A few years ago a celebrity endorsed recruitment campaign alleged that You Never Forget A Good Teacher. I was reminded of that claim this week when I saw Molly Gee clasping a photograph of her dead son, Darryl. Darryl Gee had died in prison while serving an eight-year sentence for allegedly having raped one of his students. “Allegedly”, because shortly after his premature death, Gee, a physically disabled former music teacher, had his conviction overturned when it emerged that his accuser, a girl of 11, made the whole thing up.
Even if Gee had never been convicted, his life would have been ruined by this vindictive and baseless lie. Any teacher accused (although not yet convicted) of wrongdoing by a student is legally identifiable — and will remain so if the Government rejects opposition calls for anonymity in the Commons tomorrow.
It’s true you never forget a good teacher. But more vividly I remember the teachers whose working lives we, a coven of girls, made a misery. They shared with Gee a chink in their armour: underconfident slumped shoulders or an unfashionable hairstyle. In the packs in which they socialise, teenage girls become fierce champions of bland conventionality. No bald patch, lisp or whispy moustache will escape their combined attention and censure. Unlike her male counterpart, a teenage girl is easily revolted. And what revolts her most is the thing that also most fascinates her in the world, anything to do with sex.
So it was that every one of our female sports teachers were accused of predatory shower-curtain twitching. We lobbed ink and tampons at an English teacher we despised for his supposed celibacy. Fourteen-year-old girls would brazenly excuse themselves from his lessons “because I’ve got my period”, or elaborately attach their bras to his chair, watching on spitefully while he spent the best part of The Mill on the Floss inexpertly unfastening them.
Although men were incontestably all “perverts”, every schoolgirl’s dream was to have an affair with a teacher. When an unpopular girl said she’d been to bed with her tutor she became a minor celebrity. Our ambivalence about sex was best demonstrated the day a man exposed himself to a group of us from inside his BT truck. We screeched with horror and disgust, but delightedly chased him around the block. The difference between then and now is that the scandal we made up and spread about our teachers was rarely taken seriously, even by us. We didn’t know about our rights and in truth we didn’t have rights the way children have had since 2000 when the 1998 Human Rights Act came into effect.
The idea that it might be demeaning to us, as some human rights groups have successfully argued, to be put in detention or to do lines or to be made to stand in the corner for bad behaviour was inconceivable then (although if we’d known about it we would have doubtless recognised the law as a convenient means for evading punishments or grinding a petty axe). Of course we hated the power our teachers held over us. It’s not hard to see how, her head full of hormones and her rights, a teenage girl ends up accusing her teacher of inappropriate behaviour.
Inappropriate behaviour is all she thinks about.
Add to this a generation of anxious parents who seem now to share with their teenage offspring a hypervigilance about the sexual proclivities of teaching staff. Guilty until proven innocent, as the current legislation on anonymity emphasises. A nursery school teacher friend of mine tells me about the rules implemented to allay parents’ own hysteria about sexual perverts. No sobbing toddler is allowed on to a teacher’s lap without an intervening cushion.
Why? In case my friend is harbouring a secret erection. This paranoia goes right through all schools.
It is 14 years since I left school but I still come into contact with plenty of school children. At a youth club at one of the council estates in my area I watched as a sea of pubescents were first frisked at the door for knives and then went on to display a range of anarchy and inarticulacy that made even the supervising adults who had grown up on the estate mutter darkly about the “youth of today”.
The staff showed me the results of a survey. From a long list of options — “further education”, “jobs”, “travel” and so on — the children were asked to rank them in order of priority. What preoccupied them most, it turned out, was the category that said “My rights”. Empowerment is all very well for grown-ups. But do we want our children to be empowered? Do children themselves want it? And if so, I say perhaps it’s not up to them. The number of allegations of physical and sexual assault made by pupils about their teachers has risen from 41 in 1991 to 192 in 2004. Only 69 of 1,782 complaints in the 10 years to 2005 led to a conviction. When a child cries wolf about a teacher it not only undermines the credibility of genuine victims but cripples the lives of the falsely accused.
I’m all for remembering good teachers. But what about the decent yet socially awkward teacher who will never be able to bury the memory of that one, very bad student?...