Back To School

I recently started a language course as it’s supposed to be good for aging brains but the class-room ethos could be bad for the blood pressure. It has even changed radically since I trained in adult education (briefly) in 2009, and not just the teacher telling us to work out our translations without relying on Google. Classroom doors are emblazoned with red notices telling us to ‘Fight Racism’, and you can’t begin anything until you’ve joined the student ‘portal’, a fourteen-step process involving several passwords and an app. But the biggest difference is the apparent fragility of us students, middle-aged men and me in my sixties.

‘I am not allowed to use the word ‘Test’, our teacher, Mila, told us. ‘I can only say ‘quiz.’ ‘Test’ might upset you. Many English are traumatised by school.’ What would the word ‘Exam’ have done to us. ‘They no longer teach grammar in British schools’, she warned bleakly, ‘So this is going to be hard for you.’ We tried to compose ourselves for the suffering ahead but before we could open a book or look at printed sheets, there was a more important issue, not aspects of the verb, but ‘Safeguarding’. ‘My training has taken ages’, said Mila sadly.

We study in a secondary school, entrance adorned with images of ‘Our Safeguarding Team’. Three women, a man and a crop haired person from the Thames Valley Police beam down at us reassuringly. Teachers are only allowed to communicate with students through the portal and must live at least three miles away and this also applies to those in adult education. Mila mentioned ‘Terrorism’, and to protect us a stranger would come in unexpectedly, sit at the back and observe, not her teaching but the behaviour or ‘behaviours’, as ‘they’ are now termed, to see that nothing terroristic was going on. We are also required to watch each other for, ‘anything inappropriate’.

I’d come out on a wet night to learn a foreign tongue and had gained a new knowledge of English. ‘Terrorism’ is no longer about a man planting a bomb, it now means something else, presumably sexual. Perhaps ‘groping’, or grooming on mobiles. A new world of which I know little. The school hallway however, took me back to my days as a lefty student activist. A ‘Suffrage Mural’ showed the history of the franchise. There were photos from the US ‘Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963’, there were images from the slave trade. But the politics I knew is now digitalised and identarian. A QR code offered the school’s children the chance to see ‘BLM Face Masks’. There was a tube map starting with the evil past but leading to a future where there’ll be a ‘Diversity robot’, to guard against the evil of non-diversity. Another notice attested that the institution, ‘Supports the ‘Halo Code’’ recognising, ‘The right of staff and students to embrace all Afro-hairstyles’, as an important part of identity, ‘including weaves, wigs, headscarves and wraps’. The notice continued rather primly: ‘Offensive words are not allowed to be shaved onto the head’.

After an hour I still hadn’t seen any Serbo-Croat; there were forms and an ‘E signature’ to be sent to the portal, and Mila had to ‘Reiterate British values’. ‘The foreign staff hate that term’, she said bitterly. ‘It’s insulting but we have to do it.’ Her whole manner said, ‘Don’t blame me. It’s not like this back home.’ Over a crashing musical backing a teenage voice approved of tolerance and mutual respect and we were instructed to, ‘Educate against hate’, followed by a warning about climate change. Teaching ‘British values’ in schools became law under the coalition, its importance recently re-emphasised in the Lords by Lord Blunkett who said the alternative was riots, but he didn’t mention their need in adult evening classes. ‘It’s about funding’, Mila murmured, as if reluctant to admit that it all comes down to money. We all want the class to continue, eager to get at our last chance to embrace another language, but one man, about forty hadn’t quite understood the first lesson. He offered Mila a lift home as it was raining heavily and they lived, unknown to the authorities, in the same part of town. There was a shocked silence and she sadly unfurled her umbrella.