Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No47
Newsletter Themes: Christmas memories, the value of boundaries, and why you should shout at your kids
Photo: Adam Jones
This week Facebook images of excited children dressing up and preparing for Christmas plays and other festivities have lifted my spirits in the face of the Scottish PISA results fallout and marking. Their radiant faces give me flashbacks to those moments when my daughter (and I as a child) struggled with nerves before Christmas performances, and they remind me of the extreme joy and pride when the job was done. This week, SUE received an article from an emeritus professor about cuts in foreign language teaching and courses; we will publish it in the new year. One line from the professor’s article kept jumping into my thoughts all week. He wrote that ‘learning a language is difficult, demanding and disciplining’. He reminded me how important these three D’s are for all levels of education; they are the essential partners to what used to be called the three R’s (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic). Without discipline, the content of education – the transfer of knowledge – is completely lost. It’s no accident that the word ‘discipline’ is used to describe both a single subject area and an aspect of all teaching delivery.
There has been a lot of discussion about school discipline in the news over the past week. Discipline and self-discipline are central to the education process; they are not add-ons. Teachers demand that students learn – it’s a fundamental aspect of teaching – but making demands of children has become deeply unfashionable in education policy and across broader society. As a university lecturer, I expect students to have developed self-discipline and know how to learn independently, but even in higher education we make serious demands on students to study hard and to think. Increasingly, there is pushback if we ask them to take themselves too seriously.
The problem for teachers in schools is that ‘nurturing’ and ‘wellbeing’ have now replaced demanding and disciplining as core values in teaching. Is it possible that classroom discipline is getting out of hand because we have failed to put the idea of discipline at the heart of the learning process? Some of the media paint a picture of rapidly declining student behaviour – feral children with plummeting attention spans. No doubt children are less socialised due to Covid-related school closures, and teaching is tough, but if pupils don’t grasp the value of learning, perhaps schools and the teaching unions need to reflect on whether what and how we are teaching may have contributed to this problem. In this issue, Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair, looks at the question of school discipline, and Richard Lucas of the Scottish Family Party draws our attention to the plans to extend the smacking ban to incorporate ‘shouting’ at your children. We welcome your thoughts on how we can address the question of discipline in Scottish education.
Our next Substack will appear on Thursday 4 January. In the meantime, we will send all our subscribers a special Christmas issue in pdf format! We’d be grateful if you could look out for it in your inbox and forward it to anyone you know who might want to subscribe.
Penny Lewis, Editor
Why boundaries matter in education
Stuart Waiton is the Chair of SUE
A number of reports of problems with school discipline and behaviour have been aired in recent weeks both south of the border and in Scotland. However, within all this discussion there is glaring absence of any consideration about what is the fundamental basis for discipline in schools – the very authority of education itself.
Last week, an Ofsted report highlighted concerns by headteachers in England who described a culture of non-compliance. School leaders, the report noted, talk of ‘deteriorating behaviour among pupils’ and ‘a lack of support for school policies from some parents’. In Scotland, the Scottish government’s document Behaviour in Scottish Schools 2023, without overplaying the problem, noted that ‘low-level disruption’ is a key problem that has grown over the past few decades, as has a lack of respect for teachers and authority. Additionally, the teachers union, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), surveyed members and concluded that ‘violence and aggression is a serious and growing problem in schools across Scotland’.
I’m often suspicious of reports about growing indiscipline, partly because I watched in the 1990s as the then-conservative union the NASUWT made much of their reports about growing violence in schools. Drill down into the reports and you would find that their shock-horror headlines were assisted by broadening the definition of violence to include ‘verbal violence’. This was then made all the more problematic when you found that most of the actual violence was coming from primary school children – not that you want to hear about toddlers throwing a punch, but this was clearly not the image the NASUWT was trying to paint.
Today, teachers’ unions are different, and like everything else, it’s hard to know if a conservative one actually exists anymore. However, the issue of teacher safety has remained high on the list of their concerns, and as with many other institutions today, there appears to be a tendency to want to portray their members as victims to help gain recognition for their plight.
The EIS report cannot simply be dismissed, but with only a third of schools being represented there is a danger that the survey sample is biased and that the responses were largely provided by members who experience or believe there is a problem with violence, rather than by teachers who think the opposite.
The government report, on the other hand, is a serious piece of research, although as we will see, what they do not discuss is arguably as important as what they actually found.
