We have heard a lot this year about the class of ‘68, the generation who came
of age 40 years ago in a tumult of student revolt and social rebellion. But
what of the 30-year veterans of the class of ‘78? How did leaving school in
1978 compare with 1968? And, perhaps more pertinently, how might the way it
was for school-leavers then compare with the way it is now? Discuss, with
reasons, as exams used to say. So I did, earlier this year over a pint with
old schoolmates.
Five of us met in the Wheatsheaf, once a dowdy Surrey pub frequented by pupils
of Woking County Grammar School for Boys. Now part of a smart chain, the
Wheatsheaf styles itself as an adult pub: no children unless aged 14 and
with parents. My friends agreed that 14 was when they started drinking Skol
lager there, and parents kept out.
I was unashamedly a Seventies' boy, of the Slade/Sex Pistols, Player's Number
Six/Watney's bitter, “we're-the-Sweeney-son-and-we-haven't-had-our-dinner”
vintage.
But whatever nostalgia one feels for them now it is not entirely rose-tinted.
I recently saw the 1978 movie Sweeney 2, in which a gang of armed robbers
justify their crime-financed flight to the sun on the ground that “England
as a nation is finished”. Such social pessimism was not uncommon then, even
among non-blaggers.
As the old industries went and unemployment soared, many of my schoolmates
made careers in the new economy of the 1980s, from IT to hedge funds,
property, recruitment, the media and much else. That “thin-air”
credit-funded economy of financial services, house prices and shopping is
now being deflated; hopefully, the class of 2008 will be able put their
energies into something more substantial.
In 1978 there was a sense that some new age was coming, but nobody knew quite
what. The radical idealism of 1968 had given way to the grim reality of
Britain under Tory and Labour governments, from the miners' strike and the
three-day week to the start of the “winter of discontent” in 1978. Now there
seemed a greyness hanging over a society run by the dullard “Sunny” Jim
Callaghan. Even Margaret Thatcher, looking every inch the small-town
grocer's daughter, could appear fresh and dynamic by comparison when elected
in 1979. Yet compared with today, even the grey political debate of 1978
might seem lively.
And what of education then compared with now? The class of ‘78 was the last
generation of 11-plus state grammar schoolboys in Surrey. One old classmate,
who has sent his kids to private schools, thinks that we had an “easyJet
education” at our non-posh grammar, compared with the Ryanair standard of
the secondary moderns and the business class of the public schools, but I
suspect it gave us a little more leg room than that. I hope my
state-educated daughters have the same scope to stretch out.
That afternoon in the Wheatsheaf we pored hilariously over the final
all-school photograph, taken in May 1976 when we were doing our GCSE O
levels: big hair and bigger shirt collars alongside the Brylcreemed
creepiness of the old school. There were the grinning “masters”, from the
little sadist who made taller boys crawl so that he could look down on them,
to our elderly form master, who once asked me outside for a punch-up. Some
of them might not be allowed near schoolchildren today. Yet many were good
teachers in a way that cannot be measured in league tables. Enthroned in the
centre of the photo sits the headmaster, Jack “God is” Goode, expert with a
football, bible and cane; we were the last state school kids to experience
that aspect of education, too. Yet 22 per cent of teachers surveyed this
year want to bring back the cane to sort out anti-social youth. As the
old-timers say, corporal punishment never did us any real harm - although it
is unclear whether it did much good either. At the Wheatsheaf we swapped
stories of bending over for the headmaster's sharpened bamboo stick, then
waiting outside his office for the only black boy in school to dash out
holding his backside, which he stuck in a sink while making cartoon-style
hissing noises. If the cane worked at all, it was only as the sharpest end
of a system of classroom discipline and learning. A stick alone is no
substitute for proper teaching.
And there I am in the photograph, what my late father would have called a
surly looking bugger, the only boy visible with no school crest on his
blazer. Rebel without a badge, as I no doubt fancied myself. But we weren't
so much rebelling against the old school regime as ignoring it while it
crumbled. The imminent closure of our school marked the start of the era of
turmoil and permanent change in the education system. For our last year we
were shipped off to a new sixth-form college, soon in chaos as our old
teachers tried to cope with the new world of girls and jeans. The first US
computer-board bulletin system was apparently created in 1978, but we did
not see a single computer at school. Yet those who left Woking Grammar with
a non-vocational education seemed equipped with an intellectual attitude to
make the most of the new. One old friend, last seen heading off as a courier
on the Magic Bus, now runs a big health service institution. Another, who
seemed interested in nothing more serious than his parting, is a Nato
colonel.
