Our American friends have been sending their young children off to school this week. This made me think about my own primary school days. Particularly the merit and demerit system used in my school, and how I used to fantasise it was ever so slightly different.

I started school in one of the last years of the Communist rule, and so the discipline structure was quite interesting. The first grade was divided into 5-person groups (called “the stars”), with one kid in charge (“the commander”). I was the commander, naturally.

Now, when one of the kids did something impressive, the whole group got a merit mark, a little red star that went on a bulletin board against your group’s name. If one of you was naughty, the group received a blue circle. And the six or so groups in the class competed with each other as to which one was doing best. The thinking was, I suppose, that if there was a naughty kid in one of the “stars”, the other four would guilt them into being slightly better behaved.

As the commander, I was somewhat responsible for my naughty boys (I had two), and was frequently told that I should exert influence over them somehow. I did the best I could. But mostly I just spent a lot of time wondering what would happen if, miraculously, the school introduced spanking for getting too many demerit marks. Would it be only the naughty kid who got spanked, or the whole of his “star”? Or maybe just the kid and his commander? For the commander to be spanked would have been the perfect way of me to get what I wanted without actually having to misbehave, which would have been just perfect.

The Soviet education system didn’t believe in spanking. Shaming, group responsibility – yes, spanking – no. Yet, whenever I think back to the bulletin board with the little red stars and blue circles, I wonder how the spankings would have been arranged.

Very efficiently, with much ideology behind them, I have no doubt.