Peter’s Story

Section Four - Episode Three

“Education” in the 1950's

Somehow, I managed to survive the harsh reality of school in the 1950's.....  somehow coping with the dysfunctional system, and the bullying.....

My mother kept a leather strap in the kitchen draw, and both my sister and I were strapped for any serious misbehaviour.  Until, eventually, I cunningly hid the hated strap from her by pushing it down the back of the draw, so that if by chance she did find it, I could pretend that it must have slipped down there by accident.


The teachers all had similar leather straps, and for any misbehavior that was judged to be serious enough, by a boy or a girl, was punished by the culprit being hit on the open palm of the hand with the strap.  We had to hold out our hand steady, at arm's length, and receive our just reward for the misdeed.  And, if you dared to lessen the impact of the blow by dropping your hand just as the strap struck it, you were punished for that with some extra strokes!  The teacher was God to us, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, and there was no appeal system.


Any especially serious misbehaviour would result in the culprit being sent to the Headmaster, Mr Kibblewhite, for his judgment and punishment, and he had the reputation of being more stern and severe than all of the teachers.


It was all about control.  Control of us kids at any cost.  We had to be regimented, forced into submissiveness under fear of extreme pain if we dared step out of line!  There was no escape from this prison of control.  School was compulsory.  Our parents had no choice in the matter.  And the school authorities had the legal right to decide appropriate punishment in order to keep control.  Control, control, control.


And our sentence in this prison of hell was, to us, a life sentence.  There was no such thing as a limited term sentence or the possibility of parole.  To a young child, the concept of being free to leave the system once the age of fifteen was reached was meaningless.  “Freedom” was never part of our reality, we had no idea what the word “freedom” meant.  Our only reality was the day-to-day grind of trying to stay out of trouble with the teachers, and trying to stay out of trouble with the playground and classroom bullies.




Is it little wonder that our society is so sick?  With our mental hospitals and prisons overflowing, when we subject ourselves to such horror during our impressionable formative years?  The wonder of it is, is that so many of us appear to be able to function at all as supposedly “normal” adults, after being relentlessly tortured for all those years!


The whole focus of my school days, and that of all of my peers, was totally centered around coping, somehow, with the insanity that was being inflicted on us every day by the dysfunctional “system”.  It was not just the bullying, the control, and the avoidance of being punished with the strap at all costs.  It was also what was being inflicted on us every day in the classroom, by the well-intentioned, but sadly misguided, teachers in the name of “learning”.  This was what was actually doing the worst damage.


There is a deeply ingrained belief system shared by most teachers who are part of the “system”, that children are reluctant learners.  For our own future good, it is imperative that we be force-fed daily from a uniform, compulsory curriculum.  Everyone is forced, under threat of punishment and public humiliation, to attempt to learn the same stuff, whether we are interested in that particular “stuff” on that particular day or not.


We are treated like little computerized robots, with sponge-like brains that have an infinite capacity for facts, figures and concepts.  We are forced, under pain of punishment and humiliation, to sit still at desks all day, not allowed to talk to each other, nor to socially interact in any normal functional way.


The teachers are the computer programmers, paid to shovel this meaningless data into our brains, day after day, year after year.  Only minor allowance is made for variations in learning rate and learning style:  with thirty or more kids (robots) to shovel data into, teachers are just far too busy to cater for the individual needs of each of us.




But wait a minute.  Does this theory that kids are inherently lazy, reluctant learners actually correspond to reality?  Does a one or two year old have to be sat down at a desk in a classroom and taught the theory of how to crawl, walk and run?  Does a twelve year old computer nerd have to be forced to learn how to hack his way into the Defence Department system?


No way!  Just try to stop a young child from learning to crawl, walk or run!  Once he is ready and motivated to do this, and can see other kids having fun doing it!  Just try to stop the young nerd from his hacking activities!


When I was a pre-schooler, I used to drive my parents, and any other adults or older children willing to be my victims, to distraction with my literally endless questions about everything.  I have a very clear memory of sitting in the shed of the poultry farm next door to where we lived, where they prepared the hens' food and cleaned the eggs.  Sitting on a sack of wheat, endlessly repeating the one word, my favourite word.....  “Why?”  My willing victims were the three daughters of Jack and Elsie, the poultry farmers; these three girls being a little older than me.


