Scenes From The Battleground

Here I will address the claim that children are not responsible for their actions because they are too young to understand how to behave.

I’m sure that plenty of behaviour in primary schools is down to the extent to which very young children are not always able to do things that adults take for granted or are ignorant of the significance of their actions. I’m also sure that children cannot be held responsible for breaking complex rules that they had no reason to know about or think existed. What is more incredible is the extent to which it is claimed that secondary school students, who have been in formal education for the better part of a decade, are ignorant of the basics of how to conduct one’s self. Nobody gets to the age of eleven without knowing that you are expected to obey your teachers; that it is wrong to hurt people, and that there are words you shouldn’t use in polite company. It’s not as if the students who continually misbehave aren’t also continually told to stop. “He doesn’t know any better” is an obvious falsehood. Only those behaviours which a child will never have seen or tried before should ever be considered in this light. This is not to say that children are always to be considered to be as responsible as adults for their actions, but there is no reason to consider the action of being told to “fuck off” by a fifteen year-old as involuntary, like the crying of a baby, or simply a result of a lack of awareness of the fact that it wasn’t polite.

The sort of behaviour that most concerns teachers (disobedience, bullying, verbal abuse, violence) is, of course, the sort of behaviour that children learn is wrong at a very young age. This does not stop appeals to theories of moral development such as those of Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1958) who both claimed that children developed their moral reasoning in stages. Many criticisms have been made of their ideas, but whether there is truth in their theories or not, no amount of research into the moral reasoning of children tells us about the moral acts of children. It does not take a sophisticated standard of ethical thought to do what you are told while you are at school or to refrain from telling your teacher to “fuck off”. Any teacher can tell you that children’s behaviour does not tend to continually progress in a positive way as they grow. Where behaviour improves over time it is more likely to be related to social factors (like going into the sixth form, a change in peer group, or an increase in responsibilities) than some kind of natural development. If there are developmental milestones in behaviour they would actually be points, such as adolescence, where behaviour is prone to getting worse.

Of course, even if we accept that children do follow a natural process of behaving better as they mature (or more plausibly they are socialised into at least some good habits over time) then it would still make no sense to see them as beyond blame. Even if the young were more inclined to do wrong than the old, then that would still not absolve them of responsibility. Being more strongly tempted to do something than another person does not mean you are no longer obliged to resist that temptation. “But I wanted to …” is no excuse at any age. Society can show mercy to wayward children, punish them less strictly than it would adults. It cannot, however, justify declaring them to be either free from sin or without free will. Children are not to be worshipped as saints or dehumanised into animals. They are people, and that, rather than any inherent deficiency in the young, is why they do bad things.

References

Kohlberg, Lawrence, The Development of Modes of Thinking and Choices in Years 10 to 16. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago 1958

Piaget, J., The Moral Judgment of the Child, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1932

Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict.

Arendt (1951)

In my last entry I talked about how, in the absence of more traditional views of human nature in which people are generally disposed to do wrong, it was necessary to come up with imaginative explanations of why children are not responsible for their behaviour, thereby allowing them to be innocent victims even when they are observed to be behaving like complete bastards.

The explanations were:

• Children are too young to understand how to behave.
• Children’s behaviour is determined by their background.
• Badly behaved children have a medical or psychological condition.

It is possible to imagine situations where this is true, but a moment’s thought would tell you that these sorts of situations are obviously rare exceptions to what is usual. But if you were a believer in the inherent innocence or goodness of children then it is impossible for a child to do wrong without some kind of explaining factor, an explaining factor usually picked from this list. Invariably what happens is that normal moral judgement is suspended and the discipline of psychology is bastardised to provide morality-free explanations of children’s behaviour to replace the obvious explanation. As if this way of thinking wasn’t damaging enough it also requires that teachers must be assumed to be oblivious of the “science” of human behaviour and require endless training in pop psychology. Then, having been thrown out the front door, moral judgement is sneaked in the back door in order to condemn the ignorance or intolerance of those who have not accepted the pseudo-scientific, psychological explanation of children’s sins.

The truth is that we don’t need a scientific model of the human mind to understand why we do wrong. We all have minds of our own (complete with weaknesses and a general susceptibility to temptation). A quick study of one’s own mind, and the minds of those one knows, suggests that people think, feel and do bad things. Trying to suggest a complex personal motivation for an individual’s history of sinning is like trying to suggest personal reasons why an individual might inhale oxygen or bleed red.

