October is expensive for me. Due to poor family planning, Son Number One, Daughter Number One and Daughter Number Two all have birthdays in this month. The daughter birthdays occur within two days of each other: which used to generate all sorts of competing-for-attention issues, but eventually morphed into an agreement that they would celebrate their birthdays together.
So, a couple of weeks back, I brought the sisters out to dinner, along with Daughter Number Two’s girlfriend and Daughter Number Four. Whether at home or in a restaurant, dinners have always been noisy in my family. Everyone has plenty to say, including Daughter Number Four. Even when she was pre-verbal, she’d sit at the dinner table, eat and roar, effectively modelling what she saw her much older siblings doing.
On this occasion, she had a few stories to tell about school, most of them to do with perceived injustices: teachers who had been unreasonable and, in one instance, had shouted. This in turn prompted memories from her siblings about teachers who had shouted a lot.
It was all intended as mildly shocking examples of people who had lost control; who perhaps were never temperamentally suited to teaching.
And then I told some stories from my school days: of things I had encountered and witnessed that were far worse. The kids shook their heads and tried to reconcile this with their own experiences: that the people I spoke about should never have been teachers. But it was only on the way home, still thinking about what I’d told them, that it struck me that the issue was more profound than that. The education system I lived through contained violence as a central component.
In the all-boys schools I attended, all the teachers – overwhelmingly male and often priests – would be rated for their teaching ability and inclination for viciousness. Some were wonderful and never laid a finger on anyone. Others would deliver a belt across the head, with varying degrees of intensity, if you were cheeky or not paying attention. And others were bullies.
For these teachers, the violence – slaps, hair-pulling, arm-twisting – was not intended to be punitive, but something far more insidious. The ones I remember tended to concentrate their attentions on one or two students in the class and the cruelty would be meted out casually, even playfully: they’d stroll down and grab a handful of hair or get them in a headlock, all while speaking about something else entirely. And the intention was not to intimidate the victim, but to entertain everyone else. Other boys would giggle appreciatively at this. Many of them genuinely regarded these teachers as great craic. Even some of the victims – subjected to this daily, for years – came to see it as a perverse sort of favouritism.
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Naturally, no one complained about it; I saw strapping Leaving Cert-age boys assaulted by much smaller teachers, yet if the student resisted physically, even verbally, they risked suspension or expulsion.
In case you’re wondering, I wasn’t one of those victimised boys. I was lucky. And it’s worth repeating that I knew some fantastic teachers. But even they knew what was going on. Everyone did. Everyone thought it was normal. Or they didn’t want to think about it; they didn’t want to consider that the entire system could be warped. I remember telling my parents once about a particularly savage attack I’d witnessed. All they asked was what the boy had done to deserve it.
That denial was almost total then, and no doubt still exists today. Back then, violence was common in many schools – the male ones anyway – producing a generation who’ve tried to forget about it, or convince themselves that it wasn’t a big deal, that it didn’t do them any harm; who go back to their school reunions and backslap with teachers who tortured them for fun.