Inside the ‘blackboard jungle’

The 1950s saw a wave of depictions of threatening male working-class adolescents in English novels, films and cartoons. However, these texts must be contextualised not only as part of the well-documented 1950s moral panic about youth but in relation to the popularized psychological concepts of the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ child and the increasing imple-mentation of progressive educational ideas that artificially limited working-class pupils’ horizons. This makes this period not only another reiteration of the perennial moral panics about the rising generation that Geoffrey Pearson has documented, but an emergence of a new way of conceptualizing youth.

by some sociologists between teachers and their working-class pupils may have arisen less from a sense of difference than of similarity. Teachers who were keen to safeguard their professional image would not want to identify themselves with pupils who hailed from manual workers' families; this concern was deepened by the relative fall in teachers' pay throughout the post-war period, meaning that some skilled manual workers could command higher wages than trained 'professional' teachers. 10 Male teachers, in particular, felt the need to assert a 'masculine' professional identity in response to two perceived threats: child-centred methods, which threatened their specialized knowledge by challenging their traditional practices, and 'emergency trained' teachers, usually men, who had entered teaching after serving in the war through a special one-year training course. This group threatened the craft knowledge and authority of teachers who had entered the profession through traditional channels by representing a different version of masculine authority.
The current historiography on both the 'generation gap' and on progressive education takes little account of actual practice in schools and says virtually nothing about teachers' conceptualizations of childhood. As David Cannadine, Nicola Sheldon and Jenny Keating note in their recent monograph on the history of history teaching in twentieth-century Britain, the history of 'taught subjects' -defined as the relationship between the curriculum and actual practice in schools -has been neglected. 11 Harold Silver noted in 1992 that there is 'no social history of the classroom'. He cites the articles published in History of Education from 1972 to 1989, which, with the exception of a few nineteenth-century articles, are focused on politics, assessment methods, numbers and school organization. 12 This is largely the case for articles published in History of Education from 1989 to 2013 as well; although in more recent years the journal has featured interesting and innovative work that moves beyond Silver's categories, such as Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn's work on the material culture of the classroom, there have only been three, very recent articles that address classroom practice, and true to form, they all address nineteenth-century or inter-war Britain. 13 Phil Gardner and Peter Cunningham's work has illuminated the lived experience of being a teacher, but there is still little focus on teachers' relationships with their students. 14 This neglect means that we know little about how perceptions of young people in the classroom may have influenced national concepts of childhood and adolescence.
A recent attempt to open up the 'black box of schooling' and recover the culture of the classroom has enumerated the range of sources available to the historian of education. 15 In this article, I contextualize the teacher-writers of the 'blackboard jungle' novels by considering material drawn from case studies of three local education authorities, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Sheffield (West Riding) alongside teaching journals and advice guides popular among teachers of this period, and the original psychological texts which they drew upon. 16 Oral history archives have also allowed me access to how individual teachers conceptualized their relationship to their pupils. 17 By drawing on such a diverse range of material, I have been able to trace how key theoretical ideas are 'translated' into more popular texts and/or misread by practitioners. Novels, of course, represent a challenge of their own; while not assuming that any of the novels I consider give an accurate account of teaching careers or experiences in the classroom, I have Downloaded by [192.76.8.40] at 07:  found them valuable as a kind of self-narrative, because they were all written by former teachers. While presenting fictional situations, these novels can be taken to represent something of the writers' feelings about teaching, and the way they saw their pupils, at the time of composition; furthermore, the reaction in the teaching press to the stories they tell is very revealing. Overall, in dealing with teachers' self-narratives, I have tended to work on the basis that what these texts misrepresent or obscure is as significant as what they accurately relate, even if it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference. 18 By considering the Second World War as a catalyst rather than a turning-point, this article joins a growing body of historiography that has reassessed the importance of the 1950s as a catalyst in altering ideas of romantic love, identity and selfhood. 19 Moreover, as Mathew Thomson has recently argued, the figure of the older child and adolescent was key to the reconfiguration of ideas of democratic selfhood in the post-war period. 