This is where our education system fails, and especially this story demonstrates it hasn’t evolved much. These two detention school sheets were from another time but nothing has changed much, I am still doing the same thing when students misbehave in class. However, these two documents were received by John Lennon himself when he was just 15 and attended Quarry Bank High School, Harthill Road, in Liverpool, and they are now on sale at TracksAuction for the estimated amounts of £2,000 to £3,000.
The pages come from a class detention book that was rescued from a bonfire by a teacher who spotted the name Lennon at the top of some of these pages! Only two pages were in fact saved (they were many more) so that we can read the reasons for detention given by the various teachers, and this is so telling! Nothing has changed, I am still filling up documents like this one (they are google docs these days, but what’s the difference?) and share them with the administration, and every time, I wonder what is the point of this!
John Lennon was a ‘nuisance’, chewed gum in class (horror!), was repeatedly talking, and was plain misbehaving. I see students doing the same exact thing every day, and I do the same thing that these teachers, unfortunately. According to Rod Davis, one of John Lennon’s school friends who was even in his band The Quarrymen, students at Quarry Bank High School would get bad marks which would add up and two bad marks in a week would give them a detention. This was in the 50s and we have almost the same system in my school, brilliant!
So Lennon was giving a hard time to his teachers, he was a rebel. And according to this same friend, his English teacher ‘nearly had a nervous breakdown’ and his French teacher wrote on his report card, ‘A disappointing result, He is so fond of obtaining a cheap laugh in class that he has little time left for serious concentration’… I totally relate.
It’s a very common place for talented people to have misbehaved when they were young, and I particularly enjoy these teachers’ remarks: ‘‘impudent answer to a question’, ‘silly noises in an examination’, ‘just had no interest whatsoever’ and ‘Sabotage’!… It’s a sad observation about our education system, every time I write something of this sort on a student’s report card, this same thought crosses my mind: may be I am punishing a future genius for talking too much in class, and it sounds like a joke.
