Is obedience dangerous? Part 2

In part 1, I considered whether obedience endangered children. In this post, I will consider the down sides of disobedience.

I believe children are in more danger of being abused by each other than by their teachers. Teachers are subject to CRB checks and could be prosecuted and fired if they act inappropriately. Kids have far fewer constraints on abusive behaviour. This blogpost describes what is the daily reality for some girls in some schools:

…in the school I now teach at, sexual assault has almost become part of the furniture. The Head has talked about how much of a problem it is. He sent some staff on a training day about it. He’s kept boys back after assembly and given them a bollocking. He’s kept girls back after assembly and told them he’s given the boys a bollocking. It hasn’t really helped. It’s a culture. A culture takes a lot more than an assembly to change.

It’s as if this whole issue is a pesky mosquito buzzing round his head, that he limply swats at occasionally when it bothers him too much.

When SLT talk about how good a school we are, how we’re aiming for an Outstanding Ofsted next year, how great our progress stats are, I want to shake them and say “how can you apply positive adjectives to a school where girls are just resigned to being felt up now and again? Where pupils with police reprimands and warnings for assaulting girls walk the corridors alongside the victims? Where your own pupil voice survey says that the majority of pupils do not feel safe?”

If we want to protect kids from abuse, then the first priority has to be to protect them from each other. Teacher authority is a help, not a hindrance here. Reducing the authority of adults, does not protect children, it leaves them at the mercy of the mob. Arendt described this situation decades ago:

… there exist a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this government. The authority that tells the individual child what to do and what not to do rests with the child group itself–and this produces, among other consequences, a situation in which the adult stands helpless before the individual child and out of contact with him. He can only tell him to do what he likes and then prevent the worst from happening. The real and normal relations between children and adults, arising from the fact that people of all ages are always simultaneously together in the world, are thus broken off. And so it is of the essence of this first basic assumption that it takes into account only the group and not the individual child.

As for the child in the group, he is of course rather worse off than before. For the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. If one looks at it from the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind; rather he is in the position, hopeless by definition, of a minority of one confronted by the absolute majority of all the others. There are very few grown people who can endure such a situation, even when it is not supported by external means of compulsion; children are simply and utterly incapable of it.

Therefore by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority. In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is frequently a mixture of both.

From The Crisis Of Education, in “Between Past and Future” by Hannah Arendt

As well as the harm disobedient children can do to each other, how often do we give instructions in order to keep students safe? It is very easy to focus on adults who harm children and forget that adult authority protects children from themselves. It is easy to find examples where disobedience has harmed children. The following news stories that I found for a blogpost a few years ago all involve students being killed or maimed in circumstances where students disobeyed teachers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1456897.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/4413357.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/3004667.stm

So, it is not simply the case that obedience endangers kids, it also protects them, from each other and from their own reckless behaviour. Which risk is greater? The risk that children will be harmed by their teachers because of their obedience, or the risk that children will come to harm where their teachers cannot control them? I guess it comes down to your view of teachers. If you trust teachers to protect children, you assume teachers will use their authority to protect their students. If you think teachers don’t care about children, then you assume teachers will use their authority to harm their students.

I trust teachers. Don’t you?

 

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