20 In this way, changing concepts of adolescence both resulted from, and fed into, wider social change in the immediate post-war period, gaining a significance beyond their immediate impact on eleven to fifteen-year-olds. Furthermore, the recognition that a healthy social development throughout childhood and adolescence was vital for the creation of citizens who could function in a democratic society repositioned the role of education, emphasizing the importance of co-operation within a group rather than the autonomy of the individual. As the national importance of education grew in the wake of the 1944 Education Act, parental involvement increased, and teachers themselves became vocal contributors to media debate about 'blackboard jungle' schools, their concepts of adolescence wielded a disproportionate influence in England and Wales. Therefore, considering adolescents in the classroom as well as in the clinic, home and street is vital if we are to truly understand how ideas of 'youth' changed in the 1950s. 21

THE FIRST BLACKBOARD JUNGLE NARRATIVE
After the 1944 Education Act, the majority of working-class adolescents could access separate secondary schooling for the first time, rather than remaining in all-age elementaries throughout their school career. This meant that both grammars and secondary modern school became obvious targets for media interest, as a type of educational institution that had never existed before; it was the secondary modern, however, that was depicted as 'failing' from the start. In this article, I will discuss two contemporary interpretations of the blackboard jungle narrative; the one represented in the media, and the one actually portrayed in the novels themselves. The first narrative suggested, in summary, that secondary modern schools were battlegrounds where ineffective teachers, wedded to permissive 'modern' teaching methods, failed to control delinquent boys. Although popular images of female delinquency were available in this period, the delinquents presented in these novels are invariably male. Similarly, the heroes of these stories, like their writers, are always male, and when female teachers do appear, they are generally portrayed as in need of male advice and/or protection. For example, the attractive Miss Hammond is rescued from rape by the hero of The Blackboard Jungle, and while Miss Alcock in Spare the Rod is praised for her modern methods, it is noted that she is hopeless at class control. 22 In short, working-class boys were coded as the problem and middle-class men as the solution, echoing contemporary assertions from groups such as the National Association of Schoolmasters that women could not effectively teach older boys. 23 As Laura King has most recently demonstrated, the masculinities of adult men in post-war Britain were increasingly family-orientated. In light of this evidence, the more traditional gender roles imposed on both teacher and pupils, with the 'real man' defined as an independent craftsman, indicate the extent to which schools lagged behind adult norms, and how the gendering of teenage boys differed from the roles assumed by adult men. 24 Historians have attacked this first blackboard jungle narrative as part of a wider critique of the idea of the 'generation gap', suggesting that the behaviour of youth had not significantly worsened. When we examine actual accounts of 1950s schooling, the first narrative is indeed problematized. Far from remembering a 'softer' type of education that encouraged misbehaviour, pupils emphasised rigid classroom control and corporal punishment. Derek Robinson, at a secondary school in Bristol, remembered that 'Teachers thumped kids quite regularly', and a nationwide survey of teachers in 1952 indicated that 89.0 per cent wanted to retain corporal punishment. 25 Evidence from the Cannadine archive also suggests that teaching styles remained formal for the cohort of secondary modern pupils born between 1935 and 1948. 26 Contemporary evidence from school logbooks supports these pupils' remembered impressions. Corporal punishment was misused throughout the 1950s at Cowley St John in Oxfordshire, a boys' secondary modern school. Parental complaints indicate that teachers frequently went too far; in 1952, a father complained 'that his son was struck on the face, leaving a scar', and similar complaints were made in 1953, 1954, 1955 and 1956. The headmaster seems to have tried to rein the staff in, to no avail. 27 These contemporary records indicate that 1950s pupils are not misremembering a strict regime by tapping into a national narrative of post-war austerity, but that schooling during this period often remained strict. It should also be noted that although parental engagement with schools increased during this period via parent-teacher associations and regular open days, these complaints indicate one novel area of contention; the assertion that only parents should discipline their children. This belief also stemmed from the rise of child-centred parenting, which we will return to briefly later in this section. 28 While the blackboard jungle narrative dominated 1950s media, an academic backlash took place in the early 1960s, when sociologists began to argue that adolescents were not, on the whole, a social concern. This work chimes with Jon Lawrence's recent summary of the history of sociology in Britain from 1930 to 1962, where he argues that, broadly speaking, post-war sociologists moved away from the 'social problem' remit of the inter-war period to an interest in 'social engineering' that extended beyond the poorest, presenting detailed ethnographic studies that emphasised the heterogeneity of the group under consideration. 