In the next few posts I will cover each of these “explanations” in turn and explain why they do not constitute grounds for ignoring the more obvious forms of moral reasoning. The likely complaint is that by identifying the human condition as an unavoidable cause of bad behaviour I’m not addressing how to “fix the problem”. My point, of course, is that I’m not saying it to “fix the problem”, I am saying it because it is true. People do bad things for no good reason. And this isn’t a frustrated statement about naughty kids; it’s a fact about human beings generally. This is a problem that we are not going to solve. We can’t change ourselves into saints through the application of rational principles, so why do we think that we can have that effect on future generations?

References

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schoken, 1951

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin–a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

Chesterton (1908)

… some American literati have professed their naïve belief that temptation and coercion are really the same thing, that nobody could be asked to resist temptation. (If somebody puts a pistol to your heart and orders you to shoot your best friend, then you simply must shoot him. Or, as it was argued – some years ago in connection with a quiz show scandal in which a university professor had hoaxed the public – when so much money is at stake, who could possibly resist?) The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible. In contrast to these confusions the reproach of self-righteousness raised against those who do judge is age-old; but that does not make it any the more valid. Even the judge who condemns a murderer can still say when he goes home: “and there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Arendt (1963),

Those who wish to declare themselves to be either more compassionate or more enlightened than others are keen to appeal to the inherent goodness or innocence of a badly behaved child. Claiming that a fifteen year old who tells their teacher to “fuck off” has actually done something morally wrong, let alone saying that such a student deserves to be punished, is seen as unenlightened and unfair. Those who advocate blame and punishment are seen as either cruel tyrants who hate the adorable little kiddiewinks or superstitious primitives who have no understanding of the science of human behaviour.

There is, of course, a problem with the suggestion that children are inherently good or innocent: it is not true. Children do bad things all the time. This is not a surprise as, of course, we adults do bad things all the time too and for the same reason. It is in the nature of human beings to fall short of moral perfection. We do not achieve moral perfection even for a short time, the best we can hope to do is to seek to recognise our moral failings and consider them grounds for admitting our fault; resolve not to repeat the offence; attempt to make restitution for the wrong, or in some way try to reverse the harmful effects of the wrong.

There are problems here because what I am describing are the religious concepts of Sin (literally “falling short”) and Repentance. In suggesting an existing inclination to moral failure I am echoing at least part of the doctrine of Original Sin. This is not to say these ideas rely on a religious perspective. What I have talked about here can be deduced from obvious observations of both the world around us and one’s own inner moral world, but that doesn’t stop them being seen as religious ideas. It may even be this that causes the difficulties and the claims to greater rationality of those who pretend that, morally, children are either blank slates or, worse, natural saints. We are in a culture where people don’t like to use religious concepts in moral reasoning and so there is an incentive to replace this view of morality with another more “modern” (or “progressive”) one. “Sin” in particular has become devalued, often in two opposite directions. One is to view it as simply a euphemism for sexual activity, as in “living in sin”. The other is to view it only as conspicuous, serious wrong-doing, leaving us without the terminology to discuss either our personal failings or the everyday failings of humanity.

Without the concepts of Sin and Repentance, whether they are expressed in religious or secular ways, we are at a loss to deal with moral issues, except by ignoring them. Ignoring our moral failings is something many are loathe to do explicitly – people usually stop short of announcing their own sainthood – but such a claim is implicit in any moral theory that ignores what it is actually like to do wrong. Sometimes they don’t stop short of virtual self-canonisation. Two teachers I know told me that they never sinned. (My response was to suggest it was about time they started.) But if we accept as genuine the universal human experience of doing, saying or thinking things that our best judgement tells us are wrong, then without an acceptance of our inclination to sin and the need to repent when we do so, we simply cannot explain our own moral universe. We cannot explain where we have been or where we should go. Without the concepts of imperfect human beings needing to confront their weaknesses, we end up with a contradiction: our convictions and beliefs are in opposition to our inclinations and actions. If we deny that this contradiction exists due to our own imperfect natures, then it can only be resolved by

1) abandoning our convictions

or

2) denying our responsibility for what we feel or do.

The first of these options (abandoning any principle in response to the inclination not to comply with it) is often disguised as a dislike for Puritanism or hypocrisy. “Why should anyone suggest I shouldn’t do what I want to do?” people ask, even in cases such as speeding or smoking where the harm (or potential harm) to one’s self or others is obvious. When applied to schools this takes the form of a mindless anti-authoritarianism. Teachers are portrayed as ogres, driving students to bad behaviour through their unreasonable requests and unpleasant personalities. Any teacher who has been told they were at fault for enforcing the school rules will be familiar with this form of disapproval.