“Why are you doing that?”
“Because I have to feed the hens this mixture.”
“Why?”
“Because they need food to lay eggs.”
“Why?”
“Because without food they will die.”
“Why?”
“Because we all need food to live, including hens.”
“Why?”
“To give them energy, to do things, including laying eggs.”
“Why?”
“Because we need the eggs to eat, and to sell for money.”
“Why?”
“Because we need money to buy things.”
“Why?”


No matter what the answer to my question, I would want to know more.  I would ask the next “Why?”  I had an insatiable appetite for learning.  And on my first day at school, I took this insatiable appetite to school with me, really looking forward to at last having someone to answer all my endless questions about the world.




But what did I get at school?  I got disappointment, I got control, I got a fixed curriculum that I had no interest in, I got fear of punishment and humiliation, I got disillusionment, and I got more and more control.


The only lesson that I really learnt, right to the depths of my being, was to learn strategies for coping with the dysfunctional, insane, system that I was now a part of.


Keep out of trouble, at all costs! Do not draw attention to myself! Not easy, for a large boy with curly hair!


I very quickly learnt to  “pace myself” in the classroom, so as to avoid the displeasure of the teacher by not being in the bottom group of kids in any subject.  But also to never be in the top group either, or my bully mates would not approve of this!  The comfortable middle was where I belonged.  Somewhere lost in the crowd, anonymous, a “Mr Average”;  definitely not a tall poppy, tall poppies always got cut down to size!


The dominant theme of the comments on my school reports, year after year, became “Could do better, could try harder”,  much to my parents' frustration.  But I could deal with their minor displeasure at this, much easier to face them, than to run the risk of suffering the fate of a tall poppy!


I have a very clear memory of coming to a conscious realization that I was deliberately holding myself back during my Form 2 year (age 12).  I can clearly feel the energy of the class, the teacher, the room we were in (in the older part of the school), the energy of this  “holding back” is very clear to me.  I even have a clear picture of where I was sitting in the room at the time, I could go back there today and recognize it.  Up until this time, this holding back strategy of mine was totally subconscious;  but from this day in Form 2 onwards, I was very much aware of what I was doing, and why I was doing it.



Class photograph, at age eleven, at around the time that I became consciously aware of  “pacing myself”, to keep from being a  “tall poppy”.....






My strategy of keeping out of trouble at all costs was shared by most of my peers, and it's a tragedy that we were forced to do this.  But even more of a tragedy, is the destruction of our natural personalities by “the system”.  I arrived at school as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed five year old, with a keenly inquiring mind, a heart full of love, and an irrepressible personality.  The world was my oyster, I was ready for anything!  And I finished up as a dysfunctional, disillusioned, sick, frightened, dull-eyed robot;  programmed by the system to respond to the threat of pain with avoidance at all costs.




There is a lot more to this than what meets the eye.  According to Rudolf Steiner, the mind and brain of a young child, before the age of at least seven, is not suited to the absorption of purely abstract mental learning.  Force feeding the minds of young children, under threat of punishment and humiliation, actually does permanent damage to the mind and to the brain.  The Steiner education system is built on this theory, and it works well.


The recent research by the “Gentle Wind Project” indicates that this damage done by the too-early forced learning of abstract mental data is actually much worse than even Steiner thought.  Their research indicates that children are not ready to be separated from their parents, nor are they ready for abstract mental learning, until the age of nine or ten.  And that they can very easily “catch up” in the learning that they would have missed, provided that they are given suitable encouragement to be motivated to learn at their own pace in their own way, learning about things that they are really interested in, rather than force-fed a boring curriculum.



Class photograph, at age nine, by which time the worst of the damage to my brain had already been done, and my  “original personality” had been destroyed.....






Another factor that was ignored by my teachers was my individual learning style.  I have discovered quite recently that I am a kinesthetic learner.  I have already mentioned that I can effortlessly learn a new dance and the accompanying song at the “Dances of Universal Peace” circle dancing, once we begin to combine the dance and the singing of the song together.  My body and mind just take over, and I find myself doing it!  But, when standing still, trying to mentally memorize the words and the melody, with my body not moving in time with the song, I just cannot get it, no matter how hard I try!  Little wonder that I found it so difficult, sitting still at a desk all day, trying to absorb disconnected facts with my mind, with no chance to act them out with movement of my body!