29 For example, John Barron Mays's survey of deprived Liverpool schools stated that 'There was no evidence whatsoever which gave credence to any idea of a "Blackboard Jungle" existing in the Inner City areas', arguing that a fall in delinquency from 1951 to 1958 had led to better discipline and staff-pupil relationships. 30  adolescents were negative, whereas only 36.3 per cent of adolescents' statements were critical of adults. Musgrove emphasized that less than 4.0 per cent of fourteen-year-olds had been cautioned or convicted, and wrote that 'In general our adolescents are older than we think, our treatment of them barbarous and insulting'. 31 He reiterated these conclusions in 1966, emphasizing adolescents' strong family ties. 32 These sociological arguments become ever more convincing when we consider that most of the blackboard jungle writers had little experience of secondary modern schools. The writers of these novels tended to hail from middle-class backgrounds and obviously had no experience of attending a secondary modern themselves; and even though they usually possessed teaching experience in a secondary modern, they did not tend to have stayed very long. Even Edward Blishen, who had the longest teaching career in this type of school, began his career after the Second World War teaching for three years in a prep school before moving to Holloway Road, the school on which his book was based, then gave up teaching in 1959. ER Braithwaite taught in east London briefly from 1959, but had become a social worker by the early 1960s. Michael Croft did his teacher training in a secondary modern in North Oxford in 1950, but he only stayed for that year, moving to an independent school in London when he qualified, and Fielden Hughes taught only in grammar or independent schools. 33 Despite the writers' lack of relevant teaching experience, it seems evident that the blackboard jungle narrative rang true to some teachers in the 1950s, even if it represented a skewed version of the stories these texts actually told. Spare the Rod was well reviewed in Education, where the reviewer suggested that 'we know that this well-turned piece of fiction is too genuine a picture of some patches of education for any teacher or administrator to reject it'. 34 In contrast, it received a resoundingly negative review from The Schoolmaster and Woman Teacher's Chronicle, the official journal of the National Union of Teachers (NUT); the reviewer argued that Croft's school was more typical of schools forty years ago, stating 'Secondary modern school teachers have every right to be justly indignant at this alleged "sympathetic and faithful" portrait of their work.' 35 This pair of reviews seems to indicate that teachers were split over blackboard jungle novels, but on the whole, the other offerings were more positively received, although the series of 'Jungle in Bouverie Street' articles in The News Chronicle in September 1955, focusing on delinquent behaviour at a London secondary modern school, were often criticised by teachers' periodicals. Down the Corridors was recommended by Teachers [sic] World, where one of the editors stated: 'It gives a faithful picture of school life and the professional life of a schoolmaster', and Roaring Boys was positively reviewed across the board. 36 Alongside the welcome given to these novels by educational periodicals, advice manuals for teachers created their own version of this narrative by using the language of warfare to describe staff-pupil relationships in the classroom, influencing the image of teaching adopted by new recruits. Gilbert Highet, the author of a popular guide of 1951 that had been reprinted five times by 1963, commented in his introduction that 'I have met school-teachers who were literally terrified of their pupils, and sighed with relief when the bell rang and they were released from intimidation'. 37 The opening chapter of Richard Farley's guide to Secondary Modern School Discipline was called 'Into Battle' and the chapter 'On Being One of the Boys' included sub-headings such as 'schoolboy guerilla tactics', commenting that 'Senior boys… show a streak of viciousness unparallelled in former school times'. 38 In Teaching Without Tears of 1961, RI Bowley thought that 'The teacher who ignores the pellet whizzing across the room might just as well give the signal to open fire' and that 'Surprise is as effective in the classroom as on the battlefield'. 39 Teachers World also took a markedly negative turn in the late 1940s and 1950s. 40 The trend seemed to kick off with a 1944 article by Mary Holmes called 'Why Teachers Look Forward to Friday', in which Holmes argued 'I would like to see the child given less freedom to express himself, and the teacher a great deal more. Then the child will learn what he is intended to learn, and have more to "express" at an age when his self-expression will be desirable rather than objectionable'. A few issues later, the editor commented, 'T.W. has never published an article which has stimulated more correspondence from its readers than "Why Teachers Look Forward To Friday"... it meets with the resounding plaudits of thousands of T.W. readers'. One letter was quoted as saying 'I should like to endorse everything expressed by Mary Holmes'. This attitude became particularly evident in the two regular editorial columns, penned by 'Onlooker' and 'Essem' [SM, to stand for 'secondary modern', where the author taught.] 