Three 15-year-olds have been questioned by the police and prosecuted for getting hold of the geography examination paper before the actual examination. Another nine children have been questioned for buying photocopies of the paper from those who filched it. Dear God, what a crassly disproportionate reaction to the sort of prank that children have been attempting, and sometimes pulling off, since examinations were first invented. I am quite sure that if I had had the chance to get hold of a physics examination paper ahead of time, when I was at school, I would have seized the day and brought my friends in on the bounty. It is just the sort of thing that one does in the boring wasteland of school. I would not have considered it theft, and I certainly would never have stolen things from a shop or a person, though plenty of kids did that. An examination paper is different though. The main thing is that, once you get hold of it, you share it with your friends – and I am glad to see that this is what these pranksters have in fact done. Good for them. It would have been so worryingly Maltese to get hold of it and then keep it to themselves.

Since when are the police called in for something like this, to treat it as though it were a criminal act, when it is just a normal prank? In my schooldays, stealing an examination paper, especially a pointless one of no significance like a mid-yearly, might have resulted in a dressing-down from the pint-sized headmistress, a few days’ suspension, and a request to speak to one’s parents. It would never have occurred to anyone to call the police, because it would never have occurred to anyone to think of the filching of an examination paper by a schoolchild as anything other than a misdemeanour, never a crime. Indeed, “cheating” – by copying the answers from notes on your lap, for instance, a very creepy thing to do – was far more severely frowned upon because it was decidedly unsporting: seeking to get better marks than your fellow pupils through unfair advantage. Nicking the paper and handing it out to everyone was, on the other hand, sporting: everyone was given a fair chance. Perhaps, the people who now run things were the goodie-goodies at school, and don’t understand the codes that govern behaviour among schoolchildren.

There’s worse, as there usually is. The Education Minister has appointed a board of inquiry to find out whether there were “shortcomings on the part of any public official”. And if there were, is the public official to be stood against a wall and shot? We are on the high road to madness here, certainly. A couple of kids steal a test paper, and the big guns are brought out. I feel it necessary to reassure these children that their behaviour is entirely normal, even if very naughty. Naughty it may have been, but it also shows enterprise and spirit, two personality traits that will stand them in good stead later in life, if correctly applied, while all those who were too scared to nick the paper are stuck in dead-end jobs. As headmistress, I would have been angry with them, but not too angry. The spirit of enterprise shouldn’t be stamped on, but properly channelled instead.

Children have been trying to thwart and outwit their teachers since the dawn of schools. I took immense pleasure in the pastime myself. It was one of the few ways to enliven the wasteland of (very cold) boredom that was my schooldays. On very boring days, I would take great care to be as annoying as possible, to guarantee banishment to the corridor outside, where I would pass the time reading the Jackie magazine that had been secreted up my sleeve, while the rest of the class suffered the ridiculous agonies of chemistry taught without a laboratory, or the dissection of a frog without an actual frog, only a diagram on paper. I managed all of this without answering back or being rude or aggressive. It’s amazing what a choice word here and there will do. Bad teachers are even more frightened of sharp kids than they are of aggressive or rude ones.

A general antagonism towards teachers is healthy, though. It is the goodie-goodies, who are always anxious to be liked by teachers, and who are at great pains to be on their best behaviour at all times, who are the ones to worry about. They are going to turn out to be the ones with psychological problems. Cheeking and cheating teachers is normal; trying to please teachers is not, at least not when you are past primary school age.

In this case of the stolen geography paper, it is the authorities who have behaved completely absurdly: the school head for calling the police, the police for investigating and prosecuting, and the Minister of Education (hasn’t he got more serious problems to think about?) for setting up a board of enquiry. All this for a blinking filched examination paper, and what’s more, a mid-yearly one, not even the end-of-year one that determines whether children move up a grade or stay put. What insanity. Well, I’ve always held that school can drive you mad.

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As if to prove the point that this country appears to be run by Mad Hatters and White Rabbits rushing around in Wonderland, just look at how differently this other case was handled. A 14-year-old boy punched his geography teacher in the mouth and broke his teeth. (Geography appears to be the new excitement in today’s State schools; in my time it was the groan-zone, now it seems to be all sexed up with crime and violence.) He was suspended for just a fortnight but weirdly, was allowed to sit for his examinations, though in a different classroom to his usual one.