In Behaviour in Scottish Schools 2023, we find that, overall, staff ‘perceive that all or most pupils are generally well-behaved’ (p. 70). However, there was also a belief that ‘there has been a general deterioration in the behaviour of pupils in primary and secondary schools in Scotland since 2016’ (p. 13). As noted, the main problem mentioned was the low-level disruption, which included a lack of respect for teachers and for authority. While Covid and the lockdown were mentioned, there was also a feeling that these problems pre-dated the pandemic.
Other societal factors are pointed to as helping to explain the problems; for example, issues of poverty, challenges in family life, and adverse childhood experiences are noted. Some concerns are raised about the number of children with support needs, and as an astonishing 34 percent of Scottish children have additional support needs, this raises all sorts of questions not only about difficulties this creates for teachers trying to run a class but around the issue of the labels and diagnosed conditions we are increasingly giving to children, something that SUE will explore in detail in the new year.
Looking at the solutions on offer for the problem of ill-discipline and disruption in schools, we find the usual suspects: more resources, more support staff, better training for teachers, and also, with regard to concerns about oppositional parents, a proposal for improved engagement with parents.
One issue that was raised and that is worth some consideration is the ‘perceived lack of consequences’ that teachers discussed when trying to deal with disruptive pupils. One local authority representative noted, for example, that, ‘There is a more general belief that young people believe that there are no consequences, there are no repercussions. They’re very well aware of their rights, and they’re very well aware of the system that sits around everything, and they can understand how far to push that.’ (p. 99).
As reported this week, we find some concerns being raised about the restorative and nurturing approach to discipline, compared with the punitive approach – partly because it was felt that the therapeutic approach didn’t work and partly because of how time consuming this ‘caring’ approach can be.
Across the various reports, the issue that appears to underpin the problem is the question of authority or the lack of respect experienced by many teachers. There will no doubt be extreme expressions of this and examples of actual physical violence, but in the main, this problem of ill-discipline is experienced more as part of an everyday culture of low-level disruption and a feeling of unease about the climate of a school.
The solutions offered to this problem tend to be technical or financial, but rarely is the question of teaching and indeed adult authority ever considered in terms of the fundamentals of schools and education.
We’re never going to create schools where children don’t act in an immature way or where adolescents don’t push boundaries. Today, however, teachers exist in a broader cultural or social climate where the very idea of boundaries as an important and positive part of everyday life is being undermined.
Talk of children’s rights, for example, reflects a problem that we have discussed: a problem of the confusion of adulthood and childhood. Additionally, schools are shifting towards a ‘values’ system that celebrates children for ‘who they are’ rather than who they can become – and where ‘respect’ for identities increasingly trumps the need for serious disciplined classrooms and the need to cultivate character. On top of this, teachers are now encouraged to think of themselves as being similar to the children, as part of a collective of ‘lifelong learners’ on a ‘learning journey’, and more as therapists who engage the ‘whole child’ than as educators and as experts in their field who demand respect and discipline not as a thing in itself but because they have a passion and belief in what they are teaching.
Being able to discipline a class will depend on personality traits. It will be affected by the outside world and by social problems that children experience. It will also, to some extent, be affected by the resources that are available. But in the setting of a school, discipline and authority are also fundamentally based upon the sense of purpose and belief that teachers have about what they are teaching.
If a teacher, a school, and an educational system have a strong and clear belief in the brilliance and beauty of education provided by teachers who are experts in their field – teachers who understand the vital importance of passing on their knowledge to the next generation – then the question of discipline would flow, almost naturally, from the drive and the will of these teachers and these schools.
Today, unfortunately, this clear sense of what education is, is being lost – lost not least of all as a consequence of the politicisation of the curriculum and the overloading of education with adult (elite) concerns about everything other than the very thing that schools are there to provide. You may want children to get good jobs, be good citizens, be ‘anti-racists’ or environmental activists. You may also want children to be aware of their ‘rights’ and their ‘wellbeing’ and their ‘identity’, or to know all the ins and outs of relationships and their ‘sexuality’. But whatever this is, it’s not education; indeed, increasingly we find that the politicisation of the curriculum (sometimes with a small ‘p’) detracts and at times degrades education itself. As Julie Sandilands has observed, this teaching of ideology also becomes ‘an assault on our past’ – a form of presentist moralising rather than a serious engagement with content, facts and scholarly works from previous generations.
As teachers become ‘facilitators’ of ‘lifelong learning’ who are trained to be ‘aware’ of the ‘whole child’, what they are losing, and losing fast, is a sense of themselves as knowledgeable adults who are, more than anything else, experts in their field. (Teacher training, as we will discuss in the new year, is now part of the problem rather than a solution to it.)
