“I Felt Hard Done By; By a System that Didn’t Really Represent the Likes of Me” – Phill Jupitus Looks Back on his School Days
The comedian, actor, poet and cartoonist was certainly shaped by his education – but not in the way his teachers intended…
When I was at primary school, things mostly felt like fun – maybe a few bits of knowledge permeated my little head.
I remember loving to learn about history, and especially ancient cultures like the Romans as it all seemed so alien to me at that age. I thought the World War was long enough ago, and then I was told that there were wars and characters and life well before that.
I think learning about things in those days – when school was more tactile and immersive – probably inspired my hobby of collecting old coins.
But what developed, and what became fascinating and terrifying for me was feeling like some helpless kid being slung around the education system.
Within the space of a few years I’d gone from a Barking first school to an Essex middle to a secondary comp and on to Woolverstone Hall boarding school near Ipswich.
I was young and impressionable but sensitive too and in need of stability, yet the people and experiences weren’t conducive to that.
Out of place
At Woolverstone I was in detention a lot, and always felt a bit out of place amongst the other students, most of whom had military fathers and were a bit up themselves. I will never look back fondly on that place.
I found that the challenge didn’t become learning, it became surviving the stuff that was in your head outside of classrooms, and unfortunately, I can’t really forgive that.
I think I had stuff going on in myself anyway – I was one of three kids with three different dads and I was acutely aware that my classmates, growing up, had more conventional family units… not that it mattered, we were loved at home, but I missed that too.
By the time it came to my O-levels, the only one I really excelled at – unsurprisingly, perhaps – was English language. We had a teacher called Mr Taylor who was a poet, and fanatical about the power of words.
I’d never really considered their impact before then – not just in what the words meant but their sound and delivery… there’s so much more to a sentence than just the literal meaning.
I think the way my education played itself out made me want to shout and rant a little bit, and that fitted in with my alter ego Porky the Poet and all the public performance I went on to do – it certainly helped get on the road with Billy Bragg as he was all about that… and still is.
I was pleased to see the back of school, though regret not going to university. Overall I felt hard done by; by a system that didn’t really represent the likes of me.
Better days
I should cease being maudlin at this point and put it on record that I believe the boundaries have changed a little bit these days – back then if you didn’t conform you were generally in big trouble.
These days non-conformity isn’t so much encouraged, but at very least tolerated, which ensures we’re not going to end up with a bunch of snivelling intellectual robots.
What education made me was opinionated, but I was more interested in myself than others. Life shouldn’t really be like that and there is certainly a bundle of regret flying around; but deep within that message there’s something useful, I think.
I was opinionated out of frustration, whereas I genuinely feel there is an encouragement for kids to be opinionated these days because we value what our youngsters think and feel.
In my day there was always a perception that education was something you had to sit there and soak it up. Now, education is coming from the kids – they’re not taking notes, they’re taking classes. And I like that.
Phill Jupitus is a comedian, actor, poet and cartoonist, and a supporter of the Lily Foundation, the charity which seeks to fundraise and improve research into Mitochondrial Disease.