The second option (denying responsibility for feelings and actions) is one that people are sometimes cautious about applying to themselves as it does have implications of insanity, although people increasingly do seem willing to express even obviously selfish feelings as if they can’t be judged for having them. It is, however, seen as tolerant and broadminded to deny the responsibility of others for their actions. Where once being non-judgemental meant refraining from the casting of stones, it now seems to require looking at the obviously guilty and saying “well they couldn’t help themselves”. Temptation can now be a considered a medical or psychological condition. Examples of this are easy to identify, just by flicking through a newspaper. I’m sure it was with a great deal of sympathy and good intentions that those who were inclined to drink excessively were told they were suffering from the “disease” of alcoholism, but I wonder if they would have accepted such a diagnosis if they knew it would lead to the promiscuous being diagnosed with the laughable condition of “sex addiction”. Where psychological and medical explanations don’t explain our mistakes, then the alternative is simply to separate actions from consequences. The results of our actions are simply quirks of fate beyond our control. It is presumably for this reason that newspapers now report women “falling pregnant” in the same way somebody might “fall ill” or “fall over”.

With regards to education, the belief that children are not responsible for their actions is the default position for those attempting to reconcile their denial of human nature with the rather obvious fact that all children do bad things. The usual explanations of why children are not to be held responsible for their actions are:

• Children are too young to understand how to behave.
• Children’s behaviour is determined by their background.
• Badly behaved children have a medical or psychological condition.

For those of you reading this who are teachers, is this sounding familiar?

References

Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Revised Edition, Penguin, 1963

Chesterton, G.K., Orthodoxy, 1908

I am planning to write a few posts on the ethics of education. I have already entered this territory before, (for instance in these posts: Values and Professionalism) but I have become more and more convinced that the problems in our schools are philosophical and ethical. The values and the beliefs that shape large parts of our education system, and public discourse about education, are not simply misapplied, they are wrong. Improving our education system does not simply require a change in techniques or organisation; it requires that we re-evaluate some of the concepts currently used to justify how our education system is, and some of the concepts that have been unwisely discarded.

In particular, (and this will be familiar to anybody who reads this blog regularly) we no longer seem expected to believe that students are responsible for their actions, or that they might deserve punishments (as well as rewards) for those actions. It is controversial to even challenge this. The received wisdom – that children are beyond blame – is seen by its adherents as axiomatically correct to an extent where it is morally wrong to question it. These are all comments (and I could have found dozens of others) that have been aimed at me where I have argued merely that children are morally responsible for their actions and are deserving of punishment when they do something bad:

A basic antagonism to student [sic] underlies everything that you say and recommend.

http://oldandrew.edublogs.org/2007/11/14/in-praise-of-harshness/#comment-672

[he] was probably fired for assaulting a student years ago and blogs to relive its “glory” days.”

http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=004257;p=1

I really hope you are not teaching anymore and am thankful that more enlightened teachers are around (and perhaps trained in more uptodate [sic] methods and ideas). I have no intention of continuing with this thread as I find your comments offensive.

http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/p/147936/281940.aspx#281940

If you are still caught in the pessimistic cycle of believing in inate [sic] misbehaviour then maybe a career change.  Apologies for sounding rude but i [sic] believe the old saying “if you’re not part of the solution then your part of the problem

http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/p/244410/3800204.aspx#3800204

The outrage that is felt at the suggestion that children are both responsible and culpable is astounding to me. It seems to be based on a belief that failing to accept certain doctrines about children, amounts to an actual hostility to children. Those who make these arguments believe that you must agree with them in order to have genuine concern about, or knowledge of, children. This is held so strongly, and so blatantly in defiance of reason, that it is plausible that they adopt these stances entirely so that they can consider themselves to be more compassionate and enlightened than others.

Of course, there is a strong element of hypocrisy in the comments. They object to my willingness to apply moral judgements to student behaviour, but are enthusiastic to apply such judgements to me. I would argue that this sort of incoherence is inevitable. Like much modern moral debate they have thrown key moral concepts out through the front door (specifically: responsibility, judgement and desert) only for them to return through the back door. This is because the concepts they were rejecting were indispensable. If children are blameless then somebody else must be to blame, and inevitably the conclusion is reached that I must be to blame for everything I describe. It is simply impossible to start ethics from scratch without accounting for the concepts we already rely on to make sense of the world, and blame is one of these.

In fact, this is true of philosophy generally. As Midgley (1996) argued, philosophy is like plumbing:

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them. But, for both, existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start.

Another philosopher, Macintyre (1981), suggests that the plumbing of ethics has already been torn up:

What we possess … are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely— lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

Whether this is accurate or not across the whole of ethics, my point is that it is most definitely true in education. Basic moral concepts, such as responsibility and desert, have been lost from our schools. We educate as if we don’t even know what human beings, let alone children, are actually like, and as if we can’t hope to make moral judgements about what we, or our students, are doing. We need to consider these ethical issues, as what is happening in our schools is not just inefficient or harmful, it is morally wrong.