Without this sense of purpose and the understanding of education as the transmission to the next generation of the best that has been thought and said, the question of discipline and ill-discipline will continue: without substance to authority in education, the question of authoritative schools and teachers cannot even start to be addressed.
Say ‘no’ to the shouting ban
Richard Lucas of the Scottish Family Party is concerned about moves to make shouting at your kids a crime.
You heard it here first. The smacking ban was just the start. The dominant conglomeration of hyper-gentle, no-punishment, counselling-obsessed childhood ‘experts’ are now set on their next step. Keep your eye open for the early signs. Articles are starting to appear claiming that ‘verbal abuse’ is as damaging as sexual abuse. A shouting ban will soon be proposed.
Of course children need warmth, praise and affirmation. Of course this can salve emotional scars. Of course children deprived of love won’t flourish.
The problem is that supporters of a shouting ban believe that rebuke and annoyance are antithetical to love. Worse, they view children as so fragile that hard words do irreparable damage. The artificially soft persona of the stereotypical person-centred counsellor is prescribed for every human interaction. Any deviation into sharpness or anger is tantamount to child abuse.
Headlines will pick out ‘shouting’, but dig deeper and the campaign is much wider. ‘Verbal abuse’ can include criticising, blaming, demeaning, disrespecting, scolding, frightening or threatening, according to the ‘experts’. Smacking-ban proponents deliberately conflated physical abuse with a smack. The same people are now becoming shouting-ban proponents who deliberately conflate abusive bullying with telling children off or threatening punishment.
It has been said that the role of social conservatives is to give reasons for things that don’t have reasons. That’s the case here. A parenting and child-rearing culture has been taken for granted for centuries, because it comes naturally and it works, so there hasn’t been a need to explicitly justify it. There now is a need, and here it is – read on!
Children need teaching, training and disciplining if they are to internalise the virtues necessary to flourish. As well as honouring virtues, they must learn to reject vices. Proper responses to selfish, greedy, hurtful or defiant behaviour include disapproval, irritation and even anger. The person who is never angered by what’s wrong has not risen above such base emotions but has artificially detached themselves from the stirrings of their own conscience. Children need to learn that some actions will provoke anger, and that this anger is not always a fault but can be inevitable and righteous.
Once, when teaching, I was with a small group of boys aged about 10 to 14. I overheard an older boy ask a younger one where he lived. Upon hearing which area of Edinburgh the boy and his family resided, the older one replied, ‘That’s where all of the prostitutes are. Your Mum must be a real munter.’ In other words, your mum is so ugly that your dad has chosen to live near prostitutes so that he can avail himself of their services in preference to your mum. I was furious and the older boy knew it. He knew it because I reacted angrily and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his comment was reprehensible.
The fragility–gentleness utopians would respond that two wrongs don’t make a right. But being angered by such an egregious comment is not wrong. The boy learned that such a statement angered me and, by implication, would likely anger other people as well. He’d think twice before repeating such a statement. I explained why it was a terrible thing to say, and he knew from my demeanour that this wasn’t some minor faux pas but an outrage.
A soft-voiced explanation of the error of his ways would leave him ignorant of the natural human reaction to such a comment. He might receive a quiet explanation in school, but in other contexts, he’d get fired, ostracised or punched. I taught him that people will flare up in response. The ideal is for him to learn that from someone who will not punch him, or be personally insulting or abusive, but will still display a natural human reaction.
Even leaving aside the communication of moral outrage, a stronger tone of voice serves a function in communication. From parents to police officers, the next means to persuade the uncompliant that you mean business can be to speak more firmly. It’s human nature. The utopians wish that their winsome whispers would always carry the day, but they don’t. Conveying a degree of authority through tone and manner can be decisive at a critical moment.
Criticism of flaws, blame for actions, a sharp tone, and threats of consequences are all perfectly acceptable aspects of parenting and teaching, but the project to demonise them all is well under way, under the definition of ‘verbal abuse’. The post-moral, therapeutic, children’s rights and fragility philosophy has been dominant for years already. So how’s it going? Listening to the advocates of such approaches, you would imagine schools full of timid children who dared not express themselves and shook with terror whenever a teacher approached. Can you find a single teacher to endorse that view? I doubt it.
The problem is already the precise opposite. Children are more likely to be defiant and unrestrained, making life miserable for other pupils and for teachers. Boundaryless living is hardly the recipe for personal wellbeing either. A pupil will not feel at peace after another day of hedonistic selfishness and cruelty. However, it is symptomatic of the dogma that its advocates persevere despite all evidence and can see no way out of a problem beyond a stronger dose of their existing prescription.
