Fielding ponders the dizzying consequences of being Turned Around
I'm pedalling down the road and see a poster and nearly crash.
It's of a huge mortarboard. An advert for St Custard's or Balliol or Brideshead? No. For my old school's sixth form – "1st Class".
Swish. Posh. Exclusive. I feel guilt, rage – I feel like weeping.
My old school! I taught there for 35 years. Loved most of it, especially the sixth form.
You can't beat an inner-city, state school, sixth form – sussed, curious, hungry and bright as pins. Ah, the dappled light on shades of academe as we thrilled to John Donne or Emily Bronte or the Clash. Richly various. All god's children. A golden age…
Well, apparently not. That liberal stuff is dead. We got Turned Round.
We went from a liberal 1960s folly to a whizzo palace of corporate culture. It's all the rage.
It usually proceeds thus: Ofsted parachutes in to deem school "failing". Year Zero begins.
Enter demon head, who will resemble Nosferatu. He will be "passionate" and "driven" - or barking mad. He appoints the Leadership Group, who point their power suits at staff in grim briefings and threaten them in soft, verbless prose. They had us by the modules.
Then you'll need things like blazers and ties, Zero Tolerance, flash refurbishment, some fecund plant life, a water feature, a bit of Latin, a perky prospectus and some aspirational gibberish on the walls.
You'll need to cull the naughtier pupils and, of course, the duff teachers. We lost a hundred in about 18 months. All suddenly rubbish. By what criteria? Off message? Off trolley? Too old, left, liberal, sexy, palsied, bearded? Too opposed to the relentless testing? Too partial to Captain Beefheart? We had only one thing in common – we were all in the NUT.
My goodness, it was grim. The Fear was everywhere. We were always "failing" something. I once failed to meet 17.5 targets in one week. Meet them – I was scarcely on nodding terms.
We took to beta-blockers, booze, skunk – or the hills. We were disappeared. We were replaced by shiny, tufty-haired types who were on message.
This works. There's order where once there was chaos. Everything is hunky dory, potentials are realised like billy-ho - and blondes wave pretty A*s at the Daily Telegraph.
Modern teachers good. Old teachers bad. Modern pupils clever. Old pupils dim. Turned Round. Simples.
School zooms up league tables. We zoom down soup kitchens.
We lost those culture wars. And now we never happened.
Thousands of us – rubbish and superfluous, wandering the streets, shouting at walls – at mortarboards on walls.