My plan is to post in the next few weeks on the topics of:

• Human Nature
• Blamelessness
• Needs
• Desert

References:

Midgley, Mary, Utopias, Dolpins and Computers, 1996, Routledge

MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 1981, University of Notre Dame Press

For this entry I have turned my blog over to a friend so he can write about his experience of teaching, in the next level of the education system:

As a friend of Oldandrew for many years I agreed to write a guest entry for his blog. Unlike Oldandrew, I have not become a school teacher but have experience of teaching undergraduates at University. I have been teaching mathematics to students in a computer science department in a University whose computer science department is one of the top ten in the country. Here are a few of the important rules for teaching we were given in how we should handle students:

1. Answers need to be marked for presence not correctness. These students are not mathematicians and are studying computer science so we can’t expect them to be interested and intelligent enough to be able to answer these questions correctly so as long as they attempt an answer it is fine.
2. International students cannot fail. International students pay a lot of money for their tuition and if we fail them we may not get anymore and this will reduce our income.
3. Teachers must teach at the speed of the slowest, one must never stretch the smartest students.

Sadly, the introduction of tuition fees has greatly influenced the attitude of students. It becomes increasingly common for students to demand good grades because they pay for their degree so they deserve to get a first. Similarly, students will refuse to hand in work at given times because they pay the wages of the lecturer.

International students also cause further problems for lecturers in that in some countries there is no concept of plagiarism. This means that even though students are made to sign an agreement not to commit plagiarism and the concept is explained to them in detail, international students regularly do. International students are nearly always caught because the quality of their English is below the standard of that used on Wikipedia and so whenever they cut and paste written extracts from Wikipedia it is stands out like blood in snow. If you point out to students that they are committing plagiarism then they will accuse you of racism because either you do not understand their culture (special sessions are now being put on for staff to help them understand the cultures where plagiarism is acceptable), or that you are expecting them to have too high a level of understanding of English.

A few words are in order about the ability of students from school. As a rule the only students who are actually capable of the work are Germans and Indians. The English students are often completely incapable of doing mathematics at a university level. When I went to university we did not cover anything we had done at A-level but instead starting doing new work but this is very rarely the case except at the very best universities, now the A-level syllabus is recovered in the first year so that all students are at the same level for their second year when they can be taught new material. In fact the ability of English students is so bad that at one point I was trying to prove, by induction, that something was divisible by three and I had shown that it was divisible by six. I then had to explain repeatedly that since six is three times two, anything divisible by six was also divisible by three. I even had a couple of students claiming that six was not three times two. It is at this point that I should point out that these students all have A grades in A-level mathematics.

Even when I was at university various courses were being moved from the second to the third year so the dumbing down of university of degrees has been going on for a number of years. Our education system is failing students and a lot of universities are doing their best to compensate, but this means that a lot of degrees have been dumbed down to the point where they are useless.

In my experience most schools have one or two competent members of SMT. In a good school this is the Head and the Deputy Head. In a bad school it will be the Assistant Head in charge of PSHE and the Assistant Head responsible for The Sixth Form.

There are a few things that make a good member of SMT:

1) They walk the talk. They enforce the rules they expect you to enforce. They teach the way they expect you to teach. They don’t mind you observing their lessons. They don’t ignore trouble in the corridors, hide in their offices or ignore students who aren’t obeying rules concerning uniform or behaviour around school.

2) They are honest. They keep their promises. If they say they will support you in a lesson then they are there. If they say they will sort something they will sort it. If they don’t know the answer to a question they will tell you and get back to you. If they can’t get something done they say, instead of failing to do it and looking for somebody else to blame. They don’t use euphemisms, if a kid is out of order they will say so. If a job they give you is difficult they will tell you that. If a school is difficult they will tell you that, with no weasel words about how it will be better once you “build relationships”.

3) They are on the teachers’ side. They remember what it is like to teach. They don’t waste time trying to see teachers’ problems from “the other side”, whether that’s the students or management. They have a sincere conversation with the teacher about what can be done. Most importantly of all they are like this with parents. In their book a parent who is unsatisfied with the school needs to find a new school. There are no “personality clashes” and no undermining of staff.

4) They’ll get the kid. If you report a disciplinary incident they deal with it without trying to refer it elsewhere or to pretend it isn’t serious. They assume that if you have gone to them it is because it is serious, and because nobody else will deal with it.

5) They take responsibility. If they are there, then they are in charge. This is particularly important for things like supervising the canteen, or children on sportsday or a trip. There is no need to ask them for help in such a situation, they are looking for the problems and dealing with them.