My brain was damaged and my original natural personality was destroyed in my years at Hornby School, and I have shed many tears, and sweated blood, in my efforts over recent years to recover from this early trauma.  It is only very recently (as at 1998), that I have recovered from this nightmare that was inflicted on me, and continues to be inflicted on every child who goes through our schooling system.




My original personality was stolen from me.  My original carefree, naturally joyfully curious, bubbly personality.  The lovely little curly-haired boy who sat on the sack of wheat saying  “Why? Why? Why?”  The sweet, innocent little five-year-old who could not wait for his first day at school, so as to find the answers to the “Why?”  In its place, I was forced to take on a false personality, in order to survive the daily grind of the fear of unjust punishment and humiliation, and the degradation of the bullying.  Like all children of this age, in order to survive, I constructed for myself a “school personality”.  A dull-eyed personality of a liar and cheat.  A personality that would do anything just to get through each day intact.





For many years, I believed in the myth of the “happy childhood”.  We program ourselves with this false story in order to avoid the pain of facing up to the truth.  I'll bet most of you are in major denial right now about your own experiences at school as you read this.


I say this not to upset, annoy or dismay you.  I say it in order to expose the truth to the light of day.  It's time for our wake-up call.  It's time for all of us to face up to our own individual truth, and to take responsibility for this truth, and do whatever we need to do, to resolve our own personal demons.  Only when this is done, will we ever see any improvement in social conditions in our society.  Until this is done by a large number of us, our prison inmate and mental health patient numbers will continue to swell, our hospital waiting lists will continue to grow, our politicians will continue with their dysfunctional manipulation and control.  Throwing money at the “problems” will not help.  The “problems” are not really the problems at all.  They are just the symptoms of an underlying hidden pervasive sickness, hidden deep within every one of us, and deep within the collective consciousness of our society.


What each of us needs to do, in order to travel on our “journey of recovery and freedom” from this, is for each of us to discover, for ourselves, the truth about ourselves.  The process of discovery is an important part of  “the journey”.  However, I would suggest that among the things that you do, you need to repair the damage done to the energy structure of your body by those years of abuse at the hands of “the system”.


There are various ways for repairing this damage.  I have mentioned the energy healing devices from the “Gentle Wind Project”, and the similar healing devices made by myself, and, just recently (from 2002), there is now the “Energy Anatomy” flower essences.  You can begin to repair this damage to your body by using the healing energies of the flowers, looking at the photos of the Energy Anatomy flowers on this web site.


For example, go to the Home Page and click on the link to the Energy Anatomy essences.  Scroll down the page to “Damage Repair”, and click on the small photo of the High Hopes Rose.  Wait for the large photo to load, and then follow the instructions on the page, sitting there for a few minutes absorbing the healing energy, reading the words, and repeating the affirmation.


Go back to the page that lists the “Energy Anatomy” essences, and click on each of the ones that “jump out” at you, and work with these flowers. Please contact me by E-Mail if you need help or have any questions.


Your attention is also drawn to the Pohue flower essence, which is specifically for helping the body to repair the damage done by the effects of being subjected to the  “modern schooling system”.


By healing this damage to our energetic structure, we can lean to let go of our false personality and to rebuild a healthy, strong, “true personality”.  A personality that will support a totally functional, truly healthy person.  I have been doing this now since 1992, and  “It's working”.




I have mentioned My Kibblewhite, the “Headmaster” at Hornby School.  My clearest memory of him is in the ritual that we went through every year at the time of  “Anzac Day”, April 25th.  He would address us kids at length about the story of the brave men from New Zealand and Australia who landed on the beaches at Gallipoli, Turkey, on 25th April, 1915, and fought the Turks against overwhelming odds.  This was a major battle of World-War One, and is remembered by Australia and New Zealand as a “coming of age” for our nations, for our countries nation-hood.


The names of the brave men from the Hornby area who went to the war are inscribed on the sides of the War Memorial in the school grounds, with a special mark against the names of those who were killed and did not come back.


I can recall him telling us about the “evil Germans”, who we fought in two world wars on the side of our British Empire.  How the slogan of the Germans was  “Might is Right”, but how the slogan of us righteous British Subjects was  “Right is Might”.  And how we ultimately triumphed, after much sacrifice, over the evil enemy.


I had always had the impression that Mr Kibblewhite must have been an Anzac veteran himself, such was the passion with which he spoke about the events, as if from personal experience.  But, he hardly could have been.  The events took place in 1915, and if he was old enough to be there in 1915 he would have been at least in his late fifties by the time I knew him, and I don't think he was that old.


