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Educating for a more law abiding society
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The decline of civil religion and the rise of antinomianism
Religion and morality
Moral and values education
The cultural curriculum of school
Values clarification and moral dilemmas
The role of the teacher
Conduct and discipline
Dr. Geoffrey Partington
The traditional Australian school
Encouragement of good conduct and reduction of crime were just as important in the development of education in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century as were fostering numeracy and literacy. In a typical affirmation of the moral and redemptive force of education, the Chief Justice of Victoria, William a'Beckett, declared in 1852, when considering the question 'What effect would the improved education of the people in this Colony have upon crime?' 'The answer is this an answer given by the statistics of every country where the enquiry has been made - that in proportion as education is diffused, crime decreases'.
Although the place of religious teaching in the schools was a very divisive question in the colonies, and continued long to be so long after they became states of the Commonwealth of Australia, in essentials the positive moral teaching of the public schools had a great deal in common with that of Catholic, Anglican and other non-government schools.. The moral teaching of the public schools, despite their exclusion of religious doctrine during ordinary school hours, was firmly rooted in traditional Christian values. This type of 'civil religion', as the American Robert Bellah termed a similar development in late nineteenth century United States, exerted a significant integrating influence. Government schools then engaged in moral exhortation, emphasised the value of national symbols, such as the flag, and initiated students into duties of citizenship, and respect for public law and the values of the local community. Schools based on civil religion of this character were rejected as insufficient for Christian formation by the Roman Catholic Church, but they gave their students clear moral guidance not very dissimilar in content from that offered in Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran schools. .
During nearly every decade from the 1860s to the 1960s crime rates among Australian juveniles fell and most Australians were proud of this and comparable achievements. Catherine Helen Spence, South Australia's leading woman thinker and author of a textbook for schools entitled The Laws Under Which We Live, declared towards the end of a long life and near the end of the century, 'I have lived through a glorious age of progress. Born in "the wonderful century", I have watched the growth of the movement for the uplifting of the masses'. The engagement of large numbers of men in two World Wars did not lead to steep rises in crime, despite the dislocation of families and the violence to which soldiers must become inured, and there was no breakdown of domestic life and civic law and order during the worst times of the Depression of the 1930s . Those who tried to make the traditional public school an effective vehicle of 'civil religion' did not work in vain.
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The decline of civil religion and the rise of antinomianism
Critique of the 'civil religion' of the schools was first advanced by radical intellectuals outside the schools. One pioneer was the American sociologist Willard Waller who in 1932 castigated the traditional government schools as 'museums of virtue', which tried hypocritically to instil into children standards of conduct rarely observed in the outside world. However, in Australia until the 1960s mainstream forces in the labour movement continued to support traditional moral values in education as strongly as did parties, organisations and movements right of the political centre. It was in that decade that attacks on the residue of 'Victorian values' in the schools were made with ever increasing effect.
The new counter-cultural or antinomian forces were radically opposed to any concept of absolute moral norms or values and to restrictions on individual desires, provided that they are authentic and sincerely held. Their doctrines began to gain ascendancy in two spheres which exert powerful influences on young people: the worlds of entertainment and education. New forms of 'Youth Culture', associated with pop music, the pill, and the right of adolescents to 'do their own thing', undermined educators' confidence in the value of the virtues they had once preached. Indeed, many teachers became advocates of a new permissiveness in which once forbidden fruits could be tasted or swallowed whole, The increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam war helped to weaken the patriotic elements in the civil religion. The rise of Black Power movements and feminism led many Australians to reject much in their cultural and constitutional heritage as instruments of exploitation, which helped whites to oppress blacks, men women, and bosses workers.
In the United States the civil religion had especially flourished during the periods of mass immigration around the turn of the century when its schools were seen as melting-pots in which all were to become Americans: ex pluribus unum. However, the post-1950 population changes in Australia weakened the civil religion here. Even though many non-British immigrants soon came to value the legal and political traditions of the country of their adoption, increasing ethnic pluralism became a powerful argument among counter-cultural intellectuals for rejecting much in the British-Australian culture which had developed since 1788, including the civil religion of the schools. Although the majority within many ethnic groups more or less new to Australia were strongly traditionalist in their attachment to religious and family values, their presence was used by radical intellectuals to support their own challenge to traditional Australian ideas and institutions. As Allan Bloom noted in The Closing of the American Mind, even politically apathetic American university students and teachers from the mainstream ethnicity came to accept a form off multiculturalism which considers it ethnocentric to give any special place to mainline national traditions and values, but holds it only fair that each minority group should have full access to its traditions and values. The same was true of Australia. In any case the tendency of modern market society towards atomised individualism, which easily degenerates into antinomian permissiveness, operated independently of ethnic pluralism, as the Scandinavian states showed.
In Australia few traditional values thrive and none stