When I was young: School Duties

My primary school duties didn’t begin and end with singing at funerals.

There were other tasks those of us in our final year did as a kind of community service for the school. Some were minor, like setting up the boom box and pressing play on the cassette with the marching music that signalled the end of morning assembly. (The Radetzky March by Strauss, if you want to know.)

Another one was doing the rounds of the classrooms and collecting… something. I have a memory of carrying a metal cash box from class to class, and asking if anyone had something “for The Office”. I’m not sure what this would be – it could be anything from school fee payments to sick notes.

Again, it’s one of those things that made sense at the time but in hindsight, would you trust a 12 year old today to collect school fee payments?

The second part of this duty was I’m sure I had to collect a child from Year 1, whose job was to carry the Mission collection tin. We were always fund raising for the Missions. It wasn’t until years later I realised the Missions probably meant missionaries, not a family called the Missions. Were they still sending out missionaries in the 70s and 80s? I never pictured the Missions as proselytising white folk. I pictured them as an African family.

Regardless of my indoctrinated colonial outlook, there was me – the “grown up” at age 12 – leading around the baby from year 1 – aged five – from class to class to collect things on behalf of The Office. Was the idea of sending a small child with the Mission tin a way of making the Missions more appealing? A way to persuade us children to part with our pocket money? (This seems unlikely.) Or were parents sending their children to school with spare change and instructions to “Give it to The Missions.” (That sounds familiar.)

I didn’t have to do this duty all the time, it was something that was swapped around the class, so I wasn’t missing out on class time every day. Just some of the days.

The other duty – and in today’s world it seems incredible that this was allowed – was that year seven children, aged 12, could administer basic first aid to smaller children. We had a lot of hard surfaces in the school playgrounds, and lunchtime running and jumping and chasing could lead to trips and falls and grazed elbows and knees. If witnessing a smaller child falling, scraping their knee or elbow and bursting into tears, it was a community duty of the year 7 children (I’m assuming it was mostly the girls who did this) to take them to the year 7 classroom where there was a basic first aid kit.

“This is going to sting,” I remember saying to a small sniffling child as I was about to wipe antiseptic across his knee. It’s what my mother said to me when she was cleaning up my scrapes and bumps. (Although by age 12 I was administering my own bandages. I was a tomboy then. Scrapes and bumps were par for the course.)

Wipe with antiseptic, check there was no dirt in the wound, apply a band-aid and send them back out to play.

I’m sure this would never happen today. One child providing unsupervised first aid to another child.

Would you trust a 12 year old today to do this without making a tik-tok video of the little one who was crying?

Was it good or bad that we were given this kind of responsibility at a young age?

Was it good or bad that we were performing these kinds of community activities in school time?

Will the Radetzky March ever not give me flashbacks to standing to marching out of the Quadrangle after standing in the sun for morning assembly?