“‘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?