Lucía Iglesias Kuntz, UNESCO Courier journalist
Discipline, order and commitment are values that Glenwood School in Illinois (USA) seeks to inculcate in its pupils, many of whom come from troubled backgrounds. Below, 14 boys being punished in a corridor.
”In the past few years fights between children that end in tragedy have become headline news.”
“Although the subjects of discipline and indiscipline are very rarely if ever tackled during teacher training, trainee teachers soon learn their strategic importance. Keeping order in the classroom is
the first professional skill they will have to demonstrate.”
|
Support systems for teachers Experts,
businesses and institutions in several countries have come up with ideas to help
educational authorities to deal with bad behaviour in schools. In southern Spain,
schools can join the SAVE (Seville against school violence) project set up in 1996
by Rosario Ortega Ruiz of Seville University’s department of educational and developmental
psychology. The project seeks to prevent outbreaks of violence between children by
creating a friendly school atmosphere and improving interpersonal relations. |
Teachers
are not getting enough training and back-up to help them with worsening behaviour
in schools
Merlo, Argentina:
“A 13-year-old wounded by a bullet at school.” Springfield, United States: “One dead
and 30 wounded in a shooting.” Kobe, Japan: “A schoolchild decapitated by a 14-year-old.”
In the past few years, killings, physical attacks, robberies, attempted arson and
fights between children that end in tragedy have become headline news. With the appearance
of security guards, police checks and metal detectors, the most “difficult” schools
have turned into armed camps before the incredulous eyes of the public and burned
out teachers.
But school violence is not just a problem of knives, baseball bats and marijuana
in the classroom. Day after day primary and secondary school teachers in both private
and state sectors are being confronted with examples of bad behaviour—the destruction
of school equipment or furniture, pupils’ lack of respect for each other or for adults—which
impede normal school routine.
Bernard Charlot, professor of education at the University of St. Denis, near Paris,
says there are four kinds of misbehaviour. First, real violence, involving “physical
attacks or serious injury, which would be punished in a court of law.” Then there
is unruliness, “a disrespect for school rules,” and rudeness, “breaches of good manners,
like slamming a door in the face of a teacher or fellow pupil.” The fourth kind of
indiscipline—just as serious, he says—is “sometimes ostentatious indifference by
pupils which is increasingly stressful for teachers.”
Charlot cites the cases of pupils who say they ought not to be punished for absenteeism
because “since they aren’t there they don’t do anybody any harm” or those who sit
right at the back of the classroom doing what they like and when asked to take part
in the lesson say “But sir, we aren’t bothering you.”
Visiting a school staff room and asking the teachers about their pupils means listening
to a litany of complaints about disrespect, insults and vandalism and realizing what
little back-up teachers have to help them keep order.
Paloma Garrido, who teaches translation at a private university in Madrid, lists
disciplinary problems such as unpunctuality, yawning, mobile phones that ring in
class and “an insolent attitude towards the teacher. Because I’m young, they think
they can treat me like one of their pals,” says 31-year-old Garrido, who has seven
years’ experience teaching children between 14 and 20. She says the teacher must
set the rules from the very first day and “know how to keep a distance so they know
you’re the teacher and not just a chum.”
In Mexico or Italy, in Germany or India, teacher training, when it exists, focuses
on the curriculum. No one says that lessons will be given to classes which are often
too big and comprise pupils who, as in Spain for example, may witness during the
school year an average of 8,000 crimes and 200,000 acts of violence on television.
But Alfredo Furlán, an Argentine educationist, says that “although the subjects
of discipline and indiscipline are very rarely if ever tackled during teacher training,
trainee teachers soon learn their strategic importance. Keeping order in the classroom
is the first professional skill they will have to demonstrate because if they don’t,
conflicts immediately arise which have worse consequences than failing to get good
academic results from their pupils.”
The causes of bad behaviour are extremely diverse. Some studies make a distinction
between “structural” factors such as the inevitable conflicts between teenagers and
adults who try to educate them and factors that are more specific to the age we live
in.
