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rhythmaningThrough the joys of the BBC’s iplayer, I am listening to In Living Memory, about the Little Red Schoolbook, the fuss it made and the subsequent court cases.
I remember this well. Or rather – I thought I did1. I – or perhaps (much more likely) my brother – had a copy of the LRS. (I bet it is still in my mother’s attic, along with Schoolkids Oz.) This was a time of political foment – a few years after the activities of 1968 and the Grosvenor Square riots; Britain was turbulent with frequent changes of government, rampant strikes, the three-day working week; star-filled nights (the streetlamps switched off to save power during the miners’ and electricity workers’ strikes) and uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets.
The Little Red Schoolbook was written by a couple of Danish schoolteachers, and was full of somewhat leftwing advice for schoolchildren: it contained a few pages about sex and drugs which, according to the programme (you expect me to remember what it said after 35 years?), would not be out of place in any school today – but in the early 1970s, the idea of providing advice to schoolchildren about sex and drugs was heretical.
It also gave advice on how to complain about teachers and how to organise a school strike.
This we duly did. (Again, I think it must have been my brother’s year that did this – they’d have been in the fifth form, maybe the sixth. I bet we just followed along.) I remember holding a school strike on a rather glorious summer afternoon: it was a Wednesday – our games’ afternoon (we were smart kids – we weren’t going to miss lessons and really get into trouble). I think there might have been a march (I went on many marches in the mid to late 1970s – though I would guess this would have been the first).
Or of course, we might just have bunked off and gone home.
1I thought I did, but looking up the dates, they doesn’t really coincide with my memories. This is about my memories; not facts..
I remember this well. Or rather – I thought I did1. I – or perhaps (much more likely) my brother – had a copy of the LRS. (I bet it is still in my mother’s attic, along with Schoolkids Oz.) This was a time of political foment – a few years after the activities of 1968 and the Grosvenor Square riots; Britain was turbulent with frequent changes of government, rampant strikes, the three-day working week; star-filled nights (the streetlamps switched off to save power during the miners’ and electricity workers’ strikes) and uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets.
The Little Red Schoolbook was written by a couple of Danish schoolteachers, and was full of somewhat leftwing advice for schoolchildren: it contained a few pages about sex and drugs which, according to the programme (you expect me to remember what it said after 35 years?), would not be out of place in any school today – but in the early 1970s, the idea of providing advice to schoolchildren about sex and drugs was heretical.
It also gave advice on how to complain about teachers and how to organise a school strike.
This we duly did. (Again, I think it must have been my brother’s year that did this – they’d have been in the fifth form, maybe the sixth. I bet we just followed along.) I remember holding a school strike on a rather glorious summer afternoon: it was a Wednesday – our games’ afternoon (we were smart kids – we weren’t going to miss lessons and really get into trouble). I think there might have been a march (I went on many marches in the mid to late 1970s – though I would guess this would have been the first).
Or of course, we might just have bunked off and gone home.
1I thought I did, but looking up the dates, they doesn’t really coincide with my memories. This is about my memories; not facts..