Skool Daze

We took the boy to the Scotland Street School Museum today.
A good place to spend a couple of hours, seeing what school life was like over the last 100 years and reminiscing about times gone by.

Very interesting it was too, with the little flip-top desks I remember from primary. With the ink wells that seemed always to be full of pencil sharpenings. And the wee hole inside the desk that you could never be sure what it was there for. My best guess was in the event you spilled your milk from your little pyramid carton, it gave it an escape route.

Interestingly, I didn't notice any reference to the liberal use of the belt, or strap (apparently some people referred to it as the tawse) in the 60s/70s.

I remember it well. The leather, two or three-pronged teacher's weapon of choice. Oft threatened and equally as often used, usually for the most trivial of offenses. I also remember the legend of how good certain teachers were at giving the belt and their techniques, including balancing a book on your wrist to save you from having your arteries severed from the sheer force of their aptitude. I remember one of my techie teachers proudly boasting that he could embed nails and broken glass in his belt and not a court in the land would convict him for belting such an unruly lot with it.

Charles Rennie Macintosh designed the building. And a strange thing I found out today was that he submitted a set of plans to the school governors, which were approved, then he used a different set to build it. "Builders probably always do that, to cut corners" you probably think, as I did. But he went the other way and embellished it by making various parts of the building more ornate. He did look like a bit of dandy.