Few schools have nobody like this, although some schools have so few that they end up overworked. What is rare is the situation where such a person is the headteacher. I have only encountered this briefly, but it is a joy. In particular there are some other qualities that the competent headteacher has:

1) They lead. Almost everything they do is their own idea, and they don’t care for consultation or debate. They will also make it clear what they want or expect at all times. You never have to ask what they want as they have already made it clear. Their aims are clear and non-negotiable.

2) They look for trouble. You find them in the corridors at lesson change over. They ask what the matter is if you look stressed. They intervene in as many incidents as possible, particularly if awkward parents are involved. They will take on new projects if they are likely to make a difference. They are never satisfied with the status quo even when accepting it would make their life easier in the short term.

3) They fight The Powers That Be. They will fight the Local Authority. They will ignore targets for exclusion. They will not ask what other schools are doing before taking on a new idea. They will pick a fight with anybody that interferes, and will rely on the school’s exam relults to let them get away with it. Not only that, but they do get those results. As long as they are in place the school’s results keep going up.

There’s a naïve idea that the best headteachers are the nicest ones. While I know that an evil backstabbing swine makes a poor head, a weak one is even worse. The best headteachers are ruthless bastards, but they are on your side and they are ruthless with dealing with problems, rather than in covering them up. We owe them a lot. I’d like to buy a drink for all the good secondary headteachers in England. (After all I’d probably get change from a tenner).

If you are the headteacher of a Battleground School the following types of behaviour will be normal for you:

1) The Strategic Euphemism. When interviewing suckers, sorry, candidates for teaching positions, and talking to parents and governors it becomes important to be able to avoid explaining what the school is actually like, but too blatant a lie is likely to be found out. The best way to avoid being caught out is to describe the phenomena of the school in certain glossy phrases:

“Our students aren’t afraid to say what they think” means “our students are rude to everybody”.

“Our students often have a difficult home-life” means “our parents are scum”

“We will expect you to cater for a variety of different learning styles” means “let the kids sit and chat in your lessons, it’s safest that way”.

2) The Bad Reference. There’s nothing like keeping hold of staff by stopping them from leaving. Unless you actively want shot of somebody and have a replacement lined up then you make sure you write a hatchet job. If you haven’t said anything critical of them to their face then it might take a year for them to realise what’s happening. Even if they do find out then they have very limited options.to do anything about it. If you become known for your bad references then they might not even try to leave in the first place. The great thing is that in a bad school, you can paint any teacher as bad. They will have had problems with bad behaviour. (Bill Rogers, Mr Chips and Coach Carter combined would have problems with bad behaviour in your school). So make out it is their fault. If they don’t like you, and they probably don’t as they want to leave, then say they have trouble getting on with their colleagues.

3) The Fortress Of Solitude. Nothing reduces a headteacher’s authority more than being seen with children. If they are rude to your face in front of staff then the staff may realise you are not in control of the school. The solution to this problem is to create your own Fortress of Solitude, otherwise known as your office. If it is safely placed away from classrooms and you never leave it, except to go on Local Authority junkets, then you may never have to deal with a student directly at all. It can be embarrassing if you are showing somebody around the school and some of the students say “who the hell are you?” but it beats being called names by the little scrotes.

4) Delegating Responsibility. It is well known that great managers delegate. Great headteachers delegate so much that nobody quite knows what they do at all. If anyone asks what you are doing mumble something about paperwork and attending meetings. Some headteachers warn staff in briefings if they are going to be unavailable that day. This is a mistake as it just becomes noticeable that this makes no difference to anything that happens in the school. The rule of delegating is: If it’s important to you (i.e. things that you might be asked about by the local authority) give it to another member of SMT, if it’s not important (i.e. it’s to do with behaviour, or with the kids) give it to middle managers.

5) Blame People To Their Faces. Everything will go wrong eventually. The important thing is that it was in no way your fault. You need to invite every member of staff into your office at some point and blame them for something. Make it sound official, it looks good if you have some paperwork about it that you aren’t allowed to show them. If they apologise despite having done nothing wrong then you know that they will never stand up to you, and that you can blame them for other things in the future. If they do stand up to you, perhaps by leaving or going to their union rep then at least you have uncovered a troublemaker.

6) Blame People Behind Their Back. Some people are too indispensable, or too well-connected to be confronted directly. Therefore it becomes important not to talk to them directly about whatever you are blaming them for. The important thing is that you have an excuse for what’s going on. People can go for six months to a year thinking that they have done an excellent job, with only management incompetence to slow them down, and then later discover that they have been given no credit for anything they’ve done but have been held personally responsible for the failings of everyone above them in the hierachy. Discipline is the worst area for this. A teacher may ruthlessly enforce the rules despite a complete lack of support, only to discover that the people who were meant to be supporting them held them personally at fault for having to enforce the rules in the first place. Teachers often object to being told “we are not going to do our jobs in following up bad behaviour, because we think you are to blame for every bit of bad behaviour you tell us about” but if you say it behind their back then it could take months before they notice their referrals are being delinerately ignored (rather than just accidentally like everyone else’s).