'Onlooker' argued in 1953 'Let us recognise children for what they are -physical savages with amoral minds. The whole process of education has to be directed to suppressing the savagery and enforcing acceptable standards', while 'Essem' wrote an editorial called 'Too big for their boots' in 1954 that stated 'It is our duty, in all kindness to their future, to make children understand how unimportant they are'. The Schoolmaster provided the lone note of optimism: it complained in the same year that 'Anyone who talks about the rights of children in these days is apt to get a less sympathetic audience than once would have been the case'. In a thinly veiled reference to Teachers World, the editor commented: 'I doubt whether, ten years ago, any educational weekly would have published a front-page article devoted to spreading the gospel that "it is our duty to make children understand how unimportant they are."' 41 The post-war negativity about young people appears especially striking because teachers' inter-war attitudes towards youth were unusually positive. This formed part of a national trend; the guilt over the 'lost generation' of the First World War was certainly significant in its formation, as was the increasing value of children as the birth rate fell. Victor Bailey has suggested that perceptions of youth may have become more negative after the Second World War due to the rise in juvenile crime, but what is really interesting is that commentators did not respond in the same way to a similar rise during the First. In 1914, 37,500 under-sixteens were charged each year, but this soared to 51,000 by 1917. 42 However, policy-makers responded in a very different way to their counterparts in the late 1940s. 43 Teachers World was also largely positive about children and young people throughout the inter-war period, contrasting markedly with its postwar stance, as we have seen. In 1932, an editorial by Horace Shipp stated that 'There probably never was a period when the younger generation were so free and established in their rights'. Citing the pioneering educational work of Ethel Mannin, AS Neill and Bertrand Russell, Shipp went on to write 'we somehow believe that it is the child or the children's far children who will save our muddled world'. 44  even more strongly in 1933 in an article entitled 'Why teachers should be well paid', arguing that 'The older generation is dying out and they have made a horrible mess and muddle which it is the job of the younger generations to clear up and clean up… The teacher can arrest the atrophy of the mind which threatens the future of every boy and girl… the only hope for humanity is the creation of minds which are capable of growth as they grow older'. 45 It is important to note that in this earlier discourse the teacher's interests are equated with those of the child; it is assumed that if children are afforded more rights, then the teacher's status will increase accordingly. This contrasts with post-war commentators, who assume that the teacher loses status when children are 'made too much of ' by society, setting the interests of children and teachers in opposition. This shift was reversed in parenting; as mothers were increasingly encouraged by popular psycho-analysts such as John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott to identify their own interests to that of their child, the idea expressed by inter-war parenting literature that the needs of the child and the parent must be balanced was discarded. Both shifts, however, placed a greater burden on the adult authority figure; to retain one's status, in the case of the teacher, or to be a 'good enough mother' in the case of the parent. 46 No longer the guardians of children's rights, teachers felt threatened by welfarist juvenile justice measures and 'the permissive shift', feeling that this shifted the balance of power further towards their pupils.
Teachers themselves responded to idealistic statements in the inter-war period and, on the whole, agreed, even if they were not as convinced by the natural goodness of the 'free' child. Headteacher Geoffrey Cross wrote in his regular column 'My School and its Problems' (1934) that 'the vast majority of children are perfectly reasonable, good-mannered and well-behaved... It is not easy to be a child at school, and some teachers do not understand that'. 47 In her prize essay of 1934, 'What my first year's service has taught me', Norfolk teacher Joyce Mount stated 'One maxim which last year I underlined very emphatically in my psychology notebook has come home to me: "For whatever goes on in the classroom, blame the teacher."' 48 A runner-up, 'A Novice', claimed that 'On the whole I don't think people improve as they grow older. Children are more generous and more appreciative'. 49 Kathleen Chapman, who started teaching in the first decade of the twentieth century in Oxford, remembered her inter-war pupils fondly: 'I think children all loved school so much. All the letters I have had since that article in the paper I've had about, ever so many letters and they all say, how much they loved the school and enjoyed it. They all speak so highly of it -they all say how happy they were there'. When her interviewer asked her, drawing on a more modern cultural script, 'Would you have children who sat at the back and made rather a lot of noise?' she answered, 'Oh, I don't think so… oh, you know they were full of spirit but they weren't what you would call downright naughty'. 50 These teachers, of course, were not working in secondary modern schools, but tended to be staffing all-age elementaries, so the comparison can not be perfect, as the age-group they taught was broader; however, taken alongside the broader shift in tone of the teachers' press in the immediate postwar years, the contrast is striking.
