Telling Tales out of School

Student challenge to school rules in this period reflected the larger challenge being mounted by youth culture against the hegemony of those over 30. The school's student newspaper, The Word, reflected a fairly radical side of the youth movement. The issue for May, 1969, for instance, opened with a satiric front page featuring a look at the school's latest "torture machines" under the slogan "If you can't beat a student, kill him." Inside, an editorial called on the student body to protest loudly and frequently against any perceived injustice, stating that a recent protest "showed the Department of Education that the Universities were not the only ones capable of raising a bit of trouble if pushed too far." The issue also included a full-page futuristic comic strip titled "The Revolution passed this way." In that episode, the hero - a London revolutionary named Alex - kills an evil "brain policeman" and heads for the life of a fugitive in the city's slums (The Word, 28 May 1969).

In this atmosphere, the use of marijuana and LSD became more common within school walls:

The first floor was the entrance and the staircase. You could smell the marijuana sifting up through the... Nobody seemed to care about it, the teachers didn't do anything to stop it (Shaw).

Alcohol too featured in the challenge to traditional structures of schooling. "I had some close friends who got into drinking at school, and used to go to school drunk in Grades 11 and 12" (Shaw). The lowering of the legal drinking age to 18 (during the summer of 1971) made this more prevalent - lunchtime and afternoon drinking sessions became institutionalized in the student culture.

On the last day of school in June 1967, students from the school went a bit further and, according to the paper "blew their cool." During their lunch hour, students "swarmed over King Street, shouting, jeering and rocking cars." They blocked traffic, rocked a police cruiser, and generally insulted the "fuzz." When the bell rang to indicate the end of lunch period, however, they returned to the school halls (LFP, 3 June 1967).

While this sort of public behaviour remained rare, other forms of challenge to authority supported it. Thus students eagerly listened to gossip and rumour that took aim at unpopular teachers. They liked to recall, for instance, how some Grade 12 boys had recently taken Mr. Fallona - the assistant to the principal, and head of the school's disciplinary structures - and dangled him out a third-storey window.

Dangling Fallona

The story of Fallona being dangled out of a third-floor window was no doubt apocryphal - the school's version of an urban myth. Folklorists who study such myths point out that they are usually vague about the details of time and the people involved, though they can be very precise about the site. Urban myths reappear year after year, marked by both stability in certain plot elements, and variation in other (Brunvand, 1981). This is true of the Fallona myth: when former students reported the myths they always described it as having happened a few years before they entered the school, and it was always done by an anonymous group of senior boys. Former teachers also reported hearing of the myth, but for the most part put little credence in it or, in one case, supposed it referred to an effigy (McLagan).

The popularity of the myth probably reflected the students' sense of helplessness in dealing with seemingly irrational policies on discipline. Fallona, although he mellowed considerably over the years, was always seen as being stricter (by a good measure) than his fellow teachers, whatever the decade. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, whenever students were plotting mischief. Even fellow teachers considered him "a hard old bugger" from "the old school" (Ariss).

Moreover, the possibility of some sort of student retaliation did always exist. In the spring of 1953, a youth was convicted of assault causing bodily harm for punching Fallona - and breaking his nose - in the school corridor. Fallona spent four days in hospital; the youth was sentenced to 30 days in a more secure institution (LFP, 3 Mar. 1953; Advisory Vocational Committee, 12 Mar. 1953).