If you went to school in the 70s/80s what happened that wouldn't happen now?

[TheVampiresWife]

I started primary in 1976, left secondary in 1989. Some of mine:

Corporal punishment (the most obvious one for a lot of us I think). In junior school (early 80s) we had a headmaster who would save all the week's canings for Friday afternoon assembly. The kids lined up on stage and were caned in front of the whole school. It was fucking horrific looking back - I remember a boy in my year crying and wetting himself on stage and he never lived it down, the nicknames followed him to secondary school

Girls doing needlework/cookery while boys did woodwork/metalwork

Boy in my class whose surname was Gaye. Geography teacher used to call him 'Poof' and 'Queer' which of course other kids found hilarious and joined in. He changed his surname halfway through secondary school

In my primary class an overweight girl was made to stand on a chair so the whole class could see what we would look like if we were greedy and ate too much

The headmaster who caned kids on stage also used to get girls to kiss him on the cheek and say thank you at prize givings. He also used to make comments about how we were 'developing' and once said in a conversation with my mum that I was getting 'a broad back'. The mums didn't seem to mind his comments

In primary school the children in the SEN class were described as [vile word I can't bring myself to type] by teachers and children alike quite unselfconsciously

In secondary school an English teacher had an affair with a sixth former and she became pregnant. He left but wasn't reprimanded and got a teaching job in another school the following year. The couple are still together all these years later!

It really was a different time and not necessarily for the better, either. I do have lots of happy memories of school too though!

I was not aware of anybody at school coming out in the 80s. It was a real 'no go' I think. Maybe because I'm male, I assume it was harder for gay men than for gay women. I'm sure it was bad for both, but AIDS was a massive concern and 'queer bashing' always seemed to be violence on men. The bullying would have been unbearable.
Being 'gay' was a regular taunt for anybody remotely nerdy, or not good at sports etc.

I was a young teenage in the early 80's and can recall be confused about homosexuality, I'd say about 1/3 of my peer group were ok with it and 2/3 were as confused as me. There was a lot of 'it must be wrong, because our bodies aren't designed for it' talk.

By about 18 or 19, I think I'd just accepted 'it is what it is' and I've never waivered. Once in a while though, I'll still hear the odd comment that harks back to 80's thinking and I cringe.

My son and daughter, both adults now don't appear to bat at eye, which has mislead me into thinking nobody cares anymore - it's just accepted, and rightly so. But it seems old attitudes die hard and younger people still face a troubled time if they are anything other than straight (which is tough enough given some of the violent trends in pornography).

@PissedOffNeighbour22

I was at primary school from about 1989 I think.

• headteacher used to pick me up and cuddle me frequently. Can't imagine this happening now but there was nothing dodgy about him. He was just a lovely lovely man.
• deputy head was another matter altogether. He used to send me out to 'find a book' every lesson, then follow me out and say/do weird things. I told my mum and she said I was being ridiculous and I should get over myself! . He was a very well regarded teacher but I can't have been the only one he was inappropriate with.
• teachers making people stand up in assembly to yell at them and tell them they will amount to nothing. My brother was one of those targeted and it was awful.
• kids were put over teachers' knees to be smacked.
• I hated PE in knickers and vest. Having to get changed in front of everyone was awful. There was a girl who was really well developed and her life was made to be hell. The teachers did nothing about it.

In senior school:

• having things thrown at us such as wooden board rubbers etc
• being dragged down the corridors by teachers
• teachers having affairs with pupils (never the young or attractive teachers, always the middle aged letchy ones).
• teachers standing in the communal showers watching everyone get washed

Wasn't corporal punishment outlawed in schools by then?

@Bbq1 Yes we did the sock thing! And the Kickers shoes too. But this was early 00s. That fashion must have come back round from the early 80s.

