Let’s hear it for Jon Moss, the football ref and one-time primary teacher who had no qualms about showing the red card to his illustrious ex-pupil, the Liverpool and England player James Milner.
Milner may be a multi-millionaire and his team top of the league, but he plainly remembered not to mess with “Mr Moss”. He knew that it was curtains as soon as he had committed the foul. Sent himself off. His former teacher did not need to do or say anything. Over 20 years may have passed since he attended that school, but young Milner still knew his place. The fact that Moss happened also to be the referee was largely irrelevant.
We teachers should all take a leaf out of Moss’ disciplinary notebook. Too many of us are way too soft and deferential when we meet our former pupils. Just because these people may be in their twenties, thirties or beyond, we tend to assume that we have relinquished all disciplinary rights over them. I am not so sure that we should ever do that, even when they fully grow up and go off on “work experience” for a few decades.
Lifelong discipline
Why bother investing all that time and effort in school on shaping their behaviour if we then recklessly let them off the leash just as they move into the wilds of early adulthood and into the moral maze of middle age? All the good work is undone. Our troubled society would surely become a happier and more civil place if teachers could still effectively flourish yellow and red cards at their former charges’ transgressions all the way through adulthood? “Lifelong discipline” is what is needed.
Obviously, the police and the law would still deal with the more serious behavioural breaches. Our role would be to continue to step in and punish appropriately whenever a former student is found to be bullying, smoking, littering, being abusive or engaged in any of the other misdemeanours that would have got them into trouble at school. Everyone’s behaviour (our own included) would benefit from the threat of still receiving some firm, Moss-like punishment from one of our ex-teachers.
When I meet former students, I sense that this is what they want. That’s why they never feel comfortable addressing us by our first names. Deep down they still want someone from their primary or secondary-school life to keep telling them where those behaviour boundaries are and for some form of correction to be in place for when these are crossed.
A telling off from an old teacher
Lifelong discipline would mean adults still receiving detentions and isolations from their old teachers. We would still have the right to confiscate mobile phones and take away lunchtime “out” passes. Positive behaviour reinforcement would feature stickers, merit points and messages of praise being sent home for proud parents and children to read.
This would surely lead us towards a more caring, and certainly more corrective, society, with everyone being made to stay constantly mindful of the noble principles taught to them at their school. Maybe when people reach 50 they could apply to be let off the leash, given that their former teachers may no longer have the will or energy levels to continue to track and administer punishment.
And let’s not have any predictable teacher whingeing about all of this representing “yet another responsibility for us to take on”. Come on. It wouldn’t be all that onerous a task for us all to start to monitor and discipline the full national cohort. The camera and tagging technology is ready and waiting.
Moss has shown teachers the way; he has blown the whistle on our socially irresponsible indolence. Let’s get out there and finish the job off properly.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
