A BBC report on the study can be found here.
Now I know it is more than a few years since I left school (come April it will be 28 years) and things have changed in those (almost) three decades, but we didn't have a choice about showering. We HAD to shower regardless of how active we were, or weren't.
We had a communal shower with pegs outside to hang your towel on. Once you were out of the shower and had your towel wrapped around you, you had to walk past whichever sports teacher was on shower duty so that she could see that your shoulders, face and hair were wet.
The only time you got away without showering was if you were on your period, this was noted on a register so that you couldn't get away with it too often.
And of course, as we were all told in the first year, we were all expected to be using 'internal protection', as it was called by the teachers, by the start of the third year (which I think is year 10 or 11 in today's terms) thereby allowing us to shower. This edict actually offended me more than the communal showers!
We had one period of PE and one of swimming each week, and an afternoon (3 periods) of sport per week, this was tennis and athletics in the summer and hockey (up at the school playing fields) in winter.
Not once were we allowed to leave without showering, nor were we allowed to leave in anything other than full uniform.
It wasn't a pleasant experience, but it wasn't horrific either, it was just something that had to be done and so we did it.
Did you have communal showers at school? And did you have to use them?
We did have them but we didn't use them. Our school shared the facilities with a leisure centre so the showers were off limits.
ReplyDeleteLizzie Dripping