Callum McGregor and Mr Jason’s teacher-student relationship

Callum McGregor and Mr Jason’s teacher-student relationship becomes a contest over authority: Mr Jason controls the classroom and its lessons, while Callum challenges the history that authority presents as universal. Their most consequential confrontation occurs when Callum identifies the unspoken racial boundary in a lesson about famous figures. Mr Jason confirms the answer, then uses his power to silence and punish the student who has exposed what the curriculum leaves out. A later disclosure—that Mr Jason’s mother was a nought—complicates their conflict, but does not erase the unequal terms on which it takes place.

Identity and Classroom Context

Mr Jason is Callum’s history teacher at Heathcroft High. The school has admitted nought students, but that formal change does not ensure that they are welcomed or treated equally. Callum’s arrival unfolds amid hostility: a crowd gathers outside the school, chanting against nought students, while police try to make a path to the entrance and hold back the Crosses. This public resistance supplies the pressure surrounding Callum’s place in the classroom; the conflict with Mr Jason is not an isolated clash between two personalities but part of a school environment in which nought students’ presence is contested.

The class also becomes a place where that hostility can be reproduced through ordinary instruction. Mr Jason sets the questions, defines the acceptable answer, and determines when a student has crossed the line. Callum, meanwhile, is expected to learn from a version of history whose omissions are at issue precisely because the people left out belong to his community. Their relationship is therefore shaped by a mismatch between formal roles: the teacher possesses institutional authority, while the pupil’s knowledge and objections have little standing unless the teacher chooses to recognize them.

Discipline and Unequal Treatment

An earlier lesson makes the imbalance tangible. Mr Jason enters in a foul mood and quickly directs particular hostility toward the nought students. When Callum bends to retrieve something from his bag, Mr Jason slams a heavy history textbook onto Callum’s desk and asks whether he is too poor to pay attention. Callum does not answer. The book, an instrument of instruction, becomes part of a public rebuke: instead of responding to what Callum might be doing or thinking, Mr Jason makes his poverty the subject of the exchange.

The episode establishes that Callum’s difficulties with Mr Jason are not confined to abstract disagreement over historical interpretation. The teacher can turn classroom authority into humiliation, and the class’s response is divided between students who titter and those who do not. Callum’s silence in this moment contrasts with his later decision to answer back about the curriculum. The relationship moves from an imbalance Callum endures to a confrontation he knowingly enters, although Mr Jason retains the power to decide when the discussion ends.

The History Lesson and Callum’s Challenge

Mr Jason announces that the purpose of the lesson is to show that celebrated scientists, inventors, artists, media figures, and other notable people are people like the students. A classmate points out that this is already obvious; Callum, too, wonders what the exercise is meant to prove. After several guesses fail, Mr Jason invites Callum to answer. Callum says that the famous people in question were all Crosses. Mr Jason marks the answer correct, but his approval does not open the lesson to scrutiny. He proceeds to describe Crosses as the dominant race, presenting their ancestors’ travels and acquisitions of knowledge as a civilizing history in which Crosses advanced supposedly backward societies.

Callum objects to the framing by pointing to the history books themselves: they are written by Crosses and record their own people rather than the significant contributions of noughts. When Mr Jason challenges him to name an example, Callum mentions Robert Peary as a co-discoverer of the geographic North Pole and asks how the teacher could have failed to hear of him. The exchange exposes a contradiction in the classroom’s apparent openness. Callum is invited to participate, and his answer is initially accepted, but questioning the story that follows is treated as insubordination. The issue is not simply which names appear in a lesson; it is who has the authority to decide what counts as history.

Mr Jason cuts Callum off and demands to know where his father got his account. Callum falters rather than complete the answer. Mr Jason then orders him to stand outside the headmaster’s room until he has got the nonsense out of his head and is ready to accept the teaching. Callum leaves so angry that he is shaking, knocking over his chair and slamming out of the room. He understands that the defiance may bring further trouble, but rejects the teacher’s characterization of his argument as lies. In his account, Crosses acquired weapons and knowledge as they moved across Pangaea, and noughts endured enslavement; even after slavery was formally abolished more than half a century earlier, the limited admission of noughts to schools and the scarcity of noughts in positions of authority remained evidence that formal change had not produced equality.

Authority, Disclosure, and Meaning

Callum’s punishment follows a pattern in which disagreement with the accepted account is translated into a disciplinary problem. Mr Jason does not answer Callum’s claim that the historical record is racially selective; instead, he invokes the teacher’s authority to require acceptance of his teaching. The corridor outside the headmaster’s room becomes the consequence of speaking, while the classroom remains under the control of the person whose version of history Callum has challenged. The scene thus connects educational exclusion not only to who is admitted to school, but also to whose knowledge can be voiced there without penalty.

Later, Mrs Paxton tells Callum in confidence that Mr Jason is not against him because Mr Jason’s mother was a nought. The disclosure changes the apparent shape of the relationship: Mr Jason has a personal connection to the group whose history Callum insists is neglected. But the fact does not make the earlier classroom conduct disappear or establish that Mr Jason privately agrees with Callum. Its force lies in the tension between background and action. A teacher with a nought mother still enforces a lesson that celebrates Cross dominance and silences a nought student who contests its exclusions.

The relationship consequently gives the school’s racial inequality a close, institutional scale. The crowd’s chant outside makes exclusion overt; inside, a textbook slammed onto a desk, a question about poverty, a history lesson, and an order to leave turn hierarchy into routine classroom practice. Callum’s challenge names the omission, while Mr Jason’s response shows how authority can preserve it even when a more complicated family history lies behind the teacher himself.