Jonathan Taylor, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), reviewed by NTU Creative Writing PhD student Julie Gardner.
In the first chapter of A Physical Education, Jonathan Taylor – an author, editor, lecturer and critic who lives in Leicestershire – writes: ‘I want to explore the hall of mirrors that is criticism and autobiography […]. I want to explore the uses and abuses of educational power from a subjective, rather than pseudo-objective, perspective.’ In a book that wears its evident scholarship lightly, Taylor reflects on his own experience in educational institutions, referencing literary criticism, philosophy and sociology – and achieves his aims with clarity and grace.
Having been a victim of workplace bullying myself, at a large primary school where I was deputy-head, perhaps I was looking for some kind of validation of my experiences as I read this book. I found it, but not until Chapter 7, ‘Politics’, when I recognised in Professor Caligula many of the behaviours that had broken my physical and mental health to such an extent that I finally resigned from a job that I had loved. As Taylor says, ‘most bullying is complex, nuanced, full of incongruities and ambiguities.’ As I read the earlier chapters of the book, I found myself thinking, sometimes uncomfortably, about my own behaviour as a teacher, and that of my colleagues. I remembered an incident in the mid 1970s when I had witnessed a boy being asked to remove his plimsoll so the headteacher could hit him with it, and the irony of the child’s ‘thank you sir’ as his shoe was returned to him. As Taylor notes, corporal punishment was banned in British state schools in 1986, when he would have been in his early teens: ‘I was there’, he writes, ‘at that watershed moment. I witnessed the change from a system based on caning to a system based on surveillance, one that attempted to act “on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.”’
As is evident from its title, this book is not just about bullying, but also about discipline. Superficially, these are two separate concepts, one acceptable, the other not. ‘Discipline is the legitimate exercise of authority, bullying is illegitimate, abusive, verboten’ – but, as Taylor points out, ‘the problem is that the line between them can easily seem hazy, even arbitrary.’ This haziness can result in a climate in which ‘disciplinary systems reflect, even enable the bullying they were meant to deal with’, and this, Taylor argues, is ‘institutionalised bullying.’
The book is obviously of particular interest and importance to anyone who works in schools or universities, but it does not confine itself solely to educational institutions and is accessible and engaging enough to appeal to a much wider audience. There are observations and memories about family (‘in general’, he writes, ‘the nuclear family is a little machine for bullying’), including a description of Taylor trying (and failing) to cope with the demands of two-year old twins while his wife was out for the afternoon. Ideas from Foucault, Freud, and Hegel are weaved in, alongside characters from Dickens, Kes and the Harry Potter books – all contained within what is essentially memoir. But A Physical Education is more than memoir: it is an invitation for the reader to think about the nature of power, to consider, in the words of Mary Beard, ‘what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it.’ It challenges the status quo of our (still) overwhelmingly patriarchal and hierarchical society. ‘After all, to question someone’s authority in any hierarchical system is implicitly also to question the system itself, which is responsible for raising that person up according to its own criteria.’
Towards the end of the book is a brief account of a time when Taylor’s experience of being bullied by a particular boy was at its most intense: ‘After being whispered at a hundred times about my lack of British patriotism, defective testicles, and similarity thereof to Adolf Hitler, I lost my temper, stood up, and threw a chair at Lee. He threw one back, accusing me of bullying him.‘ Like most teachers, I can well imagine this scenario. Indeed, I have faced something similar on several occasions. To say it is challenging would be an understatement. Not only does the teacher have very quickly to establish his or her authority, because to fail to do so could lead to complete chaos, there is also (and arguably more importantly) the need to keep pupils and staff safe in a situation which could escalate quickly. The teacher in question in Taylor’s anecdote was a Mrs Dee, by implication someone ‘who refuses to be ventriloquised by the system bearing down on them; someone who understands that violence, discipline, and bullying are not entirely deterministic – that the bullying cycle can be broken.’
It is principally in these many moments of thoughtful unpacking that Taylor challenges ‘commonplace British wisdom’, arguing that ‘less discipline can mean less misbehaviour; less violence can equal less violence. Sometimes, not punishing, not disciplining, not bullying can actually be a sign of strength rather than weakness.’
This is an important book. I hope it is read widely by teachers, academics, and politicians, and by anyone who is still haunted by past bullying.
If you are a Creative Writing student at NTU and would like to contribute a book review to this website, please get in touch with Rory Waterman.
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