I was a very fit child and teenager who was no good at sport. Pencil
thin, I even had a primary school teacher who would berate me in front
of the class, by no means only in PE lessons, for being overweight. It
was beyond me then, and it is beyond me now, why the obvious need for
physical exercise had to be met in the form of competitive sport.
As for the lesson usually said to be learned from such activity, has it ever occurred to those who come out with that argument that academic work might have been a more appropriate way of teaching that lesson? After all, it is not at all as if they themselves were the types that they glorify. Politics and the media are not exactly replete with people who look as if they were always picked first for sports teams. Is that how you picture the adolescent Michael Gove or Boris Johnson?
Yet somehow, even when made a Secretary of State or Mayor of London, they remain convinced that they have failed at life because they were not like that, and desperately pretend to cultivate the impression that they must have been, since no one else would possibly wish to inflict the whole process on anyone else. Would they?
The slavering public school commentariat's insistence that school uniforms, of which I am a staunch defender, were given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind) is totally false in my experience and in that of everyone whom I have ever met. So, too, is the slavering public school commentariat's insistence that competitive sport was given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind).
What we do all remember, however, is the flogging off of school fields. When the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto. The academies so beloved of Michael Gove, his "free" schools being a form of them, are already being built with no outdoor space whatever, on the grounds that people are there, at those places of business, strictly in order to work. And remember that every school is eventually supposed to become one.
As for the lesson usually said to be learned from such activity, has it ever occurred to those who come out with that argument that academic work might have been a more appropriate way of teaching that lesson? After all, it is not at all as if they themselves were the types that they glorify. Politics and the media are not exactly replete with people who look as if they were always picked first for sports teams. Is that how you picture the adolescent Michael Gove or Boris Johnson?
Yet somehow, even when made a Secretary of State or Mayor of London, they remain convinced that they have failed at life because they were not like that, and desperately pretend to cultivate the impression that they must have been, since no one else would possibly wish to inflict the whole process on anyone else. Would they?
The slavering public school commentariat's insistence that school uniforms, of which I am a staunch defender, were given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind) is totally false in my experience and in that of everyone whom I have ever met. So, too, is the slavering public school commentariat's insistence that competitive sport was given up in state schools some time a generation or so ago (when the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto, but never mind).
What we do all remember, however, is the flogging off of school fields. When the Conservatives were in government and exercising far tighter control over schools than hitherto. The academies so beloved of Michael Gove, his "free" schools being a form of them, are already being built with no outdoor space whatever, on the grounds that people are there, at those places of business, strictly in order to work. And remember that every school is eventually supposed to become one.
And then we got to have all those JCR meetings where the first hustings question for every job was "Which sports teams are you on?"
ReplyDeleteI never attended one after the end of the first year. I might even have stopped earlier than that.
ReplyDeleteI had better things to do than to watch them take public money intended for charitable donations and instead vote to spend it on sending the football team to Amsterdam for a week during term. Just to put the rest of us in our place. Well, it worked.
Mind you, as the then Admissions Tutor said, it was money well spent, because the place was so much nicer without them.
I bet you were never Head Boy, either.
ReplyDeleteMade do with two four-year terms as a governor instead. The same Head was still there when I was first appointed. But no, I hardly think that they were ever going to offer it to me. There was never any doubt who it was going to be, and he did the job as it was, and no doubt still is, expected to be done.
ReplyDelete