    ♦ Volume 26, Number 1, 2010 39   Minutes of the Escape Committee Education and Memoir CLAIRE ROBSON          N 1988, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister of the United Kingdom and I was assistant principal at Sir Roger Manwood’s School—a public high school established some 450 years before by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for Queen Elizabeth 1 st . I’d taught in a number of schools before Manwood’s, and though I’d seen my fair share of laziness and ineptitude, I’d also found that many of my colleagues were quite dedicated to what we all called ‘The Profession.’ For instance, when the Manwood’s school bell rang at the end of last period, around a quarter of our students stayed on to talk to teachers about their work, rehearse for the school play, practice team sport, play chess, debate, or make music. These activities were voluntary on both sides and unpaid as far as we teachers were concerned. We worked long hours, partly because of a certain crusty pride. We believed that ‘professionals’ did not work just from 9–5, that extra?curricular activities were ‘good for the kids,’ and that part of our job was what we termed ‘pastoral care.’ Along came the Iron Maiden. Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Affairs Private Secretary at the time (Sir Charles Powell) has described her style of government as ‘Leninist’ in its tendency to “lay down the law, bully a bit” (Hennessy, 2001, p. 397). In my experience, he got Thatcher dead to rights. 1 She strode through the nation’s halls of learning like a Valkyrie, brandishing a mighty sword of reckoning. First, she decided exactly how many hours teachers should work in a year (around 1700 as I recall). Our teachers’ unions responded by forbidding us to work for one minute more than the exact number of hours she had prescribed, and ironically, many of us ended up spending much less time with students. After?school clubs and teams that had run for decades, possibly centuries in the case of Manwood’s, were dismantled almost overnight. Next, Thatcher tossed educational initiatives at us like hand grenades: Records of Achievement, National Standards, Common Examinations— sweeping nationwide programs that should have been implemented over a period of years were forced upon us without consultation, training, or additional funding. Drowning under an ocean of