John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL W BENNETT IN CBC NEWS
“School violence: How we can fix at least one of the reasons it persists
“Why Canadian schools are falling short when it comes to addressing this chronic problem”
Oh, please, the schools and teachers and administrators have always avoided dealing with the problem. Always. I've seen it all my life in several different jurisdictions. I've always taken an interest in education, and I once even spent some time teaching. My wife was a teacher.
Eyes are averted. Difficulties with parents definitely avoided.
Systematic approaches to discipline such as "zero tolerance" are quickly dropped by timid school officials as soon as there are any charges that one group over another is being "picked on." That is what happened in Toronto a few years ago, and it happened very quickly.
A program much heralded at its beginning just disappeared overnight after complaints from a group, as though it were not conceivable that one group might indeed have more incidents of violence compared to another. That kind of response is incompatible with solving a problem, but that is a typical public-school response.
You know. in the old Soviet Union, workers used to say, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
In our schools - and especially public schools - the game is changed to something like, "They pretend to be concerned with violence, and we pretend to cooperate."
I say "especially public schools” because they have virtually no choice but to take whatever difficult and even predatory children are sent their way.
Some private schools and Catholic Schools in the United States, where they are not tax-supported, are free from this constraint and expel bad cases. Many parents in the United States like the record of Catholic schools and send children to them who are not even Catholic.
It doesn't solve the situation for society, but it does for the local school and students and teachers. There will always be parents who are unhelpful and parents who really should not have had children. And there will always be unbalanced and disturbed children.
Teachers are not qualified to deal with violence-prone children, nor should they have to do so. Their presence damages the learning environment and sense of school community for everyone else.
Clearly, special arrangements for such children are needed, but school authorities tend to avoid that both in the name of political correctness and owing to the expense.
____________________
One added thought.
Just look at the people who actually govern much of our world today.
Do you see any lack of bullying and violence?
Quite the opposite.
In both high corporate affairs and especially in high levels of many governments, notably the one to the South of us, what we see is bullying and violence at its worst. We see it often even praised and rewarded.
I am not sure human society has yet even sorted out what are the values it should embrace and encourage and enforce for its children.
Given that fact, I think it mighty unlikely to expect that we can solve the problem of bullying and violence in our schools.
