Tags
Bigot, Bigotry, Children, Drugs, Edinburgh, Education, marijuana, Opinion, Principal David Gray, Private Education, School, Stewart's Melville College
Tychy is not the greatest fan of private education, defining the whole thing as a sort of cheating which protects the place of the rich within a meritocracy, but one can only take a dim view of Edinburgh’s “prestigious” Stewart’s Melville College and its overwhelming failure as an educator. On Friday, the £17,000/£8000 per annum college – which stands in parliamentary Victoriana on the road to Corstorphine – expelled four boys, aged between fourteen and fifteen, for smoking marijuana in the school grounds. After the children were spotted with the drug, the school staff rather charmingly spied on their activities using CCTV. The school apparently takes a strong anti-drugs line, and the headmaster, David Gray, pronounced that the cannabis use was “totally incompatible with our ethos.”
These are rich kids and the expulsion of the four children seems to have been staged like the departure of some disgraced cabinet ministers. The Scotsman claims that the “parents decided to withdraw the pupils from the school on the advice of the headmaster,” making it sound as if they had recognised upon advice that errors had been made and that they were consequently resigning their children for the good of the school. The head paid tribute to the boys, claiming that “It is such a shame because they were good pupils and they were very honest when we questioned them. They were remorseful and realised how serious the matter was.” In a further statement, he continued that, “I feel for them. They are actually intelligent boys.” That the boys expressed “remorse” is surely in tune with the school’s educational anti-drugs mission, but this was not enough to save them from the chop.
One thing which has no place in any school is not marijuana but bigotry, and the sanctimonious David Gray seems to be off his head on this substance. His statements to the media were entirely free of any concern for the children’s health or welfare, and the children were not expelled because they were the source of some sort of threat to public health, but because of some very snooty judgements about their lifestyle “ethos.” Cannabis can, according to Gray, “induce a lifestyle totally contrary to the one we would wish them to choose” – an induced lifestyle such as that of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Obama and Cameron have both admitted to taking soft drugs). Gray stated that “If they choose to indulge in that way, then they are making a choice which is entirely contrary to our values…” An angel with a flaming sword, Gray waxes wrath that the children did “succumb to… temptation.”
According to its promotional material, Melville College is not about educating children but creating bland and inoffensive automatons who are “proud, respectful, self-confident and articulate,” and whose potentially-obnoxious “self-assurance” is “matched by a disarmingly unassuming and unpretentious manner.” The end result is “quiet self-confidence” (no Hurray Henrys here) and a “pride in performance exemplified by their smiles.” But not their glazed eyes and unbalanced tittering.
There is no substance to this story at all. The children’s alleged wrongdoing would have otherwise had no consequences, they had not significantly threatened their own health or that of others, they had expressed “remorse” for bringing the drugs to school, and if their idiot headmaster had not expelled them then they would still be, in his words, “good pupils” with bright futures ahead of them. This is entirely about appearance, P.R., being “on message,” and upholding the proper “ethos.” But then at a fee-paying school, which has to sell its “prestigious” brand on the market, P.R. is clearly more important than education and Enlightenment. In a somewhat desperate vein, Gray asks “If they had been allowed to stay, what would it say to the rest of our pupils?” Possibly, “I’m an adult and I have some sense of my responsibilities.”
Another thoughtful and pitch-perfect post on the expulsion of these young future citizens. I hope this brush with uptight PR doesn’t cause them too much harm.
When I grew up, neither of my two nearest neighbours had indoor toilets, or indeed safe floorboards; and my best friend lived in a caravan. I went on to attend an Edinburgh private school (recently administrated), with all the class-based confusion that that leafy suburban experience provoked. (The statistic that used to be quoted was that 25% of Edinbourgeois children attended private school, by the way – no idea what it is now.)
To go back to the Stewarts Melville incident: surely pot-smoking is more innocuous than covert surveillance: and CCTV, and iPhone cameras, could threaten to make quasi-stalinist informers of us all.
i think this is ridiculous. As an old pupil of the school, the silly assumptions made about it from people who have no idea what they are talking about are actually quite insulting. Drugs are illegal. End of story.