Tough discipline at school is good

You wonder where children get their bad habits from and then you hear about a school headmaster who is trying to turn a troubled school around only to be labelled ‘the headmaster from hell”. And who labelled him as such? The parents did, of course. And why, you might wonder, they refer to him as such? Apparently he sent dozens of children home because they weren’t wearing their uniforms correctly, such as wrong coloured socks or skirts being too short.

The school to which he was appointed was a troubled school where teachers would repeatedly go on strike for long periods because of the pupils’ violent behaviour. It all sounds like a plot of a movie where a new teacher comes in and manages to calm a very rowdy class full of underprivileged teens. But this is a true story.

With the nail clippers ready and a pack of wet wipes all girls coming into class were monitored to ensure there was no nail varnish, no makeup and not even long nails. He introduced a strict uniform rule with blazers and skirts which had to be measured in case they were too short. He introduced weekend detention, university style maths classes and a crackdown on pupils’ general appearance. He implemented strict uniform rules and no jewellery, no makeup and no embellishments, as teenage girls are prone to doing.

You know, I see nothing wrong with how this headmaster handled the difficult situation where even exam results were appalling.

I went to many schools in England and I can tell you that not all schools are the same in terms of results. Some schools churn out winners whereas other just pass the time without any discipline or extra classes for those struggling so their pupils achieve nothing at the end of the 5 years they’re there. I was in one school where my form tutor just couldn’t silence a rowdy class long enough to teach maths so he just gave up and sat down allowing the rowdiness to continue. That was a wasted hour of my life that I can never back.

I think pupils being afraid of a teacher or a headmaster is a good thing. Fear may not breed respect but it is likely to get results even they hate the teacher.

I don’t really recall many teachers who had that big of a positive impact on my education except for two English teachers who were both inspiring. No, they were not disciplinarians but then again they didn’t need to be because just being around them made you want to please them with your essay writings and reading skills.

However I do recall being afraid of several university lecturers, two in particular, who had their own unique methods of getting us to be in their classes on time, to never be absent, unless it was an emergency, and to pass our exams.

The first simply made us miss the entire class if we were even a minute late. ‘Get out!’ was his reflex reaction to a latecomer. Thereafter, all latecomers would wait until break to join the second half of the class and spend the rest of the day scrounging notes off classmates. Anyone who was late for a second and see that the class had started would not go in knowing what the professor’s reaction would be.

The other lecturer just had a policy. A surprise test at the beginning of some classes, the marks from which would go towards your final result. You miss the beginning, because you’re late, you miss the test and lose out on getting those extra marks. That being said, there wasn’t always a test at the beginning but everyone turned up on time. And everyone passed the final because they’d go home and study every night for this invisible test. Needless to say the final revision for her unit was easy.

The point is, tough discipline at school is good. It teaches kids that life, even after leaving school, is a series of disciplined activities and that includes work, daily routines and even play.

Word is that the school in question was run by students. That is chaos in the making.