Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #3: End Compulsory Education
Posted by: oldandrew in UncategorizedThere is some appeal to returning to the nineteenth century and making education optional. While there is a case that the system should make more allowances for those who are not learning in school, but nevertheless might learn in another environment, it is greatly over-estimated as a panacea for behaviour.
Secondary education is close to optional at the moment. Local Authorities are reluctant to fine parents who aid truancy and even those who do take parents to court are still slow to set the wheels in motion. For the worst behaved students there is very little that would actually get them into the classroom if they didn’t want to go. The suggestion that compulsory education is the cause of poor behaviour in schools ignores the fact that lots of badly behaved students want to be in school. Where else would they find a ready supply of adults to torment and peers to impress? More than one teacher has suggested to me that “EBD”, the current term for students that seem unable to behave, stands for Every Bloody Day because that’s how often they turn up. Conversely, there are a lot of well behaved students who would be the first to disappear if school became optional (often to escape the kids that won’t behave).
Furthermore, it doesn’t take too many bus journeys or walks through my local park, to realise that the propensity of groups of adolescents to misbehave is not dependent on being in school. Many of the students who are out of control in school are equally out of control on the streets. While teachers might well cheer if their behaviour was moved out of the school and became somebody else’s problem, it is unlikely that anyone else would be happy, making an end to compulsory education a political non-starter.
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April 26th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Are any of your students naturally curious to learn what you teach? I suspect, from observing my own children who attended school then deregistered and deschooled, that *compulsory* education snuffs out a child’s natural curiosity which inspires the urge to learn. So it’s counterproductive to make learning compulsory and students would learn much more if it wasn’t. And a curious, engaged, learning student is generally a well-behaved one, no?
I agree that it’s a political non-starter though. But I can dream.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Gill, I think you will find that Andrew has already dealt with this below, in a comment on ‘Bad Idea #1′.
If only we could rewind time to before the Enlightnment!, as that is where it started to all go wrong.
April 26th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Hmm. I myself agree with Comenius, if that’s what he said. I also agree with you, Newsisgood, when you said this:
“Myself, I think that discipline can only be tackled once a largy majority of students in a school agree that school is important. No amount of discipline could inspire this belief out of nowhere, and until this belief becomes common there is no reason for the students of that school to care about discipline at all.”
and this:
“I can’t imagine that your grandparents taught you how to set up and post in this blog, Andrew.”
April 26th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
“Are any of your students naturally curious to learn what you teach?”
Yes. Never more than a handful and mostly in the sixth form. Peer pressure ensures that most show no interest in learning.
“I suspect, from observing my own children who attended school then deregistered and deschooled, that *compulsory* education snuffs out a child’s natural curiosity which inspires the urge to learn.”
I’d be the first to argue that most secondary schools seem to have just that sort of a culture. However it has nothing to do with compulsory education. If it did it would affect all schools and all developed nations.
April 26th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
“If it did it would affect all schools and all developed nations.”
Hmm. Interesting point. So children in some countries are being raised to be more compliant with authority than they tend to be in the UK?
I’m deliberately raising mine to be more autonomous because I think autonomy is more useful to them in our culture than obedience. Maybe other parents are instinctively feeling the same thing, which might explain the problem?
April 26th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
What a joy you must be on parents’ evenings Gill. May I assume that your preferred mode of autonomy is nevertheless accompanied by some appreciation of the need to respect the right of others to learn? That your son has, via your training and example, internalised enough behavioural standards to be able to learn as part of a larger group? Obeying his parents even if the O word is never used at home?
There’s nothing wrong with obedience from children. They are not little adults. Unless you are the sort of spiteful behaviourist who allows their child to get cold and wet because they didn’t want to wear a coat, obedience is expected whatever term you dress it up in.
Obedience is necessary when many children from different families have to conform within a classroom. God save us from thirty autonomous eight year olds.
There are plenty of qualities that will give your son an edge in later life - lying, cheating, ruthlessness.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
I’ve got five children, all home educated. Every evening is parents’ evening and every day is parents’ day for me. And of course they all respect each others’ rights to learn. This is innate and nothing to do with obedience.
April 27th, 2007 at 6:55 am
I said “I’ve got five children, all home educated. Every evening is parents’ evening and every day is parents’ day for me. And of course they all respect each others’ rights to learn. This is innate and nothing to do with obedience.”
in reply to
“What a joy you must be on parents’ evenings Gill.”
But the blog put my comment in the wrong place! (Very disobedient!)
Yes, I mean obedience is only necessary because of compulsory education. When you take the compulsion away and the need for obedience, the children behave fine.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:24 am
“Obedience is necessary when many children from different families have to conform within a classroom. God save us from thirty autonomous eight year olds.”
We seem to agree that obedience is not for adults (”There’s nothing wrong with obedience from children. They are not little adults”). The point of difference is whether kids need to show obedience too.
When educated at home, no, as other methods of persuasion are possible.
When educated in class, yes: “Obedience is necessary when many children from different families have to conform within a classroom”.
So this obedience in a class is to make the class function, and it is not actually really an important part of education?
April 27th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
“There are plenty of qualities that will give your son an edge in later life - lying, cheating, ruthlessness.”
Spot on. The conflict is not between obedience and autonomy it’s between right and wrong.
The badly behaved are doing something morally wrong.
April 28th, 2007 at 9:03 am
“The badly behaved are doing something morally wrong.”
This makes the institution of schooling and the methods used to control behaviour necessarily right, which is abhorrent to me. No wonder you’ve said previously that teachers can never be wrong; that in a dispute it is always and unquestionably the student that is at fault!
I wager that your position is not built on any diagnosis of morality - it is instead reverse engineering from the position that the ’school is always right’.
“The conflict is not between obedience and autonomy it’s between right and wrong.” Yet there is, demonstrably, a conflict between teaching students in a way that promotes obedience, and one that promotes autonomy. I am sure that far more studies by psychologists could show this occurring than they could agree on ‘right and wrong’. Of course, you could bring philosophers into it, but I am sure many would disagree with you in your attribution of moral problematics to the classroom situation! Either way, I believe that you would find very little support.