To avoid spoilers and repeats, skip to 1:45
This week; the 1970s.
AKA the ugliest era ever.
We’re still in the horrifically modern school building, they’re following the comprehensive system now.
How did some of the boys suddenly get long hair?
Or how did they manage to hide his long hair in previous episodes?
Or did they really put wigs on them?!
Classroom, staffroom, teacher’s clothes, everything has gone dramatically downhill in this decade.
Roleplay in the classroom, as much as I prefer the old fashioned ways, I have to admit this kind of thing would have worked much better for me.
Mind you, it clearly is a lot of fun and more interesting than regular lessons but what do you really learn from this?
It is nice to hear a teacher have problems with nudity in a newspaper.
She is quite right, we went from corsets and not even showing an ankle to nudity everywhere all the time.
Humans can’t handle freedom very well it seems, the second we let go of some standards and rules, we go overboard.
The 1960s and 1970s are a great example of this.
Yes many of the hold ways and ideas had to go and things needed changing and improving but it was done too extremely and the world that was created wasn’t better than the old one, in some ways it was worse because things that just needed a bit of updating were instead totally destroyed and replaced with systems that caused unforeseen effects we’re still suffering today.
Teenagers were encouraged to express themselves… what a mistake that was!
Make-up is coming to school, I find this quite sad.
Caring about your appearance, having to spend money on lipstick and eyeshadow, spending time in front of a mirror trying to look good, so much effort, so much stress, all that added to an already stressful life.
I never cared about these things and just ignored them but I reckon it would have been nicer to just live in an era where you went to school in an uniform and weren’t allowed make-up.
One of the girls and two boys are not allowed to come on a trip, brilliant.
You have to be neat and tidy and they are obviously not.
Quite right.
Kids standing up for their rights, oh dear.
So they were encouraging kids not accept being send off for wearing makeup and having long hair.
Thanks a lot hippies, you ruined schools for ever!
As I wrote earlier, having “freedom” to look how I wanted made being a teenager in school not more fun, it made it more complicated.
On top of that they handed out little books with information many kids were not ready for, which again would have included me.
Having fellow school kids reading about adult subjects would make my school time even more uncomfortable, it would have made me think I was supposed to be interested in these things and that I should have find it easy to talk about them… which I wasn’t.
As often those who change the world forget that not everybody wants it changed.
Progress isn’t always progress for all.
Now the kids are drawing up “demands” for the head teacher.
Bring back the Victorian school…
A day trip to spaghetti junction… even that’s depressing.
School uniforms are ditched.
I never had any but as a kid I so wished we had them.
I hated having to care about clothes and appearance, it all added up to an already difficult time of your life.
The free school movement… all this reminds me way too much about the chaos of my 1970s childhood.
Horrible.
I was given too much freedom at school and thus didn’t do much learning.
So much wasted time.
I was forced to call my teachers by the first name and absolutely hated it.
Everybody was equal at my school, or at least that is what they were pretending to be.
All formality was removed but I didn’t want to be pals with my teachers, I wanted there to be some sort of order, hierarchy.
Freedom came with responsibilities I didn’t want.
It’s a bit silly to hear the children ask the cane to be removed.
It hasn’t even been used.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone of the production team whispered that suggestion into their ears.
Hip young teachers sitting on the edge of their desks, trying to be cool, on the same level as you… god it’s all coming back to me now… it was horrible.
No more punishment, no more rewards, just a sanctuary room for kids to relax in…
I need a bucket.
In stead of an actual black studies lesson, we get two chaps talk about their experiences during the 1970s.
Which is great and interesting but again it disrupts the immersive experience.
“In the 1970s most white kids had stupid hair.”
Really?
Only the white kids?
Although I don’t care about sports at all, I do like that a teacher simply got Muhammed Ali’s attention in a hotel lobby and convinced him to come talk at his school.
It is interesting that for some of the black kids in the class having a lesson all about being black made them feel uncomfortable.
We had a few events in school with other cultures as a theme.
In stead of some of us becoming more interested in these cultures it had the opposite effect, after all, it was school trying to make us be interested in something so we almost automatically disliked it.
Sometimes these events that were meant to make us come together actually put an emphasis on there being a difference we had not noticed or cared about before.
Home economics, finally boys get to learn how to cook as well.
No matter how much I prefer the old ways, I have to admit that giving boys and girls the same lessons is absolutely a step in the right direction.
I would have loved learning how to make a chair, I hate cooking.
Interesting!
Girl says that she would normally just use reverse search on the internet to find out what kind of plant she has but now she has to look it up, put effort into it.
Boy responds; It’s good though, it shows you how spoon-fed we are now.
Astute observation.
After-school club was a good idea, sadly there were many children who had an empty home waiting for them after school because mum was now also working.
I was one of those kids who regularly found herself home alone, but I loved it.
Learning how to be comfortable and ok with being on my own is perhaps one of the most valuable things I’ve ever learned.
Even though I am Dutch, I remember watching Grange hill on TV.
It may have been the reason I was so jealous of British kids having school uniforms.
Mind you, when the stories became unrelatable, watching it became uncomfortable.
It made me wonder if I was supposed to be having complicated relationships and do drugs even though nobody in my school did.
Interesting to see kids be shocked when a kid get a wallop from a teacher.
I had a teacher who enjoyed grabbing us by both arms and shaking us all over the place when we were naughty.
We all thought it was quite amusing.
It is fun to see the Grange Hill actor and it’s nice to chat about the subject, but again, it is dragging us out of the 1970s immersion.
Good to see that the general consensus is that the 1970s system didn’t work.
We indeed were guinea pigs.
I still can’t do maths properly and my grammar is atrocious.
Historical Reality Television 