I went to primary school abroad in the 90s but it sounds very much like school here in the 70s/80s. We were smacked and had our ears pulled when we misbehaved, no one thought anything of it.
At school in the UK, I was put into the SEN class for an hour a week as English wasn't my first language and I was supposed to be getting help to learn. It very much was a dumping ground as others have said. I just read a book for an hour while the other kids messed around. There was a teacher supervising, who was nice enough, but the SEN kids weren't really taught anything. They were just babysat essentially, even though most of them were capable of learning if given the chance. I once overhead a teacher calling the kids in the bottom set (including the SEN ones) r*tards. Awful.
I wonder if things are still the same or if SEN provision has improved.

@SweetestThing my DF was one of the people who would send letters in reply (very junior officer on board ship). He would describe the places the ship had been to, the things he had seen. He kept copies of the letters he sent. One of them described the docks in Nagasaki in the late 40s with new manufacturing equipment being delivered.

I wonder if things are still the same or if SEN provision has improved.

Massively depends on the school and the Head.

Some posters mentioned the safety films. Does anyone remember having to watch horrific films about what might happen and what you had to do in the event of a nuclear war? I couldn't sleep at night for ages after that!

@tealappeal

Some posters mentioned the safety films. Does anyone remember having to watch horrific films about what might happen and what you had to do in the event of a nuclear war? I couldn't sleep at night for ages after that!

I don't remember films but I do remember teachers saying stuff like 'It's not if, it's when' about nuclear war. The 80s was a pretty scary time to be young what with the threats of AIDS, nuclear annihilation and getting your legs chopped off by a train. No wonder Gen X are so hard to rattle!

@tealappeal

Some posters mentioned the safety films. Does anyone remember having to watch horrific films about what might happen and what you had to do in the event of a nuclear war? I couldn't sleep at night for ages after that!

Yes, that awful cartoon with the elderly couple.

How the wind blows?

@tealappeal - yes! We went to see the stage play of that too. When the bomb went off all the lights in the theatre went out and they'd brought massive fans on stage when they did so we were blasted by wind too.

Also the TV shows like Threads were so scary.

Started school 1985-1997
Board rubbers thrown at my head. Did PE in our knickers and vests in infant school. Communal showers after PE with teacher watching, fully nude. That was 1992.

@iklboo - the stage version sounds terrifying! Glad I didn't go to that one!

Left primary school in 1981. It was almost a daily occurence for our male teacher to put boys over his knee and give their arse a thrashing. Looking back there were several pupils with behavioural issues or disabilities in our school.

There was no exam pressure from parents or the school. I remember showers after PE unless you had your period in which case you had to bring a note in.
Also, no one cared about attendance. Several kids were absent for weeks on end and no one in authority seemed to follow this up. I remember one child came in bleeding because they had been beaten by a parent but again I don't think this was dealt with as it would be today.
I think it was better in that there was no academic pressure but pastoral care was absolutely shocking and in some cases abusive. No one questioned it at the time as it was considered to be the norm.

Started school in 71
music and movement in vest and pants
warm milk
teachers having affairs - don't know if they did but rumours were rife.
kids vandalising seats on a coach on a trip - the HOY took them round the back of the building one by one, even the roughest ones came back crying, none would say what he did.
Kids clearly, in hindsight, with SEN, being sent out constantly. One boy constantly running away, there were fields next to the school. Teachers would chase him and eventually he he would be caught and carried back. Probably about 9 yrs old.
Boys being caned on the field so they could be seen.
At the comp- boys being caned. One teacher had a reputation for being sadistic
Bullying was rife but the attitude was 'dont be irritating/stay away from them'
Teachers having affairs with 6th formers
A stripper was hired for a teachers birthday by a group of kids and came to the school to do her act!

I didn't get maths at all, was told I wasnt listening and stupid No help at all. I failed O level and CSE. I took GCSE in 2000.

plus sides

story time in the school garden
school discos
The christmas show put on by the teachers- they did a sketch show for the kids
No National curriculum so teachers had freedom to teach.
At the comp girls could do woodwork/metalwork and technical drawing instead of home economics and needlework, only a few of us did it and we were considered not worth bothering too much with though.

Oh and all the way through, boys did football, cricket and rugby, girls netball and hockey. Only running/athletics were both. I wanted to do football and was categorically told no, I was a girl, football was for boys.

