Bad Ideas for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis
April 22, 2007Unlike most areas of policy, everyone has an opinion on education, apparently hardwired into their heads from their own school days. This means that a lot of the debate that gets started on various forums about entries in this blog looks a lot like this:
Oldandrew has described how bad discipline is in schools. He is wrong to think that the answer to this is to improve discipline. Bad behaviour in schools is actually a result of …..
.
Because people have such entrenched views about education they see everything written about the state of the schools as merely confirming what they thought all along, no matter how obscure the connection to school discipline, allowing the writer to suggest a panacea to behaviour problems that just so happens to be what they wanted to happen all along anyway. This writer on the TES website is even able to blame behaviour on …spelling!
The following are the main suggestions that are presented as a way of dealing with behaviour despite having little or nothing to do with the issue:
- Make Lessons More Fun
- Bring Back Selection
- End Compulsory Education
- Have More Vocational Subjects
- End Parental Choice
In the next few days I intend to look at each in turn and discuss whether they would actually improve behaviour.
Scenes From The Battleground 
Not only do people often have entrenched views, but they discuss them almost wholly divorced from data. Everyone’s got an opinion and because those opinions can’t be quantified, everyone thinks they’re as right as the next guy.
Lots of opinions, mostly uninformed + no evidence = a mess.
Perhaps one problem with your approach is that schools should be about learning, not behaviour, and teachers would rather teach students than discipline them.
Of course, you can’t teach without good behaviour. But nor could you teach if ‘managing behaviour’ took up too much time.
Some sort of impasse must exist / be imagined as rather than do anything, we (the educational establishment) lower our standards for students’ behaviour constantly.
Myself, I think that discipline can only be tackled once a largy majority of students in a school agree that school is important. No amount of discipline could inspire this belief out of nowhere, and until this belief becomes common there is no reason for the students of that school to care about discipline at all.
Re Matthew K. Tabor
That is exactly how the National Curriclum came about
No amount of discipline could inspire this belief out of nowhere, and until this belief becomes common there is no reason for the students of that school to care about discipline at all.
“… until this belief becomes common…”
How will that happen? Your use of the intransitive verb suggests an act of nature or God perhaps. I have no personal experience of this kind of situation. Perhaps you are referring to strategies such as used by Marie Stubbs?