is kinda related:

http://www.morrissey-solo.com/discuss/index.cgi?re ad=281264

it unleashes the unruly British school boy in all of us! thank you Mr. MMMMMMMMMM

its so sweet to see when a pupil surpasses the teachers.

and as Morrissey keeps demonstrating, success is the sweetest revenge.

but "The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils" should really be in there as well.

I'm glad this song made the list since it's pure perfection! It just goes to show the brilliance of Morrissey's lyrics and Marr's musical genius at the time. I do think this tune is quite underrated by many - it's just too good! It's such a good album opener too.

What do you think of the live version on Who Put The M In Manchester?

Simon Goddard has high praise for “The Headmaster’s Ritual”. “Throwing down the gauntlet of “Meat is Murder’s” implicit catalogue of violence, Morrissey’s opening gambit – “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester’s schools” – remains the greatest opening line of any Smiths’ album, showing an incisive vocabulary and poetic pith that made its entry into the UK album charts at number 1 in February 1985 an even sweeter victory”.

Influences from Joni Mitchell to George Harrison, and the riffs in the Beatles’ “I feel fine” were identified in Johny Marr’s musical arrangement. For the lyric, Ken Loach’s “Kes” was cited, but Morrissey wasn’t reticient about owning up to the autobiographical background, quoted as saying about St. Mary’s Secondary School, Stretford: “If you dropped a pencil you’d be beaten to death. It was very aggressive. It seemed that the only activity of the teachers was whipping the pupils – which they managed expertly”; and “Five years of education here proved to have no effect on me whatsoever, and I’m sure no effect on anybody else except in a very adverse sense. Not to be recommended”.

Manchester Education Committee tried to ban local air-play, but Morrissey defended his onslaught on Granada TV, replying to a charge by Tony Wilson, Factory Records boss, that he was a “man trapped in a woman’s body” with the retort that Mr Wilson was a “pig trapped in a man’s body”, and later altering this to, a “man trapped in a pig’s body”!

(That last part sounds a bit like the sub-text of a parliamentary debate!)

With the abolition of corporal punishment in the meantime, Goddard comments that: “It was shrewd of Morrissey, a decade later, to write a reverse thesis of “The Headmaster’s Ritual” – the self-explanatory “The Teachers are Afraid of the Pupils”…

The Headmaster Ritual
Suffer Little Children
Ambitious Outsiders
Michael's Bones
Handsome Devil
Used to be a Sweet Boy
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side
I Want the One I Can't Have
Girl Least Likely To
Encore: The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils

Which other track does Johnny Marr feature on the list?

black box recorder - school song