If the behaviour of children had not fundamentally changed, why, then, did these blackboard jungle narratives speak to so many teachers in the 1950s, even those who did not teach in urban secondary moderns? While contemporary sociological studies effectively challenged the idea that post-war working-class adolescents were inherently delinquent, the 'culture gap' they identified between the middle-class teacher and working-class pupil was too broad a generalization. The majority of secondary modern teachers hailed from the working class. Only 7.5% of male teachers in secondary modern schools came from professional backgrounds in 1955, and 8.8% of female teachers. 51 The varied backgrounds of recruits meant that the problem in the secondary modern schools was not as simple as a clash between middle-class and working-class 'cultures'. Instead, socially mobile teachers became increasingly anxious about their standing in society, and felt the need to distinguish themselves as professionals by asserting their superior social status and distance from their working-class pupils. Later recruits would also have been likely to acquire marks of middle-class culture through a period in grammar school. 52 This reflects Mike Savage's and James Hinton's analyses of middle-class self-ascriptions in the post-war period; both observe that middle-class subjects characteristically defined themselves as 'above' class by virtue of cultural superiority, something which teachers could lay claim to. 53 Farley appealed to such cultural pretensions in his 1960 advice guide, writing 'In cities especially, the teacher is often a lone figure at a bus stop, waiting to be whisked away to some schoolboy's dream land of cultured and gracious living' and went on to add that 'It is a paradox of our social system that the more sensitive and educated citizens may have to seek their livelihoods in the teaching of the insensitive and mentally dull'. 54 This linked the child-centred discourse about the inherent limitations of the working-class pupil to the 'culture gap' that some teachers were determined to widen.
Post-war teachers, like other middle-class professionals, felt threatened by reductions in both pay and status. The President of the NUT stated in his address to the Annual Conference in 1955 that 'Wages have declined in value until each one of us can look and see unskilled and socially unimportant jobs being better paid; the actual classroom work of teaching has steadily become more exacting and more exhausting'. 55 Asher Tropp's 1959 history of the teaching profession made a similar argument, noting that the Burnham salary scales were an asset to the profession during the interwar depression, but post-war inflation meant that the purchasing power of teachers declined rapidly in comparison to manual wage labourers. 56 Figures on wage levels during the 1950s indicate that teachers' complaints had real substance: Guy Routh's data indicates that teachers were paid on average less than foremen and some groups of skilled manual workers, such as engineering fitters, in 1960. In relation to male teachers, female teachers fared even worse across the decade, with equal pay not introduced until 1961; however, their pay compared favourably to groups of skilled female manual workers, with the best-paid group in Routh's data, upholsterers, earning substantially less throughout the 1950s. 57 This disparity may help to explain why male teachers felt especially aggrieved. Routh also notes that from 1913 to 1924 teachers increased their pay lead over the national average salary, but experienced a substantial relative reduction from 1936 to 1955, so may have experienced a decline in relation to other groups of middle-class professionals as well. 58 Reductions in pay, however, mattered to teachers for more than financial reasons; many teachers increasingly felt that they did not receive the respect they had before the war. John Blackie was a well-known progressive inspector, but at the West Riding Vacation Course in Bingley in 1957 he argued 'Now the pupils are beginning to have ideas of their own, and their parents too. They no longer feel privileged at being educated… It is a paradox that just when the teacher's claim to be a professional person is beginning to have real substance his professional authority is being increasingly challenged'. 59 John Gabriel's 1957 survey catalogues such complaints from a sample of British teachers; common responses included The way children disregard commands nowadays makes life impossible in a large community' and 'The cheek and impudence of children is colossal. They are the "British Untouchables" and encouraged in this by the regulations'. Teachers frequently mention the problem of the 'growing tendency towards free discipline', suggesting that they perceived the issues to be broader than their troubles with a particular school class. 60 Male teachers may have become even more anxious about their claims to authority when faced with the large cohort of emergency trained teachers who taught in secondary modern schools, making up a fifth of the total staff in this period. 61 Teaching was a reserved occupation during the war, so these teachers would have been confronted with a group of men who had served in the forces and hence contributed to the war effort in a more direct way than they had been able to. Using the language of warfare to describe experiences in the classroom masked the fact that many of the men who drew on this script had not shared direct experience of real combat. Furthermore, many teachers, both male and female, associated the emergency training scheme with a dilution of their professional identity -their claim to cultural superiority -because it implied that the craft of teaching could be learnt in a single year, softening the entry requirements.