7) Fake Concern about Staff Well-Being. Given that so many of the miseries of teaching result directly from bad management it is very easy for teachers to suspect that headteachers don’t care about them at all. The easiest way to deal with this complaint is to buy into initiatives that are meant to help with staff well-being. These consist of an INSET explaining that in future there will be greater concern about staff well-being, followed by a questionnaire that asks people how unhappy they are and why. This questionnaire is then ignored (usually by claiming not enough staff filled it in). Coincidentally all the answers that were filled in were from respondents who said they were very unhappy and you are the reason why. If that doesn’t convince staff that you care then offer free aromatherapy sessions after school.

I discussed previously the rise of comprehensive schooling and the deteriorating position of the teaching profession. I didn’t explain the phenomena that followed on from this. The Battleground School is the type of school I have been writing about.

To be precise I am using the term to refer to schools of the following type:

• They are large, usually secular, mixed (or boys’) comprehensives.
• They have a limited or ineffective discipline system, in particular, referrals of serious incidents regularly result in no action against the student responsible and such incidents are common.
• School management explicitly avoid endorsing punishment as part of the school discipline system.
• The ethos of the school prioritises socialisation, but not socialisation into academic, religious or (conventional) moral values.
• Management deny the existence of the behaviour problems identified by staff, and see behaviour as primarily the responsibility of the teaching staff.

No figures exist for what proportion of schools are like this. My personal experience suggests that it has become the norm. I have direct experience of schools of this sort being praised by OFSTED as if nothing was awry. They form the overwhelming majority of schools in the Local Authorities where I have worked and I know from the reaction to this blog that a large number of teachers in other parts of this country are in such schools. The question I am interested in is not “how common are such schools?” I know that I am unlikely to get a more precise answer than “very common”. What intrigues me is how long such schools have been a feature of our education system.

The first point is that they have existed since at least the early sixties, before comprehensives had even became widespread. The first reference I can find to such a school is that of Risinghill which was established in 1960. Berg (1968) writes a glowing review of a school serving the deprived based on principles she finds agreeable. The headmaster, Michael Duane:

• announced to the children there would be no more corporal punishment
• claimed “I personally have no time for punishment at all”
• concluded the discipline problems were the fault of “second-raters” on the teaching staff who “did not know how to deal with children who are uninhibited and therefore a threat to the authoritarian standard”
• refused to expel any child
• did not support staff with disciplining the students

To him good teachers were the ones who “treat people [children] with respect, as friends”. “Humanist assemblies” and “child centred lessons” were introduced. Sex education became X-rated in its language and explicitness. A School Council was introduced.

In prize day speeches Duane declared:

“To measure a school by exam results is like estimating the quality of a man’s life by the number of calories he burns … They bear no relation to the real purposes of living… vigour.. spontaneity.. and a zest for life. These are important.”

and

“You cannot educate against the climate of opinion or attitude in the family, or neighbourhood or society.”

Despite the writer’s spin (apparently traditionalist teachers and unprincipled politicians are to be blamed for everything that went wrong at the school) it soon becomes clear that violent gangs formed among the pupils. Staff wouldn’t stay at the school and were often off sick. Inspectors found obscene graffiti, internal truancy, and unruly and uninterested children. Staff complained of having been attacked (including with a gun) and were often sworn at. One teacher, of the most liberal variety, describes a boy pulling a knife on her and a girl in a class being molested by a boy, with no punishment given (apparently this approach shows you are “a special kind of teacher”).

It is hard to read Berg’s account without concluding that she is describing the archetype for modern British schooling. However, this was not when such schools became normal. Risinghill became a national scandal and was closed down. Other comprehensives did not follow suit. Some schools that became comprehensives made a virtue of retaining a grammar school ethos, such as Highbury Grove Boy’s School. But over time things changed. Francis Gilbert’s two books (Gilbert 2004 and 2005) describe Battleground Schools in the early 1990s which, although not named, are easily identifiable. McNulty (2005) describes something similar, again dating back to the early nineties.