We went on a school trip to the Lake District in P7 (it was 1977) and stayed in a Youth Hostel. There were about a dozen of us in one dorm and we all got punished for talking. The teacher went round, made us unzip our sleeping bags and she smacked us on the legs.

I think not having a National Curriculum did make teachers more creative but it also meant that some teachers just followed their own interests and that subject coverage in Primary was very patchy. At my Primary I recall that every single PE lesson in Y5 was dodge ball. The teacher would basically chase you around and chuck a ball at you so I made sure I was always caught as soon as possible so I could spend the rest of the lesson chatting to my friends at the side. My top junior teacher was obsessed with the Industrial Revolution so our summer trip was to some crappy industrial site. I know some previous posters have mentioned their love of the Nature Table but when I did my PGCE in 1988,one of our lecturers said that nature tables served no educational purpose and should be banned.

I also remember when I was about 5 or 6 being hugely excited when the teacher wheeled he TV into the classroom so we could watch Words and Pictures. It was shown live so timings had to be spot on! Also doing Music and Movement in the Hall and waiting for the teacher to switch on the radio. I have used Podcasts of the BBC equivalent with my own classes and they love them.

I know some previous posters have mentioned their love of the Nature Table but when I did my PGCE in 1988,one of our lecturers said that nature tables served no educational purpose and should be banned.

I find that so odd. Yes, if it’s just a table stuff gathers on it’ll be of no purpose, but a good teacher can make anything educational, especially something like a nature table.

The reason the National Curriculum was brought it was because some teachers were not teaching the 3Rs. Sadly of course it became rather clunky, and stifled the creativity that I experienced at primary school. But it was introduced for a reason and I don't suppose the kids who weren't taught properly thanked the previous system much.

You have to realise that there was a bit of a "revolution" in teacher training in the 60s/70s and formal teaching was considered old-fashioned and times tables and even reading and certainly spelling and grammar etc went out of the window.

I was taught no grammar at all. It was all about "creative writing", however bad and incomprehensible it might be!

Some of these are shocking 🥲

I was at a primary school 1976 - 1983. I don’t remember any corporal punishment but we did have some nasty bullying teachers.

We did have showers at my secondary school (mid 80s) but they weren’t compulsory thank goodness.

Many, open teacher-pupil relationships.
Corporal punishment - boys got caned regularly at our school Blackboard wipers thrown at heads, lots of public humiliation
Subjects segregated by sex - boys did woodwork and metalwork, girls did sewing and home economics
Communal showers supervised by PE teachers who yanked towels off shy girls and shoved them into showers.
Poor or neglected pupils (self included) being told off by teachers for not wearing bras/having correct uniform/sportswear/kit for field days etc, as if we had the power to change how our parents provided for us. I hope these days there is a little more empathy and insight.
Smoky staff room and loads of pupils smoking at the bottom of the school field/outside school gates from the age of 12.

But also: all desks faced forwards towards teacher. Everyone stood up and greeted teacher as they entered the room.

Our Latin teacher used to insist on a formal greeting at the start of every class. So it went (in Latin):

• Good day pupils
• Good day teacher
• You may sit down
• I sit down

I can remember the words in Latin, but not the spelling! We all cringed and died just a little inside every time. Anyone who got something wrong had to confess they were a 'silly sausage' (what are you ....?) but not in Latin. I don't suppose the Romans had sausages.

According to my Latin teacher, sausages were a very popular snack in the Public Baths 😬

@MyCatEatsPrawnCrackers 😀😀

In the 1960’s, DP’s father caught his older brother with “Purple Hearts”. The dad took the brother down to the local police station, where the local bobby gave him a thrashing. Apparently, he never tried drugs again.

Back in what would now be years 7 and 8, in the early 80s, we had one young, very camp, extremely nasty teacher. He carried a plimsoll in his back pocket at all times. If any boy (only ever the boys) did the tiniest thing to displease him, they would be taken into the adjacent changing room and smacked with the plimsoll. It eventually came out (after a boy wet himself in fear in class) that he was smacking their bare bottoms, but I don't recall there being any major repercussions and as far as I remember he kept his job, although not his plimsoll