ANGRY MOB

I read a post by Alone in the Dark looking at Peter Hitchens' latest article and it got me annoyed enough to write something on the issue as well. Hitchens' article - We CAN turn back the clock and make our schools places of excellence. Here's how... - paints a very bleak picture of secondary education:

 Thankfully, Peter Hitchens informs us that the solutions to such problems are 'obvious' and here is what he suggests:

 So there we have it, bring back corporal punishment, banish human rights and the mythical notion of 'commonsense' will prevail. I have many fundamental objections to this; firstly, it is mind-numbingly ignorant of Peter Hitchens to possibly think that the problems of education could be 'reversed in a matter of months and put right in a few years' by these suggestions.

Secondly, how is corporal punishment supposed to help? One of the problems Peter Hitchens highlights in his article is the increased violence in schools, yet his solution is to formalise violence and have it conducted by staff as well as students. Furthermore, one of the real problems in education (one that has always existed) is bullying. How are staff supposed to tackle bullying - particularly physical bullying - when they themselves would be acting as bullies by utilising physical violence because they happen to be in power? Alone in the Dark points out that studies have shown corporal punishment to be ineffective.

One can imagine Peter is writing from a romanticised, idealised view of the recent past that somehow education all went wrong when corporal punishment was banished and we tried treating children as human beings.

Thirdly, how does he propose corporal punishment is actually introduced into schools, given that he points out some staff already have to wear 'body-armour' to enter the classroom? If the same children that currently propose a violent threat are threatened with physical violence against them will they become more or less violent in response to this?

I have worked as a supply teacher in some tough inner city schools and I wouldn't fancy trying to administer corporal punishment to anyone in year 10 or above for my own safety (and I'm a 6ft male). Furthermore, in one school I confiscated a mobile phone from a student only for the student's father to barge into the school 20 minutes later threatening reception staff until the phone was returned, how would such a parent react should a teacher try to harm their child?

I've been in schools where police riot vans had to be called to break up student punch-ups, I've been at a school where a member of staff was hit in the car park by a brick when trying to get in his car at the end of the day. I have seen all of these things and I was only supply teaching for around 6 months, yet I have absolutely no wish to escalate violence by bringing back corporal punishment - and that is the only likely outcome in my experience.

Corporal punshment was banished because society realised that demonstrating violence as a means to coerce people to follow your will is not a good example to be setting to children in a world blighted by war. Violence is never an acceptable solution in a civilised society and therefore it is especially important that children are not indoctrinated at a young age to believe that violence is a perfectly acceptable way of controlling another human being. 

Fourthly, I'm sick of the idea that basic, inalienable human rights are a bad thing. I mean, just consider this for a second: we live in a society that once owned black slaves, we live in a Europe that suffered the Holocaust, Stalin's Gulags and various genocides in the Balkan states; yet we have a large percentage of the free tabloid press actively calling for the abolition of basic, fundamental human rights.

Have I missed something?

Am I alone in being eternally grateful that I live in an age and a society that no matter what I have done, whatever mistakes I have made, whatever race, religion or creed I may belong to I am protected from the state by my rights as a human being? That somehow human rights is the cause of so much ill in society is a gross distortion of reality and an insult to all those that have died throughout the ages as a result of human tyranny.

What I learnt from my experience in secondary education is that there exists a  vast chasm between certain elements of society. I would spend a day in one school and the kids would listen, work hard and were perfectly well behaved. When I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up they would list careers like: 'doctor', 'lawyer', 'vet' and so on. A week later I would be in a school in the same city, just one mile away from the first school and I would face a day of torment and abuse with the students achieving nothing. If I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up I would be met with blank expressions or utterances of 'nothing' or 'don't care'.

The difference between the worlds of these children are so vast it is difficult to sometimes remain objective in your treatment of them. Sometimes, after a day of being told to 'f*ck off' and worse you start to hate them; you despise them as human beings. But, you have to work hard to not fall into this trap of judging those less fortunate than yourself and remember that the same child could have been born just 1 mile away and could be living an entirely different life - they didn't choose to be born, nor did they choose the circumstance of how they were raised, so what right have I got to judge how they seem to be turning out?

This is the importance of basic human rights, it stops subjective judgments being made about someone, it gives paramount importance to the fact that these people are above all human beings. Britain is not a broken society, anymore than we live in a broken world where over 90% of the world's wealth is held by just 6% of the world's population. The children in the classrooms who have had shitty childhoods and face shitty futures are constantly judged and hated by their fellow human beings who just happened to be born into a better way of life than them.

Whether they like it or not, they are as much a part of society as the middle-class that Hitchens' and his fellow Daily Mail writers eulogise on a daily basis. They are not a problem to be solved in two and a half lines, especially when the solution is to return to barbaric violence that demeans the civilised society that Peter supposedly yearns for. Perhaps society should be asking questions about the poverty that capitalism has never been able to eradicate, rather than resorting to violence to quell disaffected school children.

Perhaps Peter Hitchens' to help such school children by being the first person to coherently explain to them just why it is that they live in a tiny council flat in a rundown area, whilst a child in the next school lives in a massive town house in a leafy suburb.

This would certainly be more helpful than his current contribution of mythical memories and corporal punishment.