I had the exact same experience.
I know this is wildly off the point, but I literally had the same headteacher in primary school as this guy (quoted below), back in the early 1970s. I am ten years older than him, but the headteacher didn't change.
I'm not in any way endorsing the attitudes of this columnist, but my experience of primary school was very similar. Also, my own DDs experiences of school (the youngest did her A levels 12 years ago) was very different from the current stories I read here.
I had the same headteacher as this guy (although, as girls, we only got to play rounders and netball rather than football and cricket):-
Mr Chips is making a comeback
For four years, from age seven to 11, the most important man in my life, after my father, was Eric Sutton.
I certainly saw more of him than my dad, who was often away on business. Mr Sutton — never Eric, heaven forfend — was there five, sometimes six, days a week.
He was the headmaster of my primary school, an important influence in my formative years. Mr Sutton had the air of a Regimental Sergeant Major and ran the school with military efficiency — not surprising, really, given that he’d served as an NCO in the Army Education Corps during World War II.
He had a piercing parade-ground bark, which could halt small boys in their tracks up to 100 yards away. That said, his bark was worse than his bite.
Mr Sutton was a disciplinarian with a fearsome cane on the wall of his study. I can’t remember him ever wielding it in anger. Maybe I’ve simply forgotten. But the prospect was deterrent enough.
If he did have to administer corporal punishment, it would have been in the spirit of the old adage: This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you, boy.
[...]
Mr Sutton was a great believer in the virtues of sport. Our Dickensian school building didn’t have a playing field, so he’d march us crocodile-style to the local ‘rec’, rain or shine. In winter, we played football, in summer cricket.
After school and on Saturdays, he’d take teams to compete in tournaments. And he expected us to win. Eric Sutton would never settle for second best.
All this team sport was in addition to several sessions of vigorous PE every week and trips to the local open-air swimming pool.
He may have lain great importance on our physical development, but he gave equal — if not more — weight to nurturing our intellectual capacity.
These days, ‘passion’ is a much abused cliche. Every inept reality TV contestant professes their ‘passion’ for everything from fairy cakes to break-dancing. But Mr Sutton really was passionate about education in general and literacy in particular.
It was his ambition to get as many of his pupils as possible into grammar school, which he saw as the gateway to a better future. He succeeded spectacularly, his school regularly topping the table of 11-plus passes.
Some younger readers may think this sounds like a posh prep school for the privileged children of the well-off. Nothing could be further from the truth.
West Town Juniors and Mixed Infants, Williamson Avenue, Peterborough, was what we would now call a ‘bog standard’ state school.
But there was nothing ‘bog standard’ about the ethos instilled by Eric Sutton, who could have held his own in any exclusive fee-paying establishment.
He was a dapper man who always wore a sports jacket, complete with leather patches on the elbows, and cavalry twill trousers. He wouldn’t have been seen dead without a shirt and tie — unlike some of the slovenly scruffs on parade at the teachers’ union conferences every Easter.
Which brings me to the reason I’m taking a trip down Memory Lane today — the news that there has been a significant increase in the number of men training as primary school teachers.
[Edit right-wing rant that I don't wish to be associated with]
All this combined with relatively low wages has conspired against encouraging any young family man to become a primary school teacher.
The good news is that recent changes which allow teachers to earn a salary while they train in school have begun to attract more men into the profession. And the Government has launched a campaign to persuade male graduates to take up a career in primary education.
The numbers applying have risen by 51 per cent, albeit from a low base.
Eric Sutton would have approved.