The other day Alex Singleton dropped by, as he likes to do from time to time.  In among listening, as I like to do, to Alex talking about his burgeoning career as a journalist and media commentator, I heard myself saying to him, in connection with the teaching I’ve been doing at Kings Cross Supplementary, something that I now want to write down.  Every institution, I heard myself orate at the long suffering Alex, has a bottom line situation.  Ugly cliché phrase, but it was what I said to him and it will have to do.  What I have in mind is the situation that reveals who is in charge and what the rules are.  Really are, as opposed to what it is merely said that they are.

At Kings Cross Supplementary, I recently witnessed a bottom line situation which revealed what the rules of Kings Cross Supplementary really are.

The scene is a maths lesson, given by Mr Hodson.  This is not the usual one I witness, the one that Mr Vora gives, every Tuesday evening.  This is a lesson being given by Mr Hodson during the half term school I helped out with a few weeks back, on a Friday morning.

So anyway, Mr Hodson is explaining whatever it is, and at the back a boy is not paying attention but instead chatting to his neighbour.  Mr Hodson reprimands him.  This doesn’t work, so in a further effort to elicit total attention, Mr Hodson makes a speech:  “This is not fun.  I’m not telling you this for fun.  You’re not here for fun.  You’re here to learn.” When he teaches, Mr Hodson is not a fun guy.  But the children like him because he teaches well, which actually is quite fun.  But this speech of his doesn’t do the trick either.  So then Mr Hodson says this:  “If you don’t pay attention, you will have to get out.  Go.  Leave.  Go home.  It’s your choice.” I’m standing at the back thinking: he’s taking a bit of a chance isn’t he?  What if the kid takes him at his word?  Then he’d look a plonker.

But now comes the bottom line moment.  The boy does as he is told.  He shuts up and pays attention from then on.

Why?  Well, of course it’s his parents, and probably, in particular, his mother.  If he gets sent home early, his parents will be informed and all hell will break loose at home, all hell that he doesn’t dare face.  Therefore he does what Mr Hodson says.  Push came to shove, Hodson to Boy, and Push won.  And Hodson to Boy turned out, actually, to be Parents to Boy.

And there we have the “Constitution”, so to speak, The Rules, the Way It Is, of Kings Cross Supplementary.  The teachers of Kings Cross Supplementary supply the mechanism, the structure, the system.  We give the orders.  But we are not why those orders are obeyed.  The parents are the ones fueling the mechanism, supplying the vital energy.  They are the ones who make the mechanism actually work and make it able to drive their children forward.

Compare and contrast the above Constitution with that of another kind of school, Other School, where the bottom line moment comes when a kid (which can quickly become a group of kids) chooses not to do as he is told, because there is no Push trumping his Shove.  The teachers at Other School, as at Kings Cross Supplementary, give the orders.  But unlike at Kings Cross Supplementary, there is not enough at Other School to ensure that those orders are always obeyed.  The bottom line situation is that if the teacher can’t cajole, charm, charismatise, terrify all the kids into obeying his orders, then the teacher is the one who ends up either leaving with his tail between his legs, or staying but in a state of subjugation.

At Kings Cross Supplementary, all the children have to obey us, or get hell from their parents.  Some of the parents at Other School do enforce obedience to teachers upon their children, but some do not, which means that the place ends up being run by the children whose parents do not control them. 

The Head of Other School makes a huge difference, good or bad.  He has the power to make the life of any particular individual in his care, teacher or pupil, a living hell.  But if he does not deploy this power with extreme cunning, he is liable to preside over an anarchic mess.  At Other School, everything depends on the Head, and if the Head is not up to it, for whatever reason, it can all crumble.  Even if the Head is “good” (but not a genius) that can still make things very hard for the individual teacher, because although a genius Head is everywhere at once, a merely good one cannot be.

But at Kings Cross Supplementary, there is this great army of people, the parents, the mothers especially, prowling around the perimeter like concentration camp guards, making everything work, tolerating no disobedience, enabling even the most feeble, tired or cranky of teachers to do some worthwhile teaching, demanding the best of everyone, and, on the whole, getting it.

I realise that all this talk of orders and obedience – even “political genius” and “concentration camp guards” (!!!) – is a long way from my libertarian dreamings, of a world in which I teach children because I like teaching them and because they like being taught by me, and in which the mere suggestion from either party that the relationship is imperfect will cause an immediate adjustment to it.  But reality is what it is.  The recognition of compulsion is the beginning of liberty.

UPDATE: Other School!