Jonathan Taylor, "A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons"

The only remaining photo of Jonathan Taylor's short-lived career in ballet, c. 1977

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His new memoir is A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is here. 

 

About A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
What does it mean to be a bully? What does it feel like to be bullied—to be a victim, a pariah, a scapegoat? What are the techniques, patterns, and languages of bullying?

Intermingling memoir with literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, A Physical Education attempts to answer these questions. A highly original exploration of the uses and abuses of power in the education system, it examines how bullying and discipline function, how they differ from each other, and how they all too often overlap.  

Taylor interweaves his own experiences with reflections on well-known literary representations of bullying and school discipline, alongside sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories of power. He discusses the transition from corporal punishment to psychological forms of discipline that took place in the UK in the 1980s, and he also investigates the divergences and convergences of physical, psychological, and linguistic bullying. 

Above all, A Physical Education sets out to understand bullying and discipline from an experiential perspective: what these things feel like from "within," rather than "above," for all concerned. There are horrors, tragedies, and cyclical traumas, certainly—but there are also absurdities, contradictions, grotesque comedies. Sometimes, beneath the Gradgrindian tyranny, there is trickery, laughter. And sometimes there are chinks in The Wall, through which other possible worlds might be glimpsed.

You can read excerpts from one of the chapters from the book on The Times Higher here. You can read further details about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the opening of the first chapter. 

Jonathan at school, c.1982

From A Physical Education, by Jonathan Taylor

P.E.

It’s January 1985. I’m eleven. We’re lined up on the school football pitch, ankle-deep in slushy brown snow. It’s -2 degrees and raining ice, blowing across our faces in gusts like acid – which may be literally true, given the air pollution in ’80s Stoke. We’re shivering in shorts, white t-shirts, itchy ribbed socks and football boots with studs on. I’ve got plastic studs on my boots, but others like Danny Beaker – who, already at 5’11, is a good foot taller than me – have got metal spikes. There are a couple of punctures in the tops of my boots from previous games, when Danny stamped on them. 

The wet is seeping into my socks through the holes, while the sleet slanting from the sky is somehow creeping up my shorts, in a cruel contradiction of Newtonian physics. Every other part of my body is already soaking, and gradually freezing over. I glance around. The other boys are the same, wet through, hands in armpits, stamping up and down in vain effort to keep warm, their smoky breaths mingling above their heads like a big speech bubble: Get on with it, sir. 

Sir gets on with it, inevitably choosing the giant Danny Beaker as captain of one team, a second Godzilla-like boy as captain of the other. They nominate who they want on their teams in turn. I’m usually last, after ‘Pi’ the school Tory (one and only), who looks like his parents mistook a Stoke comprehensive for Marlborough, and my friend Steed, who pretends to have asthma to get out of running. In team sports, the three of us are the crumbs at the bottom of a crisp packet, the broken bits of Rich Tea in a biscuit barrel. 

Steed’s on Danny Beaker’s team, so Godzilla II gets the final crumb that is myself. He doesn’t even bother to call my name, merely rolls his eyes and turns away. He slouches over to the centre spot – or, rather, the hole in the slushy snow Sir has dug with his heels, to mark the centre spot – and waits for Sir to blow the whistle. Godzilla II’s holding his balls, jiggling on the spot, his vaporous speech bubble presumably saying: Get on with it, sir, before these freeze off.

Sir’s rather allegorical name is Mr Yorwin. He’s dressed in a brown sheepskin knee-length coat, woolly tracksuit bottoms, and is smoking a cigarette. The smouldering cigarette end is the one bit of colour in the whole landscape. “Taylor,” he grunts out of the side of his mouth, “get your arse in gear.” The other boys snigger. 

I jog over to him: “Sir, please, can’t we wear …?” But he cuts me off. 

“Don’t be a poof, Taylor. You don’t need yer tracksuits. You’ll warm up on the pitch if you play proper.”

“But, sir …”

“Shurrup. Get over there. You’re defence.”

“Some defence,” mutters Godzilla II from a distance.

Mr Yorwin blows his whistle. Danny Beaker is immediately thundering down the pitch towards me like a bull ...