Devils in skirts, devils in schools －スカートをはいた悪魔、学校にいる悪魔－

“Education, education, education!” 

So said Tony Blair twenty years ago as he was elected prime minister of the UK. 

I was in high school at the time.  I can certainly agree that we had some problems in our schools.  For example, I had an English teacher who never talked during the lessons.  He just checked who was present and then sat behind his desk, reading a book.  So the students did whatever they wanted, chatting and joking loudly.  The only time we got him to talk was when we started throwing things at his head.  Were we terrible children or was he a terrible teacher?

Now, twenty years after the government promised to fix all our education troubles, are Britain’s classrooms temples of calm and learning? 

Maybe not.  Judging by recent news, our schools have become a battleground between revolutionary devil-students and strict devil-teachers. 

You may have heard an interesting story this month from Isca Academy in Exeter in England.  There was a heatwave and many of the boys wanted to wear shorts.  But the school insisted that they stick to the uniform, which only allowed long trousers for boys and skirts for girls. 

When the boys complained, the head teacher was unsympathetic. 

“If you don’t like your trousers, then you can always come in a skirt!” she said sarcastically. 

But some of the boys took her literally and borrowed skirts from sisters or female friends and wore them to school.  This is how the story was reported, and people across the country laughed at the amusing protest of the boys. 

But after reading several articles about the incident, some of the small and little reported details stood out. 

The mother of one of the boys reported that when her son said he would go to school in shorts, the teachers threatened to send him to the “isolation room” for a week. 

The isolation room?  This is a school, not a prison, right? 

And according to another article, after five boys wore skirts to school, two of them were punished.  One was punished because “his skirt was too short.”  The other was punished “because his legs were too hairy.” 

Huh?  It sounds to me like the teachers were trying to humiliate the boys in skirts and to get other kids to bully them.  I can almost imagine the teachers giving the boy in a short skirt wolf-whistles. 

In an often scary and chaotic world, some things never change.  There will always be devils in schools, skirt-wearing and trouser-wearing, amongst both the students and the teachers.

Vocabulary:

revolutionary – involved with trying to overthrow a system of government or authority

strict – applying the laws or rules severely

a heatwave – an unusually hot period of weather

to insist – to refuse to change one’s opinion, claim etc despite an opposing view

sarcastically – in a joking or ironic tone

to take someone literally – to interpret someone’s words as being spoken truly, not jokingly or sarcastically

isolation – being alone or apart from others

to humiliate – to shame; to cause extreme embarrassment to

a wolf-whistle – a double whistle, with a rising and then falling tone, signifying a lewd or sexual interest in another person