ABSTRACT
Indiscipline in our schools is all too often in the news, and I was naturally concerned to know whether teachers in Europe faced similar problems to those which apparently confront the staffs of some London schools today. That there are such problems is indicated by the article quoted in an earlier chapter from an Italian periodical; but I am bound to say that the schools which I myself saw seemed to be pretty peaceful places. It is true that a teacher in one Spanish school shook her head sadly and said that the older pupils were very unruly, but such things are, after all, relative, and the behaviour of the pupils in that school seemed to me in fact fairly decorous. An Italian teacher has told me a delightful story of a class who rigged up a radio loudspeaker in their classroom and told a very raw young teacher that she must not begin the lesson as the headmaster was intending to make an important announcement through it, until which time, music would be played; they were thus enabled to enjoy an uninterrupted pop concert throughout the hour, and went on their way rejoicing at the end – and if that story is true, I have high hopes of that 186particular group of youngsters, and would certainly not see them as any menace to the future of civilization! But of grievous ill discipline – loutish rudeness, threatening of teachers, vicious vandalism – I should guess there is comparatively little, and that confined to the squalid urban areas where such things breed.
