Streaming means now something different from what it meant when I was at school. Fifty years ago.
Image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Then, it meant sorting wheat from chaff, or boys from … other boys. I was at a boys’ school and, in my year, the intake was large enough to have three parallel classes, or forms we called them. My older brothers had progressed through 1 to 5A and 1 to 5α, although by our eras they no longer taught Greek (Latin was in). But the school hadn’t the wit to think up a third alphabet’s equivalent of the first letter thereof, so they switched to the initial letters of the school’s name, which, handily, had three words in it (of which the last was school). I was allocated to 1W. There was a 1G, and also that 1S. And so things progressed until we’d taken our O-levels in 5W, G and S.
On the first day of the first term of our first year, some of the boys knew each other from their joint time in the preparatory school up the road, but I’d come from a state junior school and everything was a bit new to me. Except my desk, which had graffiti on it (in it?), purportedly dating from 1945, which just goes to show that desks in the 1940s only had obsolescence built into them in the sense of not being resistant to a Nazi blitzkrieg.
The curriculum covered, besides the pesky intrusion into life that was PE, which involved swimming in the school’s pool (which had no sun-loungers around its rim, still less a bar in the middle) or shinning up a rope, only then to shin back down it, and no safety nets, what were sneakily named academic subjects. Music was not academic, however, and involved listening to gramophone records whilst flicking ink-pellets at the boys least likely to react with a clenched fist. But the real thinking subjects, like maths, English, French, Latin and the likes, sooner or later saw the massed bands of the year re-apportioned into sets, and, when the names of these sets were announced, it became clear why the separation into W’s, G’s and Ses, instead of A’s and α’s, had been so necessary: the sets were called … C, B and A.
So ubiquitous were these sets that the initial sub-apportionment into 1W, 1G and 1S soon paled into irrelevance. Boarders had their house common rooms and, for the rest of their scholastic existence, mixed with who they got along with. Dayboys returned home at the day’s end. But, as a form, we never saw one another, except by happenstance, once morning registration had been completed. It’s a bit like sorting sweeties into liquorice all-sorts, M&Ms and flying saucers, only then to re-classify them as yellow, blue and pink.
I was placed in C-set games, the streaming of which was solely done for the purpose of picking the Under-13s side. Having cherry-picked the best rugger players for that purpose and having suitably crowned them with haloes of glory (which palled but little even in the maths lessons in which they partook as the subject’s C-set), come the summer term, the streamers were occasionally left at a loss when getting A-set rugby players to know their silly-mid-off from their googlies. Sauce for both goose and gander, I reckon.
The A-set games/C-set maths partnering was something I, therefore, didn’t share and I instead basked in the obscurity of C-set games coupled with A-set pretty much everything else, which I believed was a major injustice (as I did in fact train with the Colts XV).
The next target was to strike out for A-grade exam results in A-set whatever, and this (or a very commendable B) was mostly achieved, occasionally to the jaw-dropping astonishment of my science teachers. It was ironic that I’d engaged in quite so much tomfoolery in biology and yet scraped a B-grade at O-level. Whilst Mr Slater felt moved enough to approach me in the Quad and express his admiration, I did feel that it was not quite how it should be: why the heck had I not engaged in the same level of tomfoolery in all the other subjects in which I got a B? What a savagely wasted youth crowded with nonchalant success that could’ve been, had I but realised.
So it was that the 60-odd of us got realigned into streams, or sets, with the exception of two “option” choices: one in 2nd form, on LAW (Latin, art and woodwork) and one in 4th form involving dropping geography for something I can’t quite remember (I did drop geography, or, more accurately, the geography master, and it could have been in favour of cleaning the toilets, so avid was my repudiation—it was 4th form, after all). However, in one subject, we did actually sit all together as form 1W, 2W, 3W and, finally, 4W right the way through to O-level: scripture.
It was the only subject in which we were not streamed and now, it being a subject that preoccupies me in many of my waking hours, it occurs to me to wonder why.
Scripture is not a career subject qualitate qua, but, then again, aside from the modern languages, what subject at school level is a career subject? The fundaments of most of what I have deployed as professional skills in adulthood were mostly learned in adulthood; because fundaments are, contrary to what we learn in school, not building blocks. Rather, they are what a subject all boils down to. And any chemist will tell you that what goes in at the start of an experiment is a far cry from what the experiment boils down to as its end result. (Not bad, and I only got a C in chemistry.)
But what scripture boils down to is irrelevant in terms of professional education. It’s what it boils down to in the individual that matters. To some boys, that’s a graded O-level certificate; in others, it’s the stuff of life itself. Streaming would never alter any of that. Besides which, how would you tell a group of boys that some of them know God very well and others won’t exactly make the grade?
choice was geography or German - to my regret.