No Surrender

I have always been fascinated by the stories I read in my childhood concerning Japanese soldiers who were posted to the lonely outpost of a remote Pacific island during World War II. It seems that many of these were undeterred by news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and refused any imprecations to surrender to the Americans due to the fact they had sworn an oath of honour to their Emperor to fight to the death. many died resisting the inevitable and it was only when the Yanks agreed to allow the defeated Japanese Army to form a special battalion to bring them in with honour and dignity that the fierce firefights were avoided and as late as the early 60's wisened old veterans were returning to dignified repatriations in the motherland, slightly bemused at the new setup and the realisation that Horohito was in fact a mere mortal.

I cite this extraordinary tale as a metaphor for the institutionalisation that is commonplace in secondary schools, particularly with regard to the conservative attitudes of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) that comprises the high command of the school empire. They are at once suspicious and resistant to any change, in spite of its necessity. Let me give you an example. Chewing Gum. The modern blight of chewing gum waste is something that we take for granted in our world today and generally only react to when we have a personally unpleasant experience of it, such as treading it into our carpet at home, discovering it on our new shoes or clothing, or having to remove it from our children's hair. Otherwise we somehow manage to filter it out of our mind and vision in despite the growing evidence of it all around us.

In an attempt to define a newsworthy subject for year 7's (11-12 year-olds) to report upon I happened to step into some in my classroom, whilst energetically circulating and gesticulating. My eureka moment resulted in a site survey which involved the children counting up the discarded pieces of gum under their individual desks. The staggering total of 619 pieces were revealed in one classroom alone and some simple maths which multiplied this by the number of classrooms revealed that we were hosts to over 35,000 peces of under-desk gum litter alone, a figure that paled into insignificance when compared with the number per square metre in the playground areas, a figure we resisted the urge to mutiply by the acreage of tarmac polluted by this foul product.

I decided to approach the assistant head about the school rules on this and what we might creatively do to raise awareness on this issue. I had a few ideas in mind whereby the kids could do assembly presentations and get involved in drama and music activities to re-educate themselves on the problem. He was certainly interested and suggested that I was "kicking at an open door" a door, which he later described as "not even being on its hinges"! I put forward an idea, proven in cities and schools across the country, that 'gum targets' be provided as a safe place to dispose of the offending article, and that forms of 'gumart' might be a useful magnet for the gum waste, which after all is the problem, not the product itself. This he demurred against citing the school rule that it was actually banned in the school itself. I pointed out that this had in fact been less than successful given the abundance of it underfoot everywhere and I suggested that as a new school was imminently to be built wouldn't now be a unique window of opportunity to try to develop new strategies to avoid its inevitable arrival in the new building.

Clearly the Canute like resistance to the tidal wave of gum litter had been unsuccessful, however, rather like the original approach to the aforementioned Japanese soldiers, no change to school policy was likely. For them, and us, the war may be over, but the same firefights remain inevitable. Publicly humiliating children for responding to advertising of gum confectionery - a market which in the UK alone is worth approximately £500 million per annum and growing - has made no change to its popularity. Indeed, even the last gum free place in the world, Singapore, recently bowed to the might of marketing megabucks and lifted its ban, principally it must be said because it proved harder to enforce than the prohibition of alcohol, and yet a school edict is expected to suffice in spite off its massively obvious failure.

Maybe I should write to the heirs of Hirohito for advice, or start chewing it myself!