“Chaos! In the! Classroom!” Chris Tarrant pronounced the words in suitable tones of doom.
He was standing in for Trevor McDonald as presenter of an edition of ITV’s Tonight programme entitled Who Wants to be a Teacher? (See what they did?)
“It’s at least 40 years since I last stood in front of a class,” Mr Tarrant, a one-time teacher, said. “And yet I remember teaching as if it were yesterday.”
The reason for this, it transpired, was because he found pupils’ misbehaviour such a challenge. But that was nothing compared with the problems teachers face now. In a post-inclusion world, classrooms are now teeming with biting, swearing, pre-pubescent sociopaths.
This was one of the unquestioned assumptions of the programme. It was backed up by the testimony of former teacher Colin Adams, who was attacked by a rabid 12-year-old: “I was on the floor with this child wrapped around me, trying to strangle me.”
Pupils like this, Mr Adams believed, “should be in specialist schools, getting specialist help”. One suspects what he actually meant by “specialist school” was “borstal”. But he was not the only one to speak in euphemisms. As a counterargument, we were offered the example of the Village Primary in Stockton-on-Tees where problem pupils are placed in a “nurture group”.
We saw nurture-group head Simon Lidgard hug a wriggling child, who responded with a throaty “fuck off”. Mr Lidgard, however, refused to talk about violence. “I look behind the aggression,” he said. “Is it sometimes a cry for help? Is it something he uses to communicate?”
“The Village Primary”, one realised, was the programme’s euphemism for “crazy hippies”.
Also in the crazy-hippy corner was Wigmore Primary in Luton. Here, angry-eyed Reggie Flynn, aged 11, boasted that no one would dare hurt him. Head Carole Crabtree said that a disciplinarian approach would be counterproductive for Reggie: “he wouldn’t handle that”.
Reggie was last seen making a bid for freedom across the playground, a teaching assistant in frantic pursuit.
But as Mr Tarrant delivered his closing platitude - “these children and their futures are too precious for us to give up on” - viewers were uncomfortably aware that children do not exist in a vacuum of platitudes, euphemisms and half-hour TV slots.
The world is not black and white: problematic behaviour inevitably has causes and reasons. Problematising the children, however, helps no one.