Gustavo Calotti, who teaches languages at a secondary school in Mayotte in the Comoros
Islands and has 15 years’ teaching experience, says today’s schoolchildren are “much
more badly-behaved” than their predecessors 10 or 15 years ago. He thinks one reason
is that “young people look at the adult world and see what’s in store for them when
they leave school—a strong possibility being that they either won’t find a job or
else end up in one that is badly paid. They gradually lose the desire to make an
effort or feel the satisfaction of completing a job of work. Add to that the widespread
belief that only those with a winner’s mentality will make it and you get a kind
of don’t-care atttitude, an apathy which is reflected in their behaviour.”
UNESCO education specialist Alexandra Draxler does
not see bad behaviour as a plague or isolated phenomenon but as “a by-product of
the tremendous advance in individual rights and the broad democratization of public
life over the last 25 to 30 years.” Before that, she says, “social problems stopped
at the school gates. The situation was sorted out beforehand: violent pupils just
weren’t allowed in or were expelled, and classrooms were quiet because the discipline
was strict enough to ensure that pupils didn’t break the rules.”
Charlot admits that “these days you’re getting children in school whose parents or
elder siblings have had no secondary education, and the moment the school system
starts taking in a new category of children, some of the unspoken rules don’t work
any more. Pupils don’t turn up with the ‘pre-socialization’ they used to get and
this shows up in their behaviour.”
A social
microcosm
A school is not like
a lone soap bubble separate from society, but a place where social problems are seen
in a microcosm—problems like lack of communication, poverty, marginalization, intolerance
and loss of values. All of them lead to what Antonio García Correa, professor
of educational psychology at the University of Murcia, in Spain, calls “emotional
illiteracy”. Educational systems, he says, “have been more concerned about filling
heads with knowledge rather than teaching children to think and reason. A lot of
research has been done on children’s academic results and how to improve them, but
we have been less concerned about their social and emotional development. The result
is that pupils know more but behave worse.”
Changes in educational systems also have a lot to do with children’s behaviour. “We’ve
switched suddenly from a system based on prohibitions and punishment to one based
on sharing where the most important thing is agreement between everyone involved
in the education system and we’ve not yet learned how to put that new system into
practice,” says Nora Rais, who teaches literature in Patagonia, Argentina. She says
that “returning to an authoritarian regime isn’t the way to fix the situation. Encouraging
dialogue, making compromises and adopting values is one possible way. Teachers must
act as mediators, but we must have the resources to do that.”
The
parents’ role
The schoolteacher is
no longer someone held up as an example to others, and education is no longer a guarantee
of social advancement. But the school remains a vital institution, along with the
family, for encouraging and instilling human values in young people. Many professionals
blame parents for not pulling their weight here by being often only interested in
their children’s academic results and getting them into the next school year.
“Parents are spending less and less time on their children’s education,” says Calotti.
“They think it’s enough to pack them off to school and they don’t make a distinction
between the academic education we give children and their education as members of
society, which has to begin at home.”
But teachers are less and less alone in the face of danger. A glance at the educational
plans of several countries shows that tackling these problems is a priority in designing
policies for investigating, handling and preventing bad behaviour (see box). The
responses are starting to appear on the horizon, although everyone agrees that the
more resources a school has, the fewer problems it will face. Boosting resources
will allow more teachers to be hired, enable class sizes to be reduced, good administration
to be established and the number of teaching aids and non-teaching staff to be increased,
introducing key figures such as psychologists and social workers into the school.
An educational
priority
The one thing teachers
increasingly agree on—and they, after all, are the people who work day after day
in the classroom—is that the answer is not to punish or expel pupils or to send them
to the head teacher’s office. Civil behaviour and sociability are not values that
can be instilled overnight. They are the fruit of a daily effort by everyone—the
authorities, the educational community, the parents and of course the most important
people, the children. The rounded academic and social education of future generations
depends on recognizing this.”
Antonio García Correa (1998) Una aula pacífica para una cultura
de paz (“A peaceful classroom for a culture of peace”). Electrónica Interuniversitaria
de Formación del Profesorado, 1 (1). Available at www.uva.es/aufop/publica/revelfop/v1n1agc.htm
The control of discipline in schools is the main theme of Prospects,
the quarterly review of comparative education (vol. XXVIII, no. 4, December 1998)
published by UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education.
SAVE Programme: University of Seville, faculty of psychology, department of
educational and developmental psychology, San Francisco Javier, s/n 41005 Sevilla,
Spain. Email: ortega@cica.es