Sounds like the issue was the environment, not the pens.

Eton?

I don't know, there's no mention of pig skulls and prime ministers.

Eton group, and a prep school in an even more anachronistic vein. Our Greek textbooks had doodles and inkblots from bored kids who had died a century before I was born.

I think 90% of the blame lies with the British public school system, 10% with a very low quality pen, or maybe manufacture was worse a few decades ago.

Caning ended at least a decade before I was at school in England. The teacher when we were 7 or so showed us how to write nicely with the fountain pen. Boys flicking ink happened very rarely. I don't remember any intentional damage.

(Foreigners: "public school" in Britain means those extremely expensive schools that look like Hogwarts but have teachers more deranged than Snape and children more malicious than Malfoy. I'm amused by the anecdote about the textbook, as that's a plot point in Harry Potter.)

“ teachers more deranged than Snape and children more malicious than Malfoy”

Depressingly accurate and funny

We used fountain pens at school back in the day. There was no sport to bang others’ pens into the desk (although there’s no shortage of other stupid sports like crotch grabbing or anus poking), and no one drizzled everyone with ink, ever. I don’t recall any ruined shirt but maybe it happened at some point. Your whole experience sounds very foreign and may not be representative.

Just what sort of school did either of you go to and when? It sounds like something from a biography from someone who went to school a 100 year ago.

The future is here, just not evenly distributed.

I have the same experience, just in some rural school in France (ZEP, meaning supposedly with more "difficult" population than average) in the 90s.

I still like fountain pens but I almost never write by hand anymore. Most of my classmates seem to have stopped with them as soon as they were allowed to though, which I never understood.

You must have schooled with some remarkably mature children - in my experience if you give a 7 year old something that can be used for hijinks, it will be used for hijinks.

But either way, they were just hideous to use, and I can’t even say how many essays I had to rewrite because the pen would spontaneously decide to dribble all over the page.

It’s also left me with appalling penmanship, as it’s not like anybody ever taught us to write with fountain pens, as it was expected that you would Just Know, and if you didn’t, a few rounds of detention copying out the school rulebook would ensure you did.

This more or less sums up my experience. There’s a reason the market moved on. Not everything is a disposable razor conspiracy.

It seems the issue was that your classes were full of deviants and for some reason you've projected the issues onto an inanimate object, a writing instrument, instead of the actual problem.

The same could bCalligrapher? ruler. But we need them to measure things. Just because some people had a bad experience with them?

Whan about master penman and women? Calligraphers?

I knew from just the first line that this was English schooling experience. My dad is, unfortunately, left handed and went through a very similar experience. He got caned so much.

Thankfully by the time I went to school everything was completely different. No fountain pens at all, very patient teachers, no caning. Complete reversal from the experience of school in my dad's time (he was born in '59), which honestly sounds more like prison than anything.

He left with no O-levels too. This was back when if you were struggling the teachers just decided to abandon you.