THE SECOND BLACKBOARD JUNGLE NARRATIVE
The first blackboard jungle narrative, therefore, was popular among some teachers but seems unlikely to have corresponded to the reality of secondary modern teaching in the majority of schools. The second blackboard jungle narrative, however, was very different. This narrative suggested that secondary modern school pupils needed strong, consistent teachers who understood their educational and psychological needs to prevent the resistance to education that would otherwise inevitably occur. Unlike the first narrative, this corresponded much more closely to the actual content of blackboard jungle fictions and films. Despite the way they were represented in the media, these texts should be situated within a progressive tradition of education, as they were largely written by teachers who argued from this position; the divergence of their views from more run-of-the-mill teachers might be explained by their age and their limited experience of actual teaching, in a 'tough' school or in any other. Indeed, in comparison to the average schoolteacher of this period, it might be accurate to state that these relatively young teacher-writers represented the future, rather than the present, of the profession. As we have already briefly discussed, progressive education enjoined teachers to shape their classroom practices around the psychological developmental stage attained by their pupils; however, it tended to assume that non-academic adolescents never reached the stage of formal reasoning that could be mastered by grammar school pupils, and so asserted that their lessons must focus upon the practical, the concrete and the immediate. Furthermore, as child-centred pedagogical texts, articles and lectures asserted, these adolescents' 'natural interests' were bound up with their psychological development, and so it was no use trying to introduce them to concepts beyond their remit. 62 Although the motives of these writers were often good, this image of working-class adolescence simply reworded old stereotypes in new psychologised language. More broadly, it contributed to an image of youth that was essentially limited, suggesting that young people are 'other' from adults, unable to reason, relate or judge as adults do, and hence need to be 'understood' before they can be taught.
In this context, it is noteworthy that Edward Blishen's Roaring Boys, the most progressive of the blackboard jungle novels, was the one that received the most positive reception in the educational press. It is the reaction of the Schoolmaster that is of the most interest. As we have already seen, Teachers World took a predominantly negative view of adolescents in the 1950s, and this trend was reflected in TES as well, despite the fact that its anticipated middle-class readership was less likely than the more socially mixed readership of Teachers World to teach in a secondary modern school. For example, its editorial comment on the progressive Scottish report on Junior Secondary Education (1955) was negative: 'Will the headlong modern attempt to procure before all else the child's happiness at school tend to make a people who wish always to be amused, who have small sense of discipline and grow discontented when life turns hard?' 63 In contrast, the Schoolmaster was the only major journal to retain a note of optimism in the 1950s, although this was still tempered in contrast to its inter-war enthusiasm; as we have seen, it reviewed Spare the Rod with disgust. However, the journal praised Roaring Boys, taking pains to point out that, although 'the setting and the dramatis personae are almost exactly similar… This is a much better book than Spare the Rod'. One key point of comparison was characterization. The reviewer stated that 'Mr.Croft's characters, one felt, were puppets being manipulated to produce a designed effect; they were stock types with the defects of these types concentrated and exaggerated. Mr.Blishen's boys are real boys'. 64 The irony here is that one key feature of blackboard jungle writers was the way in which they used physical descriptions of their pupils to emphasise their weirdness, and Blishen was no exception; unlike the Schoolmaster, I read his boys as caricatures. For example, he wrote that eleven-year-old Terry's 'body… had the precarious unity of a puppet whose strings are worn and sagging… his arms were demented things, flailing in huge semicircles', one boy has a face that 'looked as if it were upside down' and a new class are described as 'thirty raw and vacant blobs'. In contrast, Blishen remembered 'the thirteen-year-olds I had known at the prep school -smooth-faced, bright, springy, confident'. 65 Another common narrative trick that underlines the othering of the pupils is referring to them as a group rather than as individuals. 66 In The Young Devils, Townsend wrote 'Form 3B classroom was tucked away on its own at the top of the school… I remember thinking they could slaughter me without anyone being any the wiser. Perhaps, when the cleaners made their rounds at night, my body might be discovered and given a quiet burial; although from all accounts it seemed that 3B were not the sort to leave any traces of their crime'. 67 Spare the Rod's hero, John, is driven to a righteous outburst to his misbehaving pupils: 'you'd shame the most loathsome slugs in the filthiest ditch. What sort of things are you? What species do you belong to?' 68 The headmaster in Down the Corridors thinks that, unlike adults, 'children rub your nose in your failure, laugh and cheer your downfall, celebrate your incompetence like cannibals, with dancing and devouring, because having no experience, they are likewise without pity'. 69 More broadly, these texts emphasized the intellectual gap between pupils and teacher. John, the hero of Spare the Rod, also possesses some sympathy for progressive ideals; although he criticises Miss Alcock for using 'smart College ideas' such as individual projects, he actually borrows her teaching methods and thinks that she would be more successful in a different school. At the end of the novel, he is spirited off by the congenial inspector to work in a new modern school after he is told by another teacher, 'You're a theorist, the type that's turning the classroom into a play centre' and asked to resign by the head. 70 However, like Blishen, John is dismissive of the 'loathsome slugs' he actually has to teach. Braithwaite's hero in To Sir, With Love similarly sympathises with the headmaster's child-centred views on his pupils while recognizing their impracticality. 71 Down the Corridors also adopted the language of progressivism, emphasizing the need to allow boys to order their own education, but the headmaster also others his pupils: 'no effort of projection can reveal to adults what they [children] are like, what they think and feel'. 72 Such texts suggested that working-class adolescents were essentially foreign, and that the task of the progressive educationalist was to translate them.
