
at Repton and finds the remembered experience so extreme that only by fiction,
by this funny, quirky satire on the public school system, can he express his
disgust.
Currently,
we make much of children’s welfare, exploring the playground bully, the
failing school, abuse and neglect by parents and care-workers.
Teachers on the whole are seen as abused, underpaid and overworked but
nevertheless noble – and so they often are. What our media, our politicians
and our educators have chosen to forget is the long and open history of
teacher-violence, encouraged by government, teachers’ unions and the public in
general and applied to or witnessed by almost everybody over thirty. ‘It never
did me any harm’ is a reference to the stick, the tawse, the cane and their
application to palm, thigh and backside and often, though not always,
approvingly registered in the punishment book. Available for inspection.
We are only a generation, some twenty years, away from those times. A
great many of today’s less than perfect parents and educators will have
personal experience of the ‘harmless’ chastisements unleashed upon them and
their own children will not necessarily be treated more kindly as a result. The
attitudes linger on, re-expressed through new varieties of coercion and
punishment – detention, suspension, exclusion, seclusion, the continuing
harassment which tries to persuade children to perform and conform.
The
sad little murderee and his co-sufferers at Gribble’s preposterous and
self-satisfied ‘Optimo School’ are a timely reminder of our continuing
hypocrisy and dislike towards children. But Gribble’s Dotheboysngirls Hall is
nevertheless comedic - ridiculous as it is reprehensible, laughable as it is
loathsome. A Really Good School sounds like a depressing read, but it isn’t,
it’s a funny, black, thriller with something to say.
Hylda Sims