“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:
His mother alerted the school that Sam would need support before going into class. But, two hours later, when she returned to check on him, she could hear a child screaming. It was Sam.
“As I went in, he was completely disregulated and surrounded by five adults and he collapsed on the floor. No one had called me,” she said.
The school suspended Sam for five days while they formulated a plan to manage his needs – something she was later told was unlawful. Having tried to push her to accept a move to a pupil referral unit, which caters for children who cannot attend mainstream school, she was then sent the notice of permanent exclusion.
After three months at home, Sam was enrolled at a new school, but it did not review whether he needed any additional support. His grades and class reports were good but, halfway through the year, a girl who had been bullying Sam pushed him and he shoved her back. The school permanently excluded him for assaulting a teacher who then physically restrained him.
“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” his mother said. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.”
Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one.
These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?
Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own.
For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project.
Having spent my childhood in Catholic schools, I’d also highlight that expulsion is more useful as a threat. Private schools would prefer not to lose paying customers after all. Of all the kids I knew who were disciplinary problems (at the primary level), the only one who was actually expelled had broken into the school office.
On the other hand, I am old enough that my early years still included the threat of corporal punishment (of the rapping your knuckles with a ruler variety when you weren’t paying sufficient attention, I don’t recall anything at the level of paddling). While that was gone in a few years, my high school principal was a very burly 6′ 4″ priest who could be very intimidating, and it wasn’t remarkable to see unruly boys man handled in the halls, so the threat of physical force was still very much present.
The thing about human behavior is that if you want to modify it, it is critical that consequences be as immediate and certain as possible. They don’t need to be severe, it just has to be clear that there will be immediate consequences (this applies to reward as well as punishment). One of the truly tragic aspects of the modern trend toward adversarial and even litigious relationships between parents and schools around discipline is that it seriously erodes the school’s ability to apply mild, but immediate censure, and pushes them to more severe, but less effective, punishments, which in turn brings in more lawyers. In the US this is particularly toxic when race gets involved, as that really intensifies the feedback loops.
You can also extend this thinking beyond the schools and into the realm of general public order as well. Formal legal processes are incredibly inefficient when in comes to behavior modification, and really need to be limited to the most important crimes so that some degree of “swift and certain” justice can be maintained. A court system overburdened with laws attempting to regulate every aspect of human behavior ends up arbitrary and capricious and in the end incapable of doing much at all.
Suspending or excluding children, normally boys, is the easy-option. Someone has to look after these children, and looking after does include disciplining them, so schools should not just pass the buck – although, yes, in extreme case special (rather than mainstream) schools are needed – for children who the parents can not home school.
I suspect that Snorri will mention diet – and he may well be correct, diet can influence behaviour, especially in children. And so can problems with parenting – although I am NOT suggesting bad parenting in any particular case.
I can’t escape the conclusion that the most important reform education needs is pruning away the requirements so that students don’t spend so much time in mandatory classes.
I hate reaching this conclusion, because I spend more time with people who think mandatory math should end with arithmetic (and sometimes maybe statistics) than with people who think mandatory literature classes should end with literacy.
Despite all the wonderful ideas stored in fiction & philosophy, all the spirit-nurturing beauty of poetry, we’re talking about things that citizens should be forced to learn. I’d rather live among a citizenry that knows how quickly computational models become useless than one that can recognize the poetic feet; I’d rather live among a citizenry that knows how difficult it is to work around Russell’s paradox than one that knows how impressive Shakespeare’s grasp of human nature was.
Of course, even if I could get everybody to agree with me, it’d still be several full-time jobs to actually create the curricula, train up the teachers, and get the parents/guardians to handle suddenly having kids with more free time.
@phwest makes some good points, though for the record I am vehmently opposed to schools using corporal punishment and (not quite so vehemently) opposed to parents using it too.
However, I think the solution is fairly simple — making all schools private and giving parents a choice. If a kid is unable to cope with a particular school the problem is that the state barely offers any alternatives, whereas the private sector could offer a plethora of alternatives under the parents’ control. No doubt there would be schools specializing in difficult children or children on the autism spectrum etc. The problem is the one size fits all, government in charge, you can’t fight city hall situation that prevails today.
If we want public funded education that does not necessitate the state running the schools. After all we have programs to support people who can’t buy food but the government doesn’t run the farms or supermarkets (not yet anyway.) A simple tax credit of maybe $7000 per child per year to be spent on educating that child would dramatically solve the problem in schools very quickly.
In terms of discipline it would give a laboratory of choices to find what works. For example, rather than beating a teen or suspending or expelling a teen, a far more effective tool would be (in cooperation with parents) to take away their cell phone for a week, or deleting their WA/Snap/Insta account. I think most kids would prefer a paddling to that. As phwest points out, effective punishments are both certain and immediate.
Though I’m not sure if that would violate the “cruel and unusual punishment” constitutional restriction.
