I mentioned elsewhere my high school English teacher – not just did he encourage us to go to the anarchists bookshop (which wasn’t all about protest and rioting but also a community centre, a Pakistani chap whom I was later to work with and whose family are well respected in the electronics industry was a regular there asthey’d have meetings with trade unions about how to deal with multiculturalism and immigration, that caused tension even on the Left).
One thing he particularly encouraged us to buy was a book called “The Little Red School Book”. it was deliberately sold for pocket money prices so teenagers could get it,and was packed full with what were very radical ideas about how high schools should run, as well as info about drugs, sex etc. Indeed it was a bit like partyvibe.org in many respects.
it was why he would let us call him by his first name, and often we could suggest what books to read or films to watch or what we would write about. It worked too, as his class wasn’t in “sets” of ability so some lads who would normally misbehave in class were there (I was also friends with them; at some point I will post my experiences of computer hacking in 1987.), but unlike other teachers who’d theyd rag a lot more, there would be about 5 mins of banter when he attempted to start up the video recorder and TV or any AV kit and it would all be connected wrong, and he’d often say “Alex, can you help me with this?” to great hoots of laughter from the class, but as soon as the VCR and tellly were correct everyone would fall silent and all eyes would be on the screen as he’d always pick an interesting documentary, often with a leftwing slant (I do wonder if some teachers so did support Thatcho deliberately set the TV all wrong as it would be on random settings like input for a Japanese camera (the school did not get one until 1990, long after he’d left and I was in my last year!)
Anyway, Ssme of it was a bit dated – it was first printed in the early 1970s but got banned in England due to the censorship, and still was “not listed” to libraries so you had to get it rather furtively even in 1986/1987. It is in English, but I noticed the names of the authors were “foreign”, and their grammar matched someone whose first language is more Germanic. It turned out that the authors are from Denmark!
So what I’ve always wondered – do Danish schools for age 11-18 actually do all that cool progressive stuff? I did have a look last night on Danish wikipedia, but it was complicated as there are about 20 different sorts of schools and it seems everyone can still go to school at age 40 or even age 80 as they feel you must always be learning throughout life (another friend of mine from Northern Europe says this was the case in his country)
