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Listen to thisChildren and youth have hit the headlines once again in Scotland. We had the case of a teacher, accused of hitting primary school children, thrown out of court on the basis that the children making allegations may have conspired in order to get a strict teacher removed from her post. This has prompted a flurry of media interest in kids and in what goes on in schools. One of the more respectable “Sunday papers” reported on a secondary school system out of control with tales of drug-taking and weapon-wielding teenagers running the show. Inevitably there was a sensationalist aspect to the report, but it nevertheless strikes a chord with hard-pressed teachers and others who work with kids.
While I have some sympathy with the teachers in these situations I become a bit uncomfortable with some of the conclusions that are drawn. In the first case we have kids portrayed as conspirators engaged in a deliberate and pre-conceived plot to oust a respected teacher. In the second case, I was disappointed by the reactions of some of the teachers interviewed, who felt that the social needs of the kids concerned were so extreme they needed to be referred on to social workers and psychologists and dealt with in special units of some sort.
For me, both responses miss the point. I don’t believe that, in a society where adult child relationships are healthy and mutually respectful, primary school kids deliberately conspire to have a teacher charged and removed from her post. Nor do I believe that many of the teenagers who rampage around secondary schools would benefit from being referred to social workers.
Such cases seem to me to be symptomatic of adult-child relationships gone wrong. We have lost perspective in this area. We can’t go on assuming that any physical contact between teacher and child in the classroom setting constitutes abuse or that if it happens on a number of unrelated occasions it provides corroboration of assault. There are a whole load of situations in a classroom or in a youth care facility where touch is entirely appropriate healthy and indeed inevitable.
Similarly in secondary schools, teachers need to feel empowered to lay down the ground rules and to exert appropriate authority in seeing these through, without worrying that they will trigger some latent trauma in a sulking teenager or be accused of some breach of a child's rights.
This is where I risk echoing some of the burnt-out former colleagues I have worked with over the years and swore I’d never sound like; “Kids today are more difficult than they were in my day.” I do wonder if the impact of drugs on some individuals and families may mean that some kids are more difficult. But by and large, I don’t believe it’s the kids that are different. What’s changed is that adults have become scared of them. And understandably so. When the police are brought in to investigate instances of physical contact within a classroom setting, an inevitable dissonance is introduced to adult-child relationships. It’s not just adults who feel unsafe in such situations. Kids do as well. When they’re given the impression that they’re untouchable, literally and metaphorically, they may well start to believe that they've been abused when a teacher stops them running in the corridor or swinging on a chair. And when they start getting asked questions about it by the police, the whole affair begins to take on a life of its own.
One of my worries is that a backlash will emerge against the political correctness of the child protection lobby. Rather than seeing kids caught up in such situations as confused by a whole lot of conflicting adult messages we start to see groups of evil conspirators out to get hard-working teachers. As they get older we will see more and more referrals to guidance teachers and social workers and ultimately, increasing numbers of kids propelled towards secure accommodation. And we’ll assuage our discomfort in seeing so many kids locked up by vilifying those staff who work in secure units for using inappropriate measures of control. All of this because we've abrogated our responsibility to care for kids, shifting our sense of how this should be done away from the relational and interactive arena where it rightly lies and locating it in sets of impersonal systems and principles.
A particularly distressing example of adult abrogation of responsibility to care for kids was provided in another major court case that concluded this past week. In a case that’s been running for about 18 months now, a 16-year-old youth was convicted of brutally murdering his girlfriend when both were only 14. One of the bizarre aspects of the case was to do with the boy’s relationship with his mother. Indeed the prosecuting counsel, portrayed this, not as a parent/child one, but one of murderer and accomplice. The case does seem to provide a chilling example of what can happen when we allow kids to become omnipotent.
But currently we don’t seem to make some of the connections between such cases. We prosecute teachers for maintaining control in their classrooms and bemoan the fact that classrooms are out of control. Duh!! as my daughter might say to such an example of adult illogicality.
“Get real!”. Getting real means that we need to start shifting the balance of power in the way that society deals with kids, giving some of it back to the adults who actually get their hands dirty in working with them. This calls for a renewed trust and belief that those adults may actually know what they’re talking about and care just as much for kids than do the “experts” that we’re so keen to call upon to pontificate when kids hit the headlines. Ahh! the nature of expertise. I feel next month’s column coming on already.
