Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA

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Posts tagged "schools"

Is Teachers Beating Kids a European Thing?

Something I wrote about it, and a couple interesting comments, can be read here.

Teachers Beating Kids - Is It a European Thing?

I recently watched, again, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was an influence on The Book of Man. When it got to the scene in which the schoolteacher slaps the boy’s face, it occurred to me that, in modern times, this seems to be a European thing.

Certainly in Scotland, children were beaten and humiliated by teachers as a matter of routine. From the novels of Barry Hines, I gather that the same was true of the North of England. But the only example of such institutional child abuse I can think of in American literature is in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was written and is set in the 19th Century. In American books and films, I can’t think of any other examples of the prison-like routines - sanctioned violence, and having to address teachers as “sir” or “miss” - that were common in the U.K. at least until the 1980s. Was the U.S. different? Am I overlooking any books or films?