Although teaching in many schools remained formal, progressive educational theory dominated in England in the 1950s and was partially implemented in secondary moderns. Progressive education was 'half-implemented' in this way for three distinct reasons. Firstly, teachers continued to teach large classes in unsuitable premises with limited materials throughout this decade, which inhibited individualised teaching that depended heavily upon a certain classroom set-up and a number of teaching aids. A second reason for the patchy utilization of child-centred ideas was that a number of teachers resisted these innovations or felt anxious about implementing them. Most complaints fell into similar categories, and, interestingly, often use very similar language, suggesting that teachers were referring to a common national script. In Gabriel's survey, for example, a number of teachers felt that 'strain was increased' by 'free discipline' and 'activity methods', and categorised these as 'mollycoddling'. 73 It also seems there was a deliberate practice of paying 'lip service' to child-centred methods, sometimes to secure promotion, especially among men. Howard Peach's letter to Teachers World in 1960 sums this up: 'Like many another promotion aspirant, I occasionally attend refresher courses. (Not to do so would mean leaving blank a whole section on that application form for the coveted post!) But what a waste of time they so often turn out to be!' 74 Mel Summers, who was a headteacher in Oxfordshire throughout the 1950s and 1960s, felt similarly; he remembered a course on 'the discovery method' with amusement, and although made to use family grouping by 'the administration', he 'wasn't too happy' about it. 75 In this kind of climate, child-centred educational methods were unlikely to have been implemented wholeheartedly.
A third reason for the distortion of progressive ideas was that, while most teachers and popular educational writers used psychologically influenced language by this period, they often misunderstood or over-simplified these theories. Jean Piaget's series of texts on the development of 'language and thought', 'number', 'moral judgment', and 'logical thinking' suggested that children and adolescents matured through a series of pre-defined stages during which their thought processes and emotional responses were essentially of a different kind to that of the adult, and his work influenced Arnold Gesell's trilogy that followed the child from birth to sixteen (although Gesell noted that adulthood was not fully achieved until the age of twenty-five). Both Piaget and Gesell modified their positions on these issues throughout their careers, placing more emphasis on the social context that created children's and young people's immature responses, and stressing that these stages were not a continuum but a loop. 76 English inter-war educational psychologists such as Cyril Burt and Susan Isaacs concurred that even young children could reason, although the scope of their abilities was inevitably limited by their lack of experience. 77 However, despite Burt and Isaacs's efforts, it was a simplified version of Piaget's and Gesell's work that became popularized in English teachers' progressive advice guides and childrearing manuals, relying heavily on earlier assumptions about the immutability of the stages and the idea that faculties only developed at certain ages.