The creation of OFSTED led to the identification of failing schools, some, such as Hackney Downs and The Ridings became infamous. Others became infamous for other reasons, such as St Geroge’s in Westminster where the headmaster Philip Lawrence was murdered at the school gates before entering Special measures (I include St George’s despite it being a Catholic school as Stubbs (2003) suggests that at its low point it lost any Catholic ethos). These schools are, however, the extreme cases and can no more be considered to be representative of a wider class of schools than Risinghill was. What’s more indicative is Blum (1998) and Johnson (1999).

Paul Blum’s book is an excellent survival guide for teachers in Battleground Schools, or in his phrase “difficult classrooms”. In his introduction he describes the problems faced by teachers:

“There will often be situations in which they will be faced with defiance, aggression and verbal abuse… [and] low-level energy-sapping daily routines in which they struggle to get the pupils to stop talking and actually listening to what they are saying.”

The success of this book (I recently saw large numbers of copies in the library of a university well know for its teacher training, far more than any other behaviour book) suggests his advice is widely applicable and that challenging classrooms are very common indeed, but he nevertheless writes as if the “rough schools” he’s describing are only those schools “which [are] bottom or near the bottom of the examination league table in [their] local area”.

Martin Johnson’s book has a similar viewpoint, despite being written as a polemic rather than as advice. He describes perfectly life in a Battleground School, including the anarchy in the corridors and the hostility faced in the classrooms. Like Blum he condemns those who suggest that “good teaching” is a panacea to classroom chaos and claims that he is talking about a minority of schools. He identifies these as “schools for the underclass” and assumes they exist only as a result of deprivation.

So as I’ve said the battleground schools have existed for, five decades. However, for most of that time they seemed exceptional. By the nineties they were easily found and by the late nineties and this decade they were common enough for people to write books about them as if they were an unavoidable widespread feature of UK education system. All the tough schools I’ve worked in have had a history, passed on by the old hands, that explains when they become tough. The nineties and the turn of the twenty-first century figure prominently in those stories.

As I said, I am convinced that they have become the norm, that they are actually the bog standard, at least in England. A short scan of the British education blogosphere and teacher forums seems to confirm this impression. Many of the books I mentioned carefully tried to explain the exceptional nature of the experiences described, and carefully and sympathetically explained the plight of the urban poor. By 2006 no such niceties were necessary, teachers were willingly buying a book, with a cover that stated:

“The kids are thick, the parents are scum, there’s drugs everywhere and half the girls are giving birth.”

Chalk (2006)

The Battleground school has now taken over.

References

Berg, Leila, Risinghill:Death of a Comprehensive School, 1968, Penguin Books

Chalk, Frank, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting, 2006, Monday Books.

Gilbert, Francis, I’m a Teacher Get Me Out Of Here, 2004, Short Books

Gilbert, Francis, Teacher On The Run, 2005, Short books.

Johnson, Martin, Failing Schools, Failing City 1999, Jon Carpenter

McNulty, Phil, Extreme Headship, 2005, Trafford

Stubbs, Marie A Head of The Class, 2003, John Murray

Before you read this have a look at The Driving Lesson dialogue which featured in my blog in November 2007. It was well received at the time and I revisit it now because it, and the reaction to it, illustrates some of the recurring themes of this blog.

Firstly (as you may have noticed), I have often explained that the behaviour of learners in our schools is terrible. Arguing over where to sit, blaming the teacher for poor achievement, refusing to listen and all the time arguing with the teacher is not just commonplace, but actually routine in many classrooms. I have seen it in the schools I have worked in and many teachers who read the story of the Driving Lesson responded to say they recognised it too. In fact the behaviour is worse than terrible it is absurd. It doesn’t consist simply of silly, childish behaviour or, to borrow a phrase, “low-level disruption”. It has reached the point of a ritual conducted out of habit no matter how inappropriately. For this behaviour to exist widely it is not enough for us to assume that children are simply awkward at times, or that teachers haven’t persuaded them to appreciate the benefits of an education. We have to accept that the education system has initiated them into bizarre patterns of behaviour. Arguing for five minutes over where you are going to sit is as pointless in a classroom as in a car. A couple of the teachers who contacted me about The Driving Lesson asked permission to use it as a role-play with their students in the hope that it may bring home to them the ridiculous nature of their behaviour.

Secondly, a major consideration in that behaviour is the belief on the part of students that teachers are to be held responsible for the students’ behaviour and effort. This is not at the basic level of expecting teachers to enforce the rules and spell out what is required for students. It has reached the point where a student can choose to break the rules, or choose not to work, and then tell any teacher who confronts this behaviour that they are at fault. This spills out from accusations into verbal abuse and even violence.

Finally, although large numbers of teachers can recognise the behaviour described there is another possible reaction to the story of the Driving Lesson; denial. When the original website that my blog was hosted on ceased to exist I looked into moving it to one of the top education sites in the UK. I was told

I’d be interested in publishing your blog, but it would need to be firmly focused upon education, so although I really enjoyed the driving school piece, it isn’t really suitable for [us].

