In Galway the other night the company I was in started talking about a local controversy. Some Leaving Cert girls, it seems, as an end-of-school prank, had invited a male stripper to lay on a surprise performance for the teachers, religious and lay, and for the girls. This was very much unappreciated by their elders. The head nun canceled revision classes, canceled the debs’ ball, and in general demonstrated to the girls where, as a matter of fact, power lies.
The people I was with never got round to discussing the rights and wrongs of this event. We were all so astonished at the girls having even thought of such a thing that we got no further. Even the youngest among us, not long out of school, could hardly believe the change there has been since her day. It would never have crossed our minds – any of the men and women there – to try even the mildest joke on the authorities in our schools. And as for a male stripper! The world would have come to an end. God knows what would have happened. We’d have been murdered, for sure.
“But then it’s all different now,” someone said. “Kids like going to school these days. They don’t dread it the way we used to.” And then, the horrible, unforgotten stories began to be told. One woman, when she was five or six – before her First Communion, anyway – had been slapped by a nun. When she told her mother, her mother took her back to the school to demand an explanation. The nun looked the mother right in the eye and denied ever touching the child. Next day, the nun assembled the school, and made the child kneel in front of it and repeat after her, “I am a liar. I am a liar.” In this woman’s voice, you could hear the bewilderment of the child she once was, as well as an enduring bitterness.
A man said that it hadn’t been too bad for him. There were only two masters in his school who beat pupils and one of them only punished you “when it was reasonable. If you were messing, or that.” But the other was a sadist, who used to lift the boys up by the short hairs beside their ears. He taught math. Once a boy explained a math problem he’d written out on the board to others, when the master was out of the room. For that, he was beaten so savagely that he was left unconscious. “What was his crime?” the man who was telling us this is still asking, thirty years later. “What was his crime?”
All of us could remember the special pain when the cane missed your palm, and caught your fingertips instead. We all, the men and women there, know what it’s like to have your ears twisted. Chair-legs, pointers, fists – anything and everything was used against children in those days.
And it was no use appealing to home. Most parents thought that if you were chastised you deserved it, and probably deserved more of the same. Or that it was the school’s business, and that parents couldn’t interfere with a school. Or, that they’d been beaten themselves and that it hadn’t done them a pick of harm.
That’s the question, isn’t it? Was it harmful? Because if it was, then most people over the age of about twenty-five years are likely to have been harmed. Not that they’d admit it. Men, especially, sturdily insist that if anything, being hit did them good. Made men of them. Should be brought back for joyriders, vandals, hooligans – other people’s children, in short.
I think it is true, myself, that just being hit, as such, doesn’t harm you, or at least that it didn’t in that culture, where it was altogether accepted. But the context did matter. Where it was unfair, or out of control, or part of personal vendetta, then it terribly disturbed the child’s task of making sense of the world. And I think that it was, generally, harmful. That it inculcated a sense of powerlessness on the one hand, while teaching authoritarianism on the other. The individual was a nobody, in a world of more powerful beings. Power was always out there, in the hands of the wielder of punishment. The notion of personal authority, of rightly having your own place in power relations, simply couldn’t develop in the climate of fear.
I think of a quiet man I knew, who once told me about his school. Everyone bullied him, because he was so meek. But one Brother hated him. One icy winter’s day, for example, the Brother soaked his scarf in water, and sent him out to stand in the yard until the scarf should freeze. It took five hours. This man never asserted himself in life. He married a forceful woman, who walked all over him. He did his little job, quiet as a mouse. It is hard for me to see no connection between what he suffered as a child and his subsequent timidity. It is hard not to believe that if he’d gone to a child-loving school, his natural sweetness might have led to his being valued, and thus to valuing himself.
In fact, I find it difficult to believe that there is no relationship between our society at large and what we witnessed as children. And it was as small children we witnessed it, at least for me. Secondary girls’ schools didn’t use corporal punishment, the ones I went to anyway. Yet we might have been better able to take it when we were older, instead of at seven or eight or nine.
What threat, I ask myself, did people so small appear to pose, that they could be treated like that? What was going on? However bold we were, how could they have done it to people so much smaller than themselves? Make them flinch and howl and be humiliated? “Ah, sure, we got over it,” people say. But if they did, how is it that those episodes are always remembered, when so much else of childhood is forgotten?
How did all this affect the relationship of ordinary people to the other people, the ones who have power over them? You notice that we have no Tiananmen Squares here, that we don’t assemble to demand accountability, no matter how bad things are. We don’t go after the people in power, we don’t follow them around saying, “What happened to the promises you made?” Or, “You lied to us.” Or, “You let us down.” Grievances we have in plenty, but what about outrage? What about confronting them – making them pay? No, that’s not something we do, and I don’t think it is altogether fanciful to see a link between that passivity and the prudent passivity we learnt at school.
The kind of country we have is commonly called “conservative.” Well, if conservatism includes an unwillingness to rock the boat, a fear of change, a dull acceptance of the status quo, those are all attitudes that were inculcated in us, from our earliest years. It isn’t as if we chose them, from a wide menu of things we might have been. To be like that was the wisest course. And not just in the schools, of course. From de Valera down to the parish priest, from the home to the guards’ barracks to the doctor’s surgery, the two poles of that world were authority and obedience.
Now, we have a more diverse kind of world struggling to come about, and young people to cope with it who never knew what it was like to be afraid to go to school. Here’s hoping that that will make a difference, and that enough of them will stay here long enough for us to see the difference. The male stripper, it seems to me, was an awfully bad idea, on several grounds. But the road that led to him has been climbing all the way.
The Irish Times, June 5, 1989