In the world before life was reduced to education, education, education, fewer
felt obliged to go to university. We did not get the AAAAs common in
A-levels today, and many went no further with their studies. It hardly held
them back. I didn't want to go either, until it became clear that a “proper
job” meant a trainee management course. So I worked in the local postal
sorting office for a year before leaving for Manchester and the joys of
United and University. Today many 18-year-olds seem under pressure to go to
university whether they want to or not. There must be a question over
whether endless expansion of higher education can be sustained in a slump -
and whether that will be a bad thing.
What of the panics about antisocial behaviour today? A glance back at the
class of '78 suggests that many problems are not new. Our parents thought we
drank too much too young - although the idea then was to show that you could
take your drink rather than put on a show of being pissed. Youthful drinking
and driving was common. Even grammar school boys - or “grammar school poofs”
as we were known - got into trouble. I received a present of a broken nose
and black eye at one schoolmate's 17th birthday party.
Those of my old friends who have teenage children think today's middle-class
youngsters are more confident, with more money and choices (at least until
now). Yet many seem less independent. Perhaps we were lucky to grow up after
the emergence of teenage freedom and before the advent of paranoid
parenting. When my contemporaries left home, some to work abroad, it was to
make a new life rather than for a joyride before heading back to mum and
dad. Others among us who could never afford to leave home nevertheless did
so, and lived in hovels as the price of independence. Will the class of ‘08
take the plunge?
A generation is often defined by its music. Mainstream music back then was as
awful as today's seems to this old geezer. By 1978 few of us felt any
connection with the charts, where Brotherhood of Man, Boney M, the Boomtown
Rats and even Brian and Michael (Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and
Dogs) had No 1s. But we had post-punk, new wave and disco. We are known,
according to BBC radio, as the Jam Generation. The Jam were from Woking and
Paul Weller drank in the Wheatsheaf. So what do my friends remember about
the now-deified Modfather? “Him and his mates were horrible little
****s.”That's not something you hear much nowadays.
And you couldn't have followed the crisis in The Times at the end of 1978. The
paper was closed for a year by a strike. Maybe things really ain't what they
used to be.
Class of '58: Hardly any fat kids
Mary Lewis, 1958, English teacher, Greenhead High School (now Greenhead
College), Huddersfield
There was a feeling that we'd worked very hard to pass the 11-plus and go to
the grammar school. We were all aware that we were very lucky to be there.
At 18, I left to study English at university. I got a local education
authority grant of the magnificent sum of £207 a year, and it covered all my
costs completely. I would have liked to have been a solicitor but I knew
perfectly well there wasn't the money.
Everyone assumed that if you did English at university, you would
automatically become a teacher. Huddersfield was quite a heavily
industrialised city in those days. There was always a miasma of dirt over
the place. Now you get beautiful views of the Pennines, the hillsides, and
the fields. We had a lot more freedom than young people today. After tea, we
played in the street. Girls rounders and skipping, boys football or cricket,
and we joined together to play hide-and-seek or tin-can-squat. I taught
English, both here and overseas, including Ethiopia and Yemen. During the
Iran-Iraq war I was in Baghdad and did see some hairy times: someone set a
bomb off round one of the water coolers in the teaching block.
In my schooldays, childhood obesity was never a problem. We had rationing
right up to 1954. One boy in my year, of 110, at junior school, was fat. He
was the son of a grocer and was teased because being fat was very unusual
then. Sex education was also very different. It consisted of an introduction
to the life cycle of a rabbit. We were expected to extrapolate from that, so
most people found out through other sources.
Class of '88: We wanted to learn
Theo Chandon 1988, Digital art director William Ellis School, Camden
The biggest difference between then and now is that there's a lot less
respect. People get angry a lot more and are more short-tempered. And we
seem to be more focused towards acquiring material wealth rather than
spiritual happiness; having the latest phone or iPod is so important. Kids
now are told they must have stuff or they're not cool, but I don't think it
was like that in my day. If you had a pair of Dunlop Green Flash trainers,
which cost £7, you were king. Nowadays they'd need a pair of Nike Air, which
cost £100.
My school had just changed from a grammar school to a comprehensive so there
was a real mix of people. We were naughty, we used to ride around on our
bikes, causing trouble, and sometimes we had fights, but nobody carried
knives and nothing serious ever happened. A lot of the kids at school were
from low-income families, but people really wanted to learn. We used to
encourage each other to achieve academically, so a lot of us did fairly
well. In my day kids had a lot more to aspire to. When we had a careers
meeting, friends of mine wanted to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, surgeons,
politicians. Now they want to be on Big Brother. I'm happy, but I do regret
that I didn't have kids when I was younger. You end up putting it off for a
career, and then you look back and think: “Hold on, I could have achieved
exactly what I've achieved and have a family”. That seems to be one of the
problems of my generation.
Interviews by Jane Wild