My grandfather, my father's father, was an Anzac veteran, and his experience of the horror of life in the trenches, at Gallipoli and in France, totally changed his life, and consequently the lives of many others close to him, as he used alcohol to numb the legacy of his war-time untreated post-traumatic stress.


Years later, when my mother mentions that Mr Kibblewhite has retired and been presented with a color television set as his retirement present, the thought comes to me  “I wonder how many thousands of kids he indoctrinated, over all those years, with his Anzac Day lecture?”




Postscript  -  1998


I recently (1998) went back to Hornby School, and I am startled to discover that the old War Memorial is only about ten feet tall, and a few feet wide.  My memory of it as a child was that it was a huge structure that towered way up high!  To me, back then, through the eyes of a child, it seemed like it must have been at least twenty feet tall!  My visit all these years later, looking at it from the eyes of the mature adult, who has by now largely recovered from the indignities inflicted on the child in this place, somehow completes the circle of my recovery from the trauma and pain of those years.


For me, the cutting down to size of the War Memorial, symbolizes the cutting down to size of all of the drama of those years so long ago.  It is just a grubby little, unloved, stone structure.....  sitting in bleak surroundings just over the fence from the roadside, inside the school grounds.


The row of pre-fab classrooms is long gone, and this somehow helps to exorcise the ghosts of the bullies and the energy of  “Miss What's-her-Name”, the teacher with the severe sexual phobia, who so deeply believed that sex was “disgusting”.


I don't even glance at the swimming pool, nor at the bathing sheds, or the bike-stand sheds; which were the places for so long associated in my memories with all of that heavy, dysfunctional energy that so heavily overlays my earliest awareness of sex and sexuality.


And the school grounds, which I had remembered as being a huge space, a place of agony, where those playground bullies made my life so miserable, are actually quite modest in size.  A scruffy cluster of old buildings set in a dusty playground, in a quiet corner of a dreary suburb, on a bleak Canterbury day, with a cold breeze gusting around the corners of the buildings, under a gray sky.


I walk back to my car and drive away.....




Further Postscript  -  November 2002


Upon re-reading the above story, from the fresh perspective of the “fully recovered adult”, who has now dealt with and healed the legacy of all of those childhood horrors, it seems like a distant memory, almost like it was someone else, and I am the detached observer who is reading about someone else's story.  My eyes no longer fill with tears, (like they used to in 1998), upon re-experiencing some of the uglier scenes, for example the unrelenting bullying.


I would therefore like to add a further postscript, and say that things were not all “bad” back then, and that most of the people involved were not deliberately bad or “evil”.  The teachers and the headmaster at Hornby School were all really nice, well-intentioned people, doing the very best that they knew how to do, under circumstances that could not have been easy for them.  Similarly, my parents were kind-hearted, loving parents who really cared for my sister and I to the very best of their ability.  Looking back at the way things were back then, nobody knew any different, everybody was part of  “the system” and they all subscribed to the shared beliefs and practices of the times.


In saying this, I am not  “making excuses”, nor am I saying that what happened was “O.K.”.  It definitely was not “O.K.”.  Nor am I going to go back and edit or change anything that I have said.  The way it is told is straight from the heart, the wounded heart of the little hurt child that was a part of me, that I carried around buried deep inside me for many years, and it is very important that this hurt child be acknowledged and heard.  And, I feel, it is also important to some of you who are reading this, those of you who also lived through those times and shared similar experiences, in that this is also your story too.



This applies to all of this story, including the part that you are about to read, set in the 1960's, when teenage Peter discovers girls, sex, relationships, etc.  What I describe is the way it was back then, and is not intended to pass  “judgment” on any particular person or group of people.... we have all of us moved on from those times, hopefully having learnt from the experiences.


In fact, this is the whole point of this “story”, and of all “stories”, what other purpose can they serve, other than giving us opportunities to experience all of the many things that we need to experience, in order to learn  “life's lessons”?  And, these lessons have to be  “real”, with us feeling real feelings, feeling the pain right to the depths of our being.  And also, of course, feeling the joy too, as real joy, not as some counterfeit parody of joy, or of pain, like in a “make believe” story book.  It is for this reason that the story may sometimes feel to you as being somewhat “raw”.


Anyway, I will leave it at that for now, and let you get on with the story.....