A quote attributed to the great Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff was doing the rounds on social media last week. “There is a frenzy in Scottish football,” he said. “They run and run when sometimes it would be better to slow down, to think about where they run and why.”
It was reportedly said in 1974, when the Netherlands reached - and should have won - the World Cup final, playing what had become known as “total football”. This was a revolutionary approach in which every player had a high degree of technical ability and could slot seamlessly into any position on the pitch - a stark contrast to the lumpen kick-and-rush approach you would often see in countries such as Scotland.
You’d like to think Scottish football has progressed since then, but, speaking to people I know in youth football, it takes a long time to change a culture. Many coaches now espouse the importance of mastering technical skills over winning at all costs, but, in truth, youth football matches are still often of the blood-and-thunder variety Cruyff would have sniffed at.
You could say the same of children’s rights. In April 1971 - a few weeks before Cruyff’s mould-breaking Ajax team won the first of three European Cups in a row - Scotland seemed at the vanguard of a progressive approach to children’s rights, when the Children’s Hearings System began operating.
This, it was promised, would usher in a new era for children: the hearings system was taking over courts’ responsibility for dealing with those in need of care or protection or who had committed criminal offences. For half a century now, where a child might once have had their fate decided in an austere court of law, now they typically find themselves in the less intimidating surroundings of a hearings room, where the emphasis is more on helping them than meting out punishment.
But how far have we really moved on from the highly punitive approaches of the past? Children and young people’s commissioner Bruce Adamson, in this week’s big Vlog Scotland interview, suggests that there remains a long way to go. Having watching pupils being caned in front of hundreds of peers during his own schooldays, he is driven by a determination to put children’s rights at the heart of education.
And today is a landmark date: the law that sets the minimum age of criminal responsibility at 12 comes fully into force, raising it from 8. While that is higher than in other parts of the UK - where it is 10 - it remains below the “absolute minimum age of criminal responsibility” sought by the UN, which is 14.
Adamson’s biggest professional regret is that he was unable to raise it to at least the UN threshold. “Criminal laws are a really bad way of addressing harmful behaviour,” he says.
Scotland routinely likes to portray itself as progressive, and this extends to education - the ideological battle between so-called “trads” and “progs” in England is just not a thing here, because most people in Scottish education instinctively side with the latter.
Yet there is an element of self-deception. In Scottish education - as in criminal justice, as on the football pitch - there is a strain of conservatism that takes decades to chip away at. You see it in the rigidity of the senior phase where, even after the seismic shock of two years (at least) with no national exams, a bold alternative to exams still does not seem to have been seriously entertained by government ministers.
All countries have national myths they like to bask in, but the danger is that they obscure weak spots and complacency - and it often takes an outsider to hold that up to the light.
So, a question: if Johan Cruyff had turned his life to education rather than football, and had lived long enough to apply his pithy clear-sightedness to Scottish education in 2021, what would he say?
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 17 December 2021 issue under the headline “A Cruyff for help to get rid of our old-fashioned ways of thinking”
