Kiss and. . .hell

GIVEN that the fastest thing to travel across Atlantic is not Concorde, but daft ideas from America - the wearing of baseball caps back-to-front, feminism, gangsta rap, political correctness, line-dancing city-dwellers being given the urge to wear cowboy hats and boots, and so forth - it is not surprising that, following the remarkable case of young Master Johnathan Prevette, of North Carolina, the question already being asked in the UK is: Could it happen here?

He is the six-year-old shaver who, you will recall, was suspended from his primary school for plonking an affectionate kiss on the cheek of a same-age girl in his class.

It earned him international notoriety and hours of fame in the media as the youngest official sexual harasser in the world. And, of this, there can, it seems, be no doubt, for his deed was in clear contravention of his school's written-down code against "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature."

Whatever else he is, the lad deserves some credit for being forward in other departments as well. For if, at six, he can - as expected of his age-group by the school authorities - get that lot in his tiny bonce, he warrants a star for having developed such advanced skills in reading and understanding. However, rather than being interested in aping the evidently-superior American teaching methods that his case has exposed, according to one of their trade unions, teachers here, it seems, are more concerned that precocity in that other "r", to wit, randiness, is also developing in our junior school playgrounds - to the extent that, as was reported in one of the more serious national newspapers four days ago, it was "only a matter of time" before primary schools in Britain had to draw up rules defining decent conduct between boys and girls.

Indeed, so apparently-throbbing is the atmosphere in today's school yards that, among those tiny figures giving and receiving the glad-eye to and from their peers, whereas once the business was not the dating game, but hopscotch, marbles and tig, it has now reached the pitch where the the green-eyed monster is also involved.

For Mr Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, reveals that some recent high-profile cases of disruptive infants - infants, note - were "fuelled by playground jealousies over relationships." Could it happen here, then? It looks like it already has - though, we are told, the Education Department knows of no instances yet where a primary school child had been expelled for kissing a classmate.

My concern about this trend, however, is that, with it, there may come the sort of crackpot appendages that the Americans have adopted to deal with it - the "high management" counselling scheme such as the wick Master Prevette was slammed into to curb his ardour and the politically-correct codes and the the social workers and bureaucracy that are necessary administer them.

This is not to ridicule the problem - we cannot have tiny kids slobbering over one another at school; it's a threat to public health, if not the nation's morality; nor can we have infants fighting among themselves for the affections of others.

But, amid the alarm that the thing is getting out of hand and in need of a US-style no-snogging code and the associated nannying admin, it surprises me that our education authorities have pensioned off and forgotten the potent cure that used to be available.

For though the Education Department says it is unaware of any primary school child being expelled for kissing a classmate, it cannot obliterate the fact that some have been severely and beneficially dealt with for this dangerous transgression - namely, six four-year-old romeos, including yours truly, of the class of 1948 at the Bash Street primary that is my own fondly-remembered alma mater. If our education minister, Mrs Gillian Shephard, was to dig out of retirement the repressive stick of a nun who was its headmistress and let her loose with her remedy for playground games of kiss-catch - which was no less than six strokes of the cane on the backside and being humiliated by having a pink ribbon tied to your hair for being "soft" - there'd be no need for a code as somehow today's kids would, as we did, instantly get the idea, for a few years at least, that playing football is better than sex.

But if, in these enlightened times, Mrs Shephard dare not risk deploying this ultimate deterrent, she will, I think, have to have a word with the Ministry of Defence about the stuff they used to put in National Servicemen's tea - and consider doing it with the school milk.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.