I've been touched, very much so, by the comments left here and on Facebook, and with the messages received from everyone with their own stories to tell. Some of those accounts can leave you wondering how on earth it is possible to survive such things, certainly from an emotional point of view. Yet on the whole we usually do find ways of surviving, albeit, sometimes with a greater or lesser degree of dysfunctionality in our life.
It appears that abuse can push an individual inwards or outwards. I wouldn't profess to being any kind of psychologist, but there are certainly those who recycle the aggression they fall victim to - upon others - which is most likely how it happened in the first place. Then there are those who do the recycling inwardly, the result often being a tendency towards depression and despondency. I would place myself in the second category. But whichever way one aims it, and whether the reaction is passive, or overtly expressed, considerations such as predisposition and family environments would logically be a relevant part of the total picture.
A commonly held view is that that's what life was like in those days, as though the whole of life was like that. The truth is, however, that there have always been other 'schools of belief', and significantly so. Possibly the most well known example is the Steiner approach to education, a fellowship founded by Rudolph Steiner way back in 1919, the year which marked the opening of his first school.
Steiner was a philosopher, scientist and innovator, who saw the child as real person. Examples of his beliefs were that education should: work for all children irrespective of academic ability, class, ethnicity or religion; should take into account the needs of the whole child - academic, physical, emotional and spiritual; develop a love of learning and enthusiasm for school.
I have friends, and have met a number of people, that attended Steiner schools - the antithesis of the state school system the great majority of us experienced - and from what I've observed, an apparent testament to the principle that good values, respect, and basic decency are most certainly not qualities that get 'beaten' into you.
Another example of an alternative approach to preparing young people for adult life is Summerhill, a school founded way back in 1921 by A. S. Neill.
These are the words, as found on the school's website: http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk
"Founded in 1921, it continues to be an influential model for progressive, democratic education around the world. Summerhill is the oldest children's democracy in the world. It is probably the most famous alternative or 'free' school. The system that Summerhill employs is not only about education - it is also a different way of parenting which eliminates most of the friction and many of the problems experienced by modern families."
You see, it's not only about times and eras, it about culture and belief systems, and as I see it, about a willingness to open one's mind to other possibilities - maybe more effective ones.
So while I ponder about the way things could've been, I'll continue below with the next excerpt of the way things actually were.
“Learning” was fast becoming my last priority, “anonymity” the first. It was more about survival than anything else, and there was only one place to go, and that was inward. Becoming increasingly withdrawn, my objective, was to get older as fast as I could.
Despite the ernest attempts to achieve invisibility, the next direct brush with restorative justice came in the second year, form 2b, at the hands of Mr Sanderson the form’s prep teacher. It wasn’t unlike a road accident - it all happened in slow motion. From one second to the next, fifty years later even, each moment is still as clear as crystal. It went like this: Repeatedly as I tried to get the attention of the classmate sitting next to me, his lack of response and unwillingness to even turn his head did nothing but strengthen my efforts. Then came the slow-motion; the chilling moment of awareness that there was only one single animated being in that entire classroom. Whichever way I looked, the room seemed frozen, the gaze of all, fixed, firmly on me. Technicalities were irrelevant, whatever I’d done, it was wrong, and that’s all that mattered. Then came the “finger of death”, Mr Sanderson’s to be precise, a finger that silently, and with one, perhaps two simple movements had me walking to the front of the class as he, the executioner, reached into a drawer for the customary gym shoe (it turned out that we’d been told to stop talking, an order that for one reason or another I hadn’t heard).
“Bend over, Nicol” was the choice he offered, and before a room full of students, that’s exactly the option I chose. I received two hefty blows. It really, truly and deeply hurt me, physically and more. I walked back to my desk with a sense of powerlessness and injustice of existential proportions, and for the rest of that afternoon every ounce of inner resource had to be found to hold the tears down.
This was, to an extent a watershed moment. The event wasn’t something I would get over very easily; through the following weeks, perhaps even months, every school morning I would wake in a distraught and tearful state, as though not just awaking from a nightmare, but also feeling I was about to enter a recurring one. Surprisingly, the mother who had previously showed such unflinching conviction in the schooling system was now apparently so concerned about her son’s state of mind that she phoned the school. Apart from what she wrote in her diary I have no idea who she spoke to, or what she said. What I do know is that months after the event, towards the end of the very same prep class in which the original correction occurred, Mr Sanderson asked that I remain behind after class. This was traumatic in itself - easily as anxiety-inducing as “the finger”; again, I expected the worse.
The bell sounded; all the pupils left the room; now it was just me and him. Once again he beckoned me out to his desk, but this time asked me to sit down. “Nicol, I hear you’ve been a bit upset” - well, I can’t pretend to remember his exact words, but I’m sure they couldn’t have been much different. What I do recall exactly is that I broke down completely at that moment, so much so that he escorted me to the staff room where his 1960s attempt at counselling continued. In his efforts of appeasement, and to lessen the obvious gravity of emotion, astonishingly, he explained to me how many times he carried out this kind of thing and consequently how routine and unimportant it therefore was to him. My job, obviously must have been to apply the same insignificance to my experience of being on the receiving end. It didn’t work. But the one thing I did notice after all this was the softly, softly approach the teaching staff seemed to take towards me for the remaining year, maybe longer.
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