Schools

It's a crazy time of year at work. We should be winding down towards Christmas and the summer holidays. But in between marking 250 Chemistry exams, doing the stuff needed to avoid 2011 being a disaster, and being the guy responsible for allocating my colleagues to the living hell of taking substitute classes in our dysfunctional junior campus, I need those holidays.

I teach in an under-resourced large high school on the suburban fringe. The school gets students with lots of problems and struggles to deal with them. It makes me think.

I've been thinking about schools and bullying a lot lately, particularly after Biki wrote a fine, strong post in response to Brandon Bitner's suicide. Her account of her son's bullying instigated by his teacher moved me. Teacher bullying is an issue that can be dealt with with just a little effort by schools. Student bullying is a whole lot harder.

A class of 25 fifteen year-olds can be a scary place. It is such a fine line between order and chaos. Every ounce of your energy goes into pushing, cajoling, harassing  the mob into not trashing the furniture, into not engaging in physical violence and, just possibly, into learning some maths. You make decisions about what you ignore. You have no choice. Students know not to be offensive to each other in my classes, that's where I draw the line. But there are other things I let go when I shouldn't. Certainly some teachers do better than others. A few charismatic individuals succeed in transforming the classroom. But most of us just manage to get by.


Schools are such archaic institutions. Such an icon of the industrial age. We take every five year old and line them up, desk by desk, row by row, to transform them into productive citizens. For a while, the teacher controls the agenda, but as they gain a will of their own the demands of the group take over. All the same age, lacking any perspective gained by experience, no-one with the wisdom to reign in the excesses. Randomly mixed, ensuring the bullies can find a victim, the strong can rule the weak, the cool rule and the others hide in shame.

Mass institution like this from the industrial revolution have never brought good. Prisons, well nobody cares about their dehumanising nature. We’ve seen the terrible legacy of abuse, emotional,  physical, sexual, that Children’s homes wrought upon generations of kids who didn’t have a chance. Factories only became human when organised labour took control and ensured the dignity of workers.

Dunno what to do about it, though.

One thing I do know is that people like me must stand up and force our schools to do all we can to make the place safe for kids.