Having been bullied pretty thoroughly throughout school (though less after I got my reputation as a Mad Scientist) I sympathize. I think I would have been better off had I been allowed to skip Physical Education, because that’s where the bullies were, but that’s me. There were other classes other kids were miserable in. Allowing a kid to say “I do not want this class” for just one class, no questions asked, would remove a lot of the feelings of compulsion. Think back. Wasn’t there one class you hated more than all the rest?
It’s the bureaucratic trap. Nine times out of ten a warning about a disruptive pupil, a dangerous dog, an unbalanced adult are waved away by ‘the system’ because there is no provision to intervene. When something does go wrong the response is ‘there was nothing we could do’ and ‘the aggressor had a bad history anyway.’
Which means that to the Bureaucrat one victim every now and again is a price worth paying for a smooth system. I’d recommend that we sack the disinterested – but if we did that we’d have no social services at all. And often they do good work most of the time.
It’s probably also wort noting that the article quoted is spectacularly loose with facts: https://x.com/oldandrewuk/status/1847865561750872139
On Paul Marks’s points, expulsion is not an easy option: the process is not a simple one for schools to undertake. And while he may see it as buck passing, I see it as prioritising the education of the rest of the class over the “needs” of the violent or serially disruptive pupil. Most schools are not set up to deal with the worst behaved kids; this is a Good Thing, as such setups would be either heinously expensive or terrible for the rest of the pupils.
There is one excuse for the teachers: they are plagued by whimpering students asking them to “do something”. They are seldom bothered by the bullies. Worse, the bullies are usually raised by people who will raise Hell if anything is done to the bullies.
None of this applies, of course, to the teachers who are the bullies. In high school we had one (named Ryberg) who put a student’s head through the glass on a classroom door. They kept him for the rest of the year, but he was gone the next.
Fraser Orr wrote:
A simple tax credit of maybe $7000 per child per year to be spent on educating that child would dramatically solve the problem in schools very quickly.
Or the private schools will follow the example of the university did when .gov got into the student loan business and just jack up their prices because they know .gov will just continue to increase the student loan (or child educational tax credit) amount.
I can live with public schools, but we really need to have a real discussion of what we want from the schools and what we don’t want and get the feds out of the picture entirely. We’ve had nothing but diminishing returns since the DoEd was established, so why do we still have it?
Schools cannot make up for the missing parent? Who knew?
I’m sure 200 lawyers will solve the problem in no time.
@stevenR I’m sure you are right that the existing private schools would do that, but that isn’t the goal. There is a massive market for schooling that is buried under the rotting corpse of the public school system. Allowing parents to control would enable that market that isn’t touched or even realistically reachable by expensive private schools.
It would, for example, allow a group of teachers to get together and set up a small boutique school focused on particular markets, or perhaps larger schools organized by companies like Chesterfield Academy. This is the way it used to be in medical care here in the US before the boot of government crushed them all into big mega corps and homogenized healthcare into the horrific mess it is now.
With an ecosystem of school alternatives available to parents everybody would be subject to competitive pressures to meet the expectations of the parents. Don’t get me wrong, that is not an unadulterated good, one could easily imagine crazy religious schools popping up. But for the average parent who just wants a decent education for their kids it would be a big blessing.
The reality is that even the private school industry isn’t much subject to pressure since the public school system absorbs so many customers, and so there really aren’t very many private schools. Making a bigger customer base with money to spend would be quite transformative.
And it is also worth saying that within the colleges that you refer to ALL the innovation is taking place in this small boutique schooling. Smaller colleges focused on actually teaching people useful marketable skills. It is a dynamically competitive environment even though that is gummed up to some degree with government money and red tape.
A dear friend of mine runs a school that trains estheticians. She refuses to take FAFSA because of the nightmare it is. But she is flourishing and producing a lot of graduates. Girls who go on to have a great career for themselves. often ending up opening their own new businesses. And I do some work for a group of small colleges in the Southwest. The train automative engineers, hvac technicians, cosmetology and a whole bunch of other things. It is an extremely competitive market and produces really great value for the students. I can say though as someone who helps with their IT, most of their problems come from dealing with the government.
can live with public schools, but we really need to have a real discussion of what we want from the schools and what we don’t want
But when did that ever work? In a system under political control, and particularly the political control of unions, when did what you want, or what you want for your kids mattered a damn? You can see it at these school board meetings where parents complain about the atrocities the school board is visiting on their kids, and the school boards don’t care, they just have to endure the ranting for an hour and then go back to what they are doing. The only way you get what you want is if the supplier has to convince you to part with your money. You’ll never get what you want through political means. It is the Dual Delusions of Democracy: that your vote matters and that government solves problems. Neither is true. But your dollar definitely matters, and companies begging for those dollars definitely know they have to solve your problems if they want you to continue giving it to them.