In the prevailing ethos, parents feel inhibited when dealing with their own children, refraining from the firmness that would be natural. They internalise the irritation and exasperation that children inevitably engender from time to time, instead of expressing it. This can leave children pushing the boundaries incessantly and parents eventually exploding when they can no longer hold in their frustration. Children do need building up, but sometimes they need taking down a peg or two as well.
This might be particularly acute for dads. Roughly speaking, dads are more likely to take a firm line, talk straight, admonish and discipline children. Mums are more likely to take a relational or restorative approach. These complementary styles usually combine to form an effective team. That’s my view, anyway. The Scottish education–social work–charity–political establishment takes a different view: the feminine typical approach is always best, and characteristically masculine approaches are worse than ineffective and unenlightened, they are dangerous – worthy of criminalisation.
There are things that shouldn’t be said to children. I don’t buy the view that a sentence can blight someone for decades to come, but sustained hostility, aggression, or lack of love will take its toll. The distinction between criticising and insulting is important. The balance between warmth and firmness is no exact science, but any loving parent will instinctively seek a generous balance. A degree of fear of authority figures is healthy, but we can easily see when it is veering into an unhealthy domination or terror. That’s the heart of the utopians’ error. They would never come out and say, ‘because something can be done badly or to excess, it should be banned’, but that is basically their pitch. They seek to use the extreme to demonise the perfectly reasonable.
It will be claimed that research shows that ‘verbal abuse’ is the root of all kinds of evils. On closer inspection, the studies will suffer from conflation, confounding, gratuitous subjectivity, genetic neglect, and statistical feebleness. But they won’t be subject to closer inspection in the media or parliament.
In 2018, the Scottish government toyed with a redefinition of child abuse. The proposal would have criminalised the sort of behaviours that have been discussed here. It has seemed to fall off the government’s agenda. Perhaps they didn’t have the heart for another Named Person scheme–style controversy over state intervention in family life. The juggernaut won’t be stopped that easily though.
Pressure is building. All the usual suspects will keep pushing, with the aid of a sympathetic media. The parliament will likely offer little resistance beyond some temporary querying of the finer details.
They won’t rest until a father is in court for shouting at his son who had just hit his mother. Almost all adults interact with children in a way that ain’t broke, so we don’t need the Scottish government to fix it.
References
https://wordsmatter.org/what-is-verbal-abuse/
https://www.msn.com/en-au/health/medical/shouting-at-children-can-be-as-harmful-as-sexual-abuse-according-to-study/ar-AA1hz42I
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/23967325.gender-recognition-reform-row-feminists-battling-women-rights/ Kevin McKenna, Gender Recognition Reform row: the feminists battling for women rights. 04/12/23
https://news.stv.tv/scotland/scotlands-education-ranking-falls-in-wake-of-covid-pandemic-pisa-study-finds Craig Meighan, Scotland's education ranking falls in wake of Covid pandemic Scotland ranked behind England in all three categories - but maintained its international standing. 05/12/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12829633/Is-time-ban-mobiles-classroom.html Graham Grant, Is it time to ban mobiles from every classroom? As Scottish education slides down global rankings, report highlights smart phone use as one reason for startling decline. 06/12/23
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/06/why-the-young-are-falling-for-hamas-propaganda/ Frank Furedi, Why the young are falling for Hamas propaganda. Identity politics has cast Islamist terrorists as noble freedom fighters. 06/12/23
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67580173 Andrew Picken, Scottish education performance falling, says study. 05/12/23
https://www.effiedeans.com/2023/12/the-snp-has-destroyed-scottish-education.html Editorial blog:The SNP has destroyed Scottish education. 07/12/23
https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/news/scotland/333039/as-school-standards-fall-humza-wont-say-sorry?utm_source=linkshre&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=shared_link Michael Blackley, As school standards fall, Humza WON'T say sorry. He’s helped ‘destroy our once world-leading education system’. 07/12/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/comment/no-wonder-school-standards-scotland-31614893 Stuart Waiton, No wonder school standards in Scotland are collapsing when teachers focus on indoctrination... not education. 07/12/23
https://archive.is/2eZWs Helen Puttick, Keeping disruptive pupils in mainstream schools ‘ruins lives and learning’. UK government adviser decries ‘mass experiment’ which shies away from punishing troublemakers. 10/12/23
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/12/nicola-sturgeon-is-still-haunting-scotland/ Joanna Williams, Nicola Sturgeon is still haunting Scotland. The former first minister’s scandals and failures are all coming home to roost. 12/12/23
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