A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons 
Jonathan Taylor, Goldsmiths Press, £23

THIS is an unusual memoir-cum-educational treatise, examining bullying and power dynamics in schools and at work, both at an institutional and individual level, as experienced by the author. He relates first-hand the different forms bullying takes throughout his childhood into adulthood and what it reveals about the culture and society we live in.

Taylor says of this book: “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.” 

That makes it sound like heavy going, which it is not; on the contrary it is humorous, entertaining and often light-hearted, even though a harsh thread of sad reality runs through the narrative. It is intense, revealing and instructive at the same time. He makes many literary and philosophical allusions, including to Foucault, Freud, and Hegel, all woven into the narrative alongside characters from Dickens and Harry Potter; and to the boy, Billy Casper, in A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, whose experience mirrors his own.

In one episode he tells of a class exercise in which pupils are shown dramatised scenes from the Falklands war and are asked to discuss the moral issue of shooting an injured enemy soldier. The teacher is horrified to discover that most of the boys in the class are all for killing and any idea of compassion is deemed “wimpish.”

It also reveals how much the deprived social context from which most of the boys come influences their belligerence. 

Taylor wears his scholarship lightly while reflecting on his own experience in educational institutions, referencing literary criticism, philosophy and sociology.

Taylor notes that corporal punishment was banned in British state schools in 1986, when he would have been in his early teens. “I was there, in school, 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’.”

He quotes Hegel on the master and slave dialectic, and shows how bullying is also related to  misogyny and racism. As he says: “Most bullying is complex, nuanced, full of incongruities and ambiguities.”  Anyone who has experienced bullying during their lives, whether at school or work, will recognise the dynamics. He also includes observations and memories about family. “In general, the nuclear family is a little machine for bullying.”
 
As the title indicates, the book is not only about bullying, it is 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 where “disciplinary systems reflect, even enable the bullying they were meant to deal with” and this, Taylor argues, is “institutionalised bullying.”

The book will obviously be of particular interest and importance to anyone who works in the educational sphere, but it does not confine itself solely to educational institutions and is written in such an accessible and engaging way, that it will appeal to a wider audience. 

A Physical Education is much more than memoir. It invites the reader to think about power structures, and to consider “what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it.” It challenges the status quo of our patriarchal and hierarchical society.

“After all, to question someone’s authority in any such system is implicitly also to question the system itself, which is responsible for raising that person up according to its own criteria.”

This is an important book and deserves to be read widely.