Video transcript for Looking back

[Music]

[A cartoon tree grows from the bottom corner.]

['Looking back … At school.']

[A photo shows school blackboard with chalk writing on it.]

Looking Back – at school

[A young girl sits in a living room facing an old man. She asks questions and listens to his answers.]

Girl: Tell me about the school you went to when you were my age.

Man: The school I went to when I was your age had a lot of ground around it so there was a lot of room to play and lots of trees and it seemed to be very very big. We used to be given little bottles of milk and it was somebody who used to have the job of collecting the milk and handing it out to people. And they were little bottles of milk, like that.

[He shows the size with his hands.]

Man:You'd have to get the top off it and sometimes they weren't so fresh. They were quite hot in summer. Drinking hot milk wasn't all that much fun. That's what I remember about that school.

Girl: What did you do in class?

Man: We didn't have computers, no electronic devices at all. It was a teacher out the front with a piece of chalk and we didn't have laptops or any devices like that, in fact we still used pens and we used to have ink wells on our desks. And it was my job quite often I remember to fill all of the ink wells at everyone's desks with ink. And then I would have to give out the nibs.

[Dip pens, ink, ink wells and blotting paper are shown.]

Man: The pens that we had in those days were just a long piece of wood and at one end there was a fitting where you could slide a new nib on, and we used to get new nibs regularly. I seem to remember maybe once a week we'd be given a new nib, everybody. So somebody's job was to go around and hand out the nibs. And we had blotting paper to mop up if we'd spilt the ink or to stop the ink from being spread across the paper. And we had what were called 'slope cards' and so everyone had a card that had lines on it and would show you, when you put it under the page, how you had to make your letters. They had to line up with these slopey lines on the slope card because a lot of attention was given to how children wrote in those days. That's a bit different today as well.

Girl: How were children expected to behave at school?

Man: We had to behave ourselves. We had to be very quiet and speak only when the teacher asked us questions. There was not as much conversation between teachers and children, I remember now it was all very much all of us sitting there listening while a teacher talked out the front and you would only speak when you were asked a direct question. There was a lot of discipline in classrooms, I remember at that time.

Girl: What happened in the playground?

Man:One thing we used to do, I remember – the boys – we used to play marbles and I've got some here. This was a very popular game in those days because we used to play to win marbles from one another. See those?

[He holds out the marbles.]

Man: Another game we used to play was one I remember called 'Forcing back'. And it was a game the boys played and we'd go to the oval or to a big open space and all we had was a tennis ball and there'd be two teams at different ends. The idea was that you would throw the ball towards the other team but as far as you could to make them go back and have their turn to throw back at you from where they stopped the ball. So the idea was to try and throw it right over their heads and make them go back and that was what 'forcing back' meant, you were forcing them back. So that was a game we boys used to play a lot. I don't know what the girls did. They were always doing girl things.

Girl: How did you get information and do your work when you were six and seven?

Man: Well we didn't have computers so we relied on what the teacher could tell us for information, or what we found from books and then of course we would write in our work books with our pens dipped in the ink well. You know I've still got my very first reader that I had at school and I've kept it all these years. It's called The open road to reading.

[He shows the book and pages inside.]

Man: In a very fragile brown paper cover that my father put on and you can see where he wrote my name there. You can still see the marks of the nib and the ink. So that's it. I can still remember all of these pictures in here, all of these stories are still so familiar to me. Very old fashioned now. Would you like to have a look?

[He hands the book to the girl.]

Man: Looks very old fashioned now doesn't it? Look at that plane there in the picture, it's so old. Thank you. So that's called The open road to reading and that was my very first reader from primary school. The book I learned to read from.

Girl: What is your happiest memory of school?

Man: When I was very young, I was the school bell boy. So the bells didn't ring between classes automatically then. Someone had to go out and we had an old fashioned bell on a tower with a rope,

[A large metal bell on a tall post is shown.]

and my job – because I had a watch – I was one of the few boys of that age who was lucky enough to have a watch so it was my job to decide when I should leave the classroom and go out to the playground to where the bell was and ring the bell for the whole school. And I used to do that every time we changed from one lesson to another every day and I used to love that time when I'd be able to just get up and walk out of the classroom and have a little time by myself and have this very important job of ringing the bell.

Girl:Do you think school is better for kids now, or then?

Man: There's a lot more opportunity now for children to learn all kinds of things. We probably enjoyed or didn't like school just the same as children today either like it or don't like it. I don't think that ever changes. When you think of what you can learn and how much easier it is to learn things then today it's better but it's not always just the learning that makes you like school or not, does it? You can like school or hate school for lots of reasons. So in many ways it's, I think, just the same.

Girl: Thank you.

[A long view shows the girl and the man sitting in the living room.]