We mainstreamed the kids who, in the past, were sent off to other facilities as unmanageable. We did this in the name of equity and fairness.
It worked, dropping the quality of education down to rock-bottom for ALL kids, not just the “vulnerable” ones. That’s true equality of outcome.
You can have love and sympathy for a kid who is so screwed up psychologically that all he can do is scream and rage and oppose. You can want to do right by such a kid, you can try to help him manage himself to a point where he can have a happy life.
It’s a noble goal.
But what happens is the presence of such kids makes schoolrooms completely unmanageable and non-educational.
The unmanageable kid remains unmanageable. The other kids sit in boredom and (sometimes) fear while they watch uncountable meltdowns, assaults, and demonstrations, all by the “vulnerable” kid who has no control over his own thoughts and actions.
Somehow we decided that we’d have great outcomes for everyone, at any cost. The result has been bad outcomes for everyone affected. We need a new paradigm for unmanageable kids.
At present you live amongst a citizenry which, by and large, doesn’t know any of those things and has never been forced to learn them.
That, too, is an issue. I plan to get around it by despairing. It hasn’t helped so far, but I’m not a quitter.
My understanding is that Brian was always against using force on children. It was one of the reasons he didn’t want to be a teacher.
Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?
I reread your OP Natalie, and I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. If anyone assaults you you have the right to use some degree of force to prevent it. Of course with a child you have to understand that they have only limited responsibility for their actions, and for sure gentleness is much the word of the day.
In many legal codes there is a distinction between assault and battery. Assault often means just means an threat or attempt to injure, and it becomes battery when the victim is actually touched by the attacker.
But I’d offer two examples.
* If a disgruntled child comes to school with a gun and threatens to shoot people, surely nobody has any quibbles about restraining that child, even to the unfortunate point of killing them. And this is true if the kid merely waves the gun around without discharging it.
* If you are walking down the street and are assaulted by a mentally handicapped person who doesn’t know what he is doing, for sure the person is due sympathy, but you absolutely have a right to prevent him from hurting you or others. Even if the assault consists of him cornering you and cocking his fist without actually touching you.
I didn’t know Brian, but surely he espoused that most libertarian of ideas “no initiation of force”, which is quite different from “no force at all”. And this is true even if the attacker didn’t do so with full responsibility for their actions.
I’m sixty six now and still harbour a deep loathing of rugby and football. The really sad part is that I grew to be a very fit and sporty person once I got away from school and it’s narrow and unimaginative sports curriculum.
At the private school I attended one of the principal benefits appeared to be the freedom they had to take the half dozen or so pupils who were disruptive with behavioral problems and shove them in “Set 5” which was functionally not much more than daycare. There was no pretense that the pupils in that class wanted to learn or that anybody was interested in teaching them.
@BlindIo
At the private school I attended one of the principal benefits appeared to be the freedom they had to take the half dozen or so pupils who were disruptive with behavioral problems and shove them in “Set 5” which was functionally not much more than daycare. There was no pretense that the pupils in that class wanted to learn or that anybody was interested in teaching them.
A couple of things — just because one company in a market does things badly doesn’t mean the idea of free markets is bad. Second, I don’t know where you live but I’m going to guess that where ever it was your parents had very few private school options to choose from — especially if they didn’t want you boarding. Competition works best when there are actual competitors.
And finally, I think this idea that there are kids that don’t want to learn is pure bunk. All kids want to learn. What they don’t want to do is to learn in the way the teachers want to teach, or often the kids have some significant issues medical or social that is getting in their way. Humans are naturally curious. I think this reality is summed up perfectly in this cartoon.
Not all kids can go all the way through the math stream and graduate with a knowledge of calculus, or through the literacy course with a profound appreciation of Shakespeare. But all can learn many useful skills if we will only recognize that not everyone learns the same things or learns the same way.
If you want to see kids learning, watch them study the details of how to win at some particular video game, or research the intricate details of pokemon cards or study basketball statistics or research fashion and makeup. That passionate desire can be captured to let kids learn skills that translate well into the real world.
FWIW, what I see in much of the “education establishment” is a lack of compassion and care toward children. Like too many big organizations it is about the organization not its customers. Which is a shame because the vast majority of teachers care a great deal about kids and are squashed by the organization.
I was very lucky. My kids went to a really amazing schools, some public some private, with teachers who really cared about kids. My kids were all pretty smart (or I think so anyway 😀), but there were a lot of kids who were not, and the teachers were extremely kind, supportive and helpful to those kids too. They let them read about dinosaurs, and learning about dinosaurs let them learn a hell of a lot of other things. They provided them with the medical and environmental support they needed. Would that every kid was to lucky.
But the only way that they will be lucky is if parents have the power to demand it. The only way those kids will be lucky is if the organization can’t not care about kids, because they have to care so as to convince the parents to give them the money they need to survive.