Sergeant Brown is promoting “the concept of a medieval society”. So he has, among other initiatives, been running a Knight School for children under 8. They are given chivalric names, wear medieval costumes and pledge themselves to courtesy,mercy and protection of the weak. When they pass, they get knighted by the Lord Lieutenant at Tattershall Castle, and are presented with a wooden sword and shield.
It appears to be working. The self-styled “nutty policeman” has set 130 young squires on the way to an anachronistically courtly adolescence; even if they lapse, certain useful ideas have been ineradicably lodged in their heads. In a week when a schoolgirl was stabbed in the face in a dinner queue and the Children’s Commissioner stated that violent bullying in schools is increasing, we should be pleased to hear that Spilsby children, at least, are being told about honour and chivalry — the courtesy of the strong to the weak — in the guise of a thrilling game.
This last point --the courtesy of the strong to the weak-- seems to me to be the key to the bullying epidemic in US schools widely written about in the past few years. Most of the so-called anti-bullying curricula emphasize suppressing any instinct for competition or opposition. It's a matter of the schools outlawing dodge ball and nagging the kids not to fight. . . or even to defend themselves. This strikes me as wrong-headed in any number of ways. In the first place, I doubt it helps bullying kids to try to get them to suppress their violent drives even more --probably, in fact, it makes them worse. Especially in the case of boys, it's far better to give them games and activities that give them something constructive to do with all that testosterone so they learn to channel it appropriately. Simply telling them they're bad and need to stop is a recipe for a sociopath as far as I'm concerned.
Secondly, this kind of education is simply forming adults who look the other way in the face of injustice. I don't want my kids to be foolhardy about the fights they pick, and I hope they'll have the strength to walk away from silly fights. But if they're on a playground where a big kid is picking on a weak kid just because he can, I hope my guys will not "walk away," but will defend the little guy. Even at the cost of a bloody nose, if it comes to that.
I could go on, but won't just so that I can get in one other point. A parish I once belonged to had the most incredible group of altar boys. Just boys. The pastor called his altar servers the "Knights of the Altar," and he created a mystique around service of the Eucharist such that there was prestige and honor involved in serving. Even at the solemn high mass in Latin, where many adults were a little lost, you'd see these pre-teens and teens knew exactly what was going on. Their surplices were clean and pressed; their posture was good, their bearing dignified --none of that can't-wait-to-get-out-of-here look you often see on teens at mass. And the parish had more altar servers than it actually needed. Which is only to say I agree with Libby Purves: there's still power in the Knight.