Unbelievably, there are people in the wider field of education who are simply oblivious to how children are behaving in our schools. The web journalist quoted above is merely the tip of the iceberg. A far more important denial of the realities of behaviour in secondary schools is the following:

… most schools successfully manage behaviour to create an environment in which learners feel valued, cared for and safe … in our experience, where unsatisfactory behaviour does occur, in the vast majority of cases it involves low level disruption in lessons. Incidents of serious misbehaviour, and especially acts of extreme violence, remain exceptionally rare and are carried out by a very small proportion of pupils.

Steer (2005)

This quotation is from the Introduction to the Steer Report a review of behaviour in schools commissioned after school discipline became an issue during the 2005 general election campaign. It was put together by a team of headteachers, school managers, an OFSTED official with responsibility for behaviour, and various union representatives. Somehow the behaviour that is so commonplace that I could satirise it in my blog, because I could be sure teachers would recognise it, exists in a world that the leading lights of the educational establishment are unaware of.

I tend to see denial as emanating from the education establishment and the associated education bureaucracies, rather than the politicians. But what I want to see as soon as possible is a politician willing to face up to the truth on education, and say about the education system what John Reid (whatever happened to him?) said about the Home Office, that it’s “not fit for purpose”.

References:

Alan Steer (chair), Learning Behaviour: The Report of The Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, DFES

Almost every book ever written about behaviour management will include this piece of advice: “Be consistent”. Now in practice there are some members of SMT who will give the opposite advice (“be flexible”,) but it is generally accepted that consistency is a key part of managing behaviour. Kids should know the rules and that the rules should always apply.
There is, unfortunately, a commonly made exception. Common sense will always retreat in front of tradition and many schools have developed the tradition of having a day where – for charity – some of the school rules, namely the ones related to school uniform, are suspended. On these Non-Discipline Days (more often known as “Non-Uniform Days”) teachers are no longer able to object to the gang colours, short skirts, expensive trainers, sexually explicit t-shirts and identity concealing head gear that a teenager is forced to wear by their peers when not protected by adults. And who could possibly object? It’s for charity.
Well I could object for the following reasons.

1. Rules are not something that can be switched on and off. It makes no more sense to have a day when the uniform rules are relaxed than it would be to have a day where students are encouraged to skip lessons, break windows or burn down the canteen.
2. School uniforms are one of the most important weapons against truancy. Simply put, if a parent makes sure their teenage child is in uniform and locked out of the house there is a more than reasonable chance they will end up in school eventually. Take the uniforms out of the equation and they are far more likely to race to the nearest amusement arcade, shopping mall or crack house. At Woodrow Wilson School SMT brought an end to the recurring cycle of Non-Discipline Days when it was noted that it reduced attendance in years 10 and 11 by over ten percent.
3. Discipline is worse on these days. Children believe they won’t have to work as it is a special occasion. Caps and hoodies provide greater anonymity for truants and trouble makers. At my current school (which has a little bit of an internal truancy problem) I actually caught 14 different children out of lessons in a single afternoon on Non-Discipline day. (Well I say caught, a more accurate observation would be that in most cases I observed them pulling their hoods over their heads and running off.) And this is without mentioning the two girls in Year 9 who don’t do a thing all day because they have decided to do a sponsored silence to raise £1.63 in sponsorship money between them.
4. You have to constantly explain which rules are still in place and which aren’t:“No, you can’t dye your hair in the toilets”; “You can’t wear hats indoors”; “Balaclavas and gimp masks are not acceptable”; “Yes, you still have to bring in a pen to write with”.
5. Compassion inflation sets in. If the school could abandon the rules for Children In Need then they should do it for Comic Relief, and Jeans for Genes Day, and any emergency in the news, and for the local dogs home, and to fund the school’s awards day. It doesn’t take long before it’s one day a month and there’s still resentment from any teacher with a new good cause if they don’t get a day too.
6. It’s a pain to collect the money in.

Of course part of the problem is that with schools failing to carry out their core function of educating children in an orderly environment then there is an abnormally strong desire to get them to carry out secondary functions, such as charitable fundraising, community work or school productions. All these things would be highly desirable if schools were doing the basics right, but seem utterly unnecessary when there is anarchy in the classrooms not being dealt with. I sometimes fear that if given a choice between achieving a 100% literacy rate among students and appearing in the local paper handing over a cheque for £137.50 to a donkey sanctuary, most headteachers would choose the latter. Nobody wants to be seen as uncharitable. Running a rubbish school is however entirely socially acceptable.