Back in 1979, when I was 14, he would have been expelled immediately, as some of my male contemporaries were, for similar behaviour. He would have been summoned at once to the headmaster’s office, made to sit there under strict surveillance until his father arrived to collect him and to settle any outstanding fees, and told never to return. Another school would be found to take the boy, through begging, string-pulling, or bribery by donation – or if he was already 15, no school at all, and O-levels would be taken by means of private lessons. But that’s the glory of private schools and church schools: they can get rid of the pupils they don’t want, the ones who are aggressive, and those who are a bad influence – though I am told that this is not happening any more because, in the case of private schools at least, the fees are too valuable to lose.

Though this was a case of a pupil assaulting a teacher, the police were not called in. I am in full agreement with this, because matters of school discipline should be handled by the disciplinarians of the school, and not by those of the Sate, who have greater problems to be getting on with, like murders, drug heists, and crooks selling rickety death-traps to desperate immigrants. It is the lack of rational thought that foxes me: if the filching of a mid-year examination paper is a criminal matter deserving of police investigation and prosecution, then why is the breaking of a teacher’s teeth a simple matter of a fortnight’s suspension? Go figure, as the Americans say. Pranks are normal and forgivable, but physical violence and aggression towards teachers are not. Yet here, the reverse message has been communicated.

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According to the teachers’ union, which is rightly incandescent with rage, the tooth-breaker walked into school “like a hero” to sit for his examinations, not wearing his uniform and sporting a baseball cap. The Education Minister, who saw a stolen geography mid-year examination paper as grounds for the immediate appointment of a board of inquiry, in this case wrote to the chairman of the National School Discipline Education Board to ask him to treat the matter with urgency. He demanded an account of the circumstances leading up to the point at which the teacher was punched by the pupil, a medical certificate detailing his injuries, and information about “the response time of the authorities and the support given to the victim.” Mad Hatters and White Rabbits, I’m afraid. They’re running all around us. I am almost encouraged to hire a circus elephant and persuade it to stampede through the halls and classrooms of some State school, purely out of curiosity as to what the consequences might be? Will I be arrested? Or will I merely be the subject of an enquiry as to the response time between the elephant entering the school and everyone running screaming out the other side? Possibly, I may be hanged, drawn and quartered, and then a board of inquiry appointed to see what to do about the elephant.

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Are schools and education authorities now run entirely by people who fail to understand the psychology of teenagers, or more to the point, how to handle difficult brats? The worst thing you can do with a cocky kid like this tooth-breaker is give him even more attention, making him feel powerful and important (“Look at all these adults, tying themselves up into knots about me. I’ll try breaking a few more teeth and see what happens next.”) It’s a dead cert that he isn’t even liked by the other children; they just feel obliged to accord him hero status because, if he’s the sort to break a teacher’s teeth, then he’s not exactly a cuddly bunny. There is only one way to handle boys like this teacher-puncher: in exactly the same way you should handle toddlers having terrible temper tantrums – by cutting them off from social contact each time they behave that way, until they get the message that a certain kind of behaviour results in social ostracism and they stop doing it. On the other hand, the worst thing you can do with a toddler throwing a temper tantrum is to pander to him or her (“What’s wrong, hanini? Have a biscuit. Have a toy. Shall I read you a story?”), or to make the toddler feel powerful by making it obvious that you don’t know what to do and that he or she has the upper hand in the situation. This is when the child learns that each time it wants to make adults run around like panicked sheep, all it has to do is lie down, howl and stamp, and preferably break a few things while turning blue with rage.

The only way to deal with this behaviour is to keep very calm, very disapproving, and very firm, placing the toddler in another room, closing the door, and making it very clear that until proper behaviour is established, it won’t be joining the rest of the household. That’s exactly what has to be done with teenage tooth-breakers in schools: exclusion from the company of their peers for as long as possible, with a return permitted only on sufferance, and with immediate exclusion the minute the behaviour repeats itself – not all this flustered White Rabbit angst.

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