1975 Free Speech in a Cornish Comprehensive School

 

The school leaving age has been raised to sixteen and across England there are some rather aggrieved pupils who started secondary school in expectation of leaving at fifteen. I’ve accepted a job to teach them, starting January 1975, but at least the school is in deepest Cornwall where everyone is supposedly more genial than in the big cities. I teach some History up to GCSE level but my main task is to engage the reluctant fifteen to sixteen year olds to whom I offer recently-invented Social Studies. Unfortunately, the raising of the  leaving age has obliged schools to erect portable and supposedly temporary cabins for use as overflow classrooms and I spend a lot of time in one.

It’s a wet cold day and the windows of the temporary classroom are steamed up. Today’s topic is Free Speech and Toleration - the latter a word which I soon discover is unknown to my pupils to whom I am trying to explain the basic ideas of John Stuart Mill,  that you should be free to say what you like so long as it does not harm others.

Roy has outgrown being a boy and school takes him away from the job he wants to be doing. Large and genial but occasionally disruptive, he is sitting by the window, seemingly interested in what is happening on the other of the condensation. But then I realise he is writing something and the words are clear enough

ALL TEACHERS ARE WANKERS

Other pupils have now followed the line of my gaze and await my response. I see a perfect opportunity: this is a test case for John Stuart Mill’s ideas. It’s an expression of an opinion but it doesn’t harm anyone and so there is no good case for banning it or punishing Roy. What do you think?

Roy shifts in his seat, rubs out the word ALL and above it writes into the condensation SOME.