Why fear must not rule schools

This week has seen horrific images of death and destruction from the Russian school.
The past few years have seen an epidemic of school shootings in the United States, including the horror at Columbine, in which two former pupils returned to their own school and shot many children before turning their guns on themselves.
The obsession now is with safety.

On top of these incidents, there has been considerable publicity given to school trips that have gone wrong, injuries that have been sustained during school sports and a related rash of parental law suits. The obsession now is “no risk”, so there can be “no blame”.
There had already been a move away from schools “adding” trips, visits and vacations to pupils' educational experience after the industrial action of the early 1990s, in which many teachers withdrew from taking sports teams away on Saturdays and from taking societies and clubs in the evenings.
But what is taking place now risks being a wholesale redefinition of what school is for, as security is stepped up around schools across the globe and as any activities that involve risk are shed.
The power of the media to make the atypical look typical, and to frighten people that the clearly atypical may be coming to a school near them, is of course part of the explanation for our fears.

Children in Russia still have a much greater chance of being killed in a road traffic accident than of being shot by terrorists, but this balance is absent in the reporting. In the UK, children actually stand a much greater chance of being murdered by their parents than of dying in an accident on a school trip.
The hugely increased numbers of lawyers and solicitors with incomes to earn is also part of the reason why schools are avoiding risks. We are increasingly a society that sues - dyslexics sue for the effects of their condition being missed at school, pupils sue if they have failed and parents sue if there is any chance of funding their debt-ridden lifestyles. This world of ambulance- chasing reaches, of course, its peak in the United States, where lawyers now fill about a tenth of the Chicago Yellow Pages.

So much for why risk is to be avoided. But what are the effects of the desire to play safe? Schools have, in virtually every society, been built to be open to the streets and communities around them to encourage the community to walk in. Security measures may hinder this. Schools trips, visits and holidays provide chances for developing more aspects of children's personalities than their normal school diet. They provide a chance for children to see their teachers for real, and for their teachers to see more of them than is visible between 9.30am and 3.30pm. Some would say that they provide the most memorable, most enriching and most treasured parts of the entire school experience. They are being reduced due to fears about risk. School sports, likewise, provide opportunities to develop aspects of young people other than their minds. They provide opportunities for competition, but also for collaboration, and opportunities for young people to develop an appreciation of risks, and of weighing the chances of risks resulting in injury, which cannot be taught. As the wire fences and security cameras go up around schools, and as the trips and visits cease, we need to ask whether we are over-reacting. Life is full of risk. Part of growing up is to learn to handle and manage risk. In any case, children's risks of hurt and injury have always been much less when they are in school time than when they are outside it. The media and their portrayals of the dangers to children obviously deeply affect all of us. But life is about thinking about things as well as emoting about them. Before we withdraw our children and schools behind ever more impenetrable boundaries, we need to think twice about the real level of risks they face. Should fears that are more imagined than real rule our schools?

David Reynolds is Professor of Education at the University of Exeter and is one of England's leading education policymakers.

September 9 2004
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