Civitas

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October 21, 2005

Sisters are Doing It to Themselves

The badly scarred and understandably sad-looking face of a twelve-year old Sheffield schoolgirl stares reproachfully from a photograph on the front page of today’s Times. The poor girl acquired her disfiguring injuries after she was savagely set upon by a knife-wielding classmate whom the previous day the brave victim of the attack had tried to stop bullying a third schoolmate.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, set up a ‘behaviour task force’ to make proposals about how to tackle the growing problem of classroom bullying and disorder which it is due to publish today. It was, apparently and welcomingly, asked to adopt a long-overdue and badly-needed zero-tolerance approach to the problem.

We should, however, not hold our hopes too high. For we have long been promised so much by the present government and given so little it is difficult to believe we shall not this time receive only yet more brave words that amount to little in practice.

By way of illustration of the current tragic gap between rhetoric and reality today in all matters to do with schooling today, consider what was said in its last Ofsted report about the approach of the victim’s school towards instilling good behaviour in pupils:

‘The school looks after its pupils well…. The school successfully integrates many pupils with challenging behaviour, and those who have been excluded from schools…. A programme for personal, social and health education is well organised and effectively taught. … Moral education is good. Expectations regarding behaviour are clear, and pupils are full aware of the difference between right and wrong.’

Now, we all know that one swallow does not a summer make. But by the same token so do we that it takes only one rotten apple to spoil a barrel. Moreover, it simply defies belief to suppose the attack was a totally isolated incident or that a twelve-year old girl would be carrying a knife to school with the intention or willingness to use it as she did had her doing so not been to some extent in keeping with the entire culture of that school, if not at its official classroom level, then at its unofficial level in the playground.

(There’s a word whose literal meaning harks back to earlier more civilised times and serves as a standing indictment of the harsh and brutal reality that place has all too commonly and tragically become today.)

But the rot goes well beyond the disturbed and deprived family backgrounds which are such fertile incubators of the many disorderly and disturbed children who attend today’s schools. It goes right up to the top of the educational establishment. Consider, for example, what the same Ofsted report said about that same school’s approach towards moral education:

‘Moral education is good…. When moral decisions are to be made, pupils are taught to think these through from action to consequence…. Moral issues are debated as they arise in lessons, for example, global warming and its consequences, refugees and persecution.’

Lord above! If ever there was a moral decision to be made by a school child, it is not whether the G8 countries should adopt some protocol about reducing carbon emissions or whether there should be a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred. It is whether they school bring into school a knife today or any other with the intent or preparedness to use it.

Admittedly, this moral issue is by no means as straightforward as might at first sight appear. Were school environments entirely orderly and civil, the question should simply not arise for a child of whether to carry a knife to school. It does, however, when schools have been turned into blackboard jungles into which children must daily venture in fear and trembling of being assaulted. Then, whether to carry a knife to school does become a genuine moral issue for them.

Having said all that, it seems Ofsted, along with the entire educational establishment of this country, has got the moral focus all wrong if it and they should think moral education in schools should be about fostering in their pupils the ability to debate such issues as the ethics of global-warming, rather than about instilling in them basic common decency, as well as attempting to develop their abilty to think for themselves about how to be decent as well as their wanting to be, when all about them there is so much moral chaos, disorder and unruliness.

School, as we know, is no moral substitute for the home and, unless their pupils' home environment is stable and nurturing, it is an uphill struggle for teachers to turn out morally decent products.

Perhaps, then, more emphasis should be given in schools and in the wider community at large on the value of stable homes and family-life. ‘Oh!’ we will be told ‘to do that will stigmatise those children not fortunate enough to have been born into one!’

Balderdash! If the time has come for society to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance towards classroom disorder and bullying, it has also come for it to get tough on the causes of classroom disorder and bullying. Of these unsettled and unstable home-lives must be a principal, if not the single biggest, cause.

All those 'sixties feminists who back then championed the break-up of the two-parent family because, so they claimed, this would liberate women from domestic violence should be made to take a long hard look at the photograph of that poor school-girl’s face and made to answer the simple question of whether their sisters’ liberation from the oppressive patriarchal family was worth her scars inflicted by a girl not a boy as well as all the other injuries and indignities suffered by all other victims of violent crime today.

Posted by David Conway at October 21, 2005 11:29 AM

Comments

Posted by: Clairwil at October 22, 2005 01:26 AM

Posted by: PhilB at October 22, 2005 07:09 AM

Posted by: JayN at October 25, 2005 12:10 PM

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