By now you are sufficiently acquainted with your new crop of pupils to know which of them threatens to make your year hell. I suspect the question of whether it is nature or nurture that has made them so vile is not uppermost. Renewing your membership of the Campaign for the Reintroduction of Corporal Punishment is probably a higher priority.
Nonetheless, let me briefly crave your attention regarding the causes of hellish pupils. I can speak with authority on the subject because I was one myself.
Having had permissive early care, very much encouraged to do my own thing, I was not at all pleased to be sent to school at the age of four. I fought a lot, on one occasion breaking a younger boy’s arm, and I was reluctant to concentrate on my school work.
I was still a savage when I moved to secondary school. Had it not been for a very patient and disciplined teacher, and the unswerving encouragement of my dad, civilisation would have wholly eluded me.
That I could be recast as a decent citizen suggests my problems were not caused by genes. But in the past 15 years or so there has been a blizzard of false media coverage (eg almost anything involving Robert Winston) based on incorrect readings of the evidence, suggesting that genes are the main cause of academic failure, hyperactivity and antisocial behaviour.
Overall, my analysis of the findings of studies of identical twins and adoptees explodes the cosy idea that a bit of both nurture and nature explains why we are different from our siblings. I have shown that, apart from a handful of severe and rare mental illnesses like schizophrenia, environment explains the vast majority of cases of mental problems. Similarly, personality and achievement are not “a bit of both”.
It is now clear that the differences between you and your siblings are caused primarily by differences in the way your parents related to you, especially in the early years. The new evidence shows that if negative things happen to you in the first six years - like abuse or neglect - they have a greater impact than if they happen in the second six or subsequent years.
Early care sets the patterns of electricity and chemistry in the brain with which we subsequently intepret the world, like a thermostat. Even the size of bits of the brain can be affected.
Studies of the hippocampal region of the brain, crucial for the regulation of emotions, show that, on average, it is 5 per cent smaller in women who were sexually abused as children. The earlier the abuse, the greater the reduction in volume, and the greater the number of sub-personalities she is likely to develop as a means of coping with the abuse.
Conventional genetic wisdom is that the reason hellish pupils do so badly at school and in life is that they inherited dodgy genes. As Professor Richard Herrnstein, co-author (with Charles “Underclass” Murray) of The Bell Curve, told me in 1990, “there are different genes for different classes”.
It is now possible to disprove this claim, through studies of children taken into local authority care. The kind of alternative care the child receives, not its parental history, is what predicts how it will fare. They do best if they are adopted as soon after birth as possible by responsive, reasonably affluent parents. Next best is to be fostered, next is to be kept permanently in local authority care and worst of all is to be returned to their original, biological parents.
To believe, as so many British and American leaders seem to, that genes are the main reason the poor are poor, the bad are bad and the mad are mad is simply incorrect. The truth is that your pupils from hell are caused by government policies which fail to support parents adequately and foster a political economy and culture in which parenting deficits are more liable to happen. Along with a variety of other public servants (social workers, GPs) you are being forced to deal with the consequences of 20 years of increasing inequality and Americanisation of our society.
I cannot pretend that repeating this last (long-winded) sentence every time Jimmy tries to disrupt your class will make you less liable to want to hit him. But at least you will be blaming the right cause of your rage and despair, rather than genes, and at least you now know this situation is eminently preventable.
Oliver James’ new book “They F*** You Up - How To Survive Family Life”, is published by Bloomsbury (pound;16.99)