The idea that children and adolescents are 'unable to reason' was frequently cited by popular texts and related to Piaget's schema. JB Edwards's 1965 summary of recent research on the moral development of the adolescent in Educational Research concluded that sixteen-year-olds may not yet have developed 'moral autonomy', but did not question the standards set for 'moral autonomy' or, crucially, ask whether most adults actually met the criteria. 78 Piaget, in contrast, was cautious about ascribing absolute rules to children's moral development, writing that moral reasoning was often determined by social context, with children able to reason maturely in certain situations, and adults reverting to earlier stages of reasoning in unfamiliar circumstances. 79 Farley and Fyvel emphasised the problems that modern youth encountered through being unable to distinguish fantasy from reality; Fyvel thought that youth violence was partly caused by copying gangsters in films, and Farley concurred, writing that 'The pupils see so many ready-made plots and happy endings that their grip of life is unreal and unsure'. 80 The idea that adolescents could not think in the same way as adults made the child-centred programme for educational reform limiting, especially in the secondary modern school, where progressive influences were far more dominant than in the grammar. For  were suitable for teenagers: when a teacher wrote to inquire whether he should choose a topical subject such as 'The Nationalisation of Road Transport' for his senior class, this idea was rejected by the editor as 'children under 15 can have no independent thoughts on the subject'. Toeing the progressive line, the editor argued that children could only have opinions on subjects which are within the range of their own experience, and that a more suitable topic for debate might be 'All children under 14 should be sent to bed not later than 8 pm'. 81 The educationalist HC Dent wrote in 1958 in an account of secondary modern schools that these children's interest in learning 'can only be evoked and retained when they see before them immediately obvious, readily attainable, and personally relevant goals', and suggested projects on 'Ourselves and Our Homes', 'Ourselves and Our Surroundings' and 'Ourselves and Other People'. 82 These methods assumed that, unlike adults, fourteen-year-olds are unable to understand anything outside themselves and their immediate surroundings, and denied them the opportunity to discover new interests and ideas that are not self-centred. 83 Ironically, then, the increasingly negative media image of children as egocentric, lazy and indulged was partly fostered by the assumptions of child-centred education itself. These limits theoretically affected all teenagers but in practice, had much more impact on secondary modern school pupils, who shouldered the double burden of age and class, both categories that defined them as abnormal.

CONCLUSION
The growing post-war pessimism among teachers about youth contributes to a wider historical debate that has been current since Angus Calder's The People's War in 1969; did the Second World War herald a new social consensus, or was there more continuity than change? Although recent work such as that of Geoffrey Field has reiterated the argument for a more inclusive concept of the nation after the war, I would suggest that the class-based stereotypes that are evident in these teachers' portrayal of their working-class male pupils indicate the robustness of existing divisions, at least for the young. 84 As Sonya Rose has suggested, the war did not result in a more unitary national identity, and Lawrence has also noted how the rhetoric of 'classlessness' often relied on stereotypical figures such as the 'manly proletarian hero'. As he argues, the 'affluent worker', far from partaking in a more inclusive society, became the new 'social problem', a concern we have seen reflected in teachers' complaints about manual workers' salaries and the lack of respect they perceived for their social position. 85 As in Claire Langhamer's recent monograph on heterosexual relationships, I treat the war as a 'watershed' by contending that there was a conceptual shift after its end, but this took time to manifest, with the 1950s emerging as a key decade of change. 86 This reflects Nick Thomas's argument that the relative historiographical neglect of the 1950s has underestimated the significant role this decade played in the 'permissive shift' that is traditionally dated to the 1960s. 87 Considering age as an identity category also helps to nuance accounts of gender and class. Almost a quarter of the population of England and Wales were under fourteen from 1931 to 1961, and although by definition these individuals will enter different age categories as they move through the life-cycle, their experiences of class and gender as children and adolescents still differed from their class and gender ascriptions as adults, although it is unlikely that pupils accepted the school's categorizations uncritically. 88 Despite contradictory sociological evidence, the first blackboard jungle narrative appealed to teachers who felt threatened by anxieties about pay, status and masculinity, factors which threatened to undermine their authority in the classroom. With secondary modern schools in this period poised between traditional and progressive teaching, the narrative of progressive teachers being universally 'soft' on rioting youth does not really ring true either. However, as demonstrated by the second blackboard jungle narrative, progressive education did have an impact on conceptions of childhood in this period due to its dominance in theory, if not in practice. Progressivism itself moulded new, anxiety-laden, concepts of adolescents, emphasizing their limited maturational capacities and their separation from adults. The novel aspect of 1950s school fictions was not their depiction of threatening working-class youth or their positioning in a discourse about the 'teenage consumer' and Teddy boy. Rather, it was the fact that progressive as well as traditional educational writers were now contributing to this image, employing child psychology to 'other' the working-class adolescent and subscribing to a simplified version of progressive educational practice that limited working-class horizons. The blackboard jungle writers, therefore, are notable not for their contribution to an age-old debate, but in how they prefigure a reconfiguration of adolescence in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Siân Pooley, Sebastian Nye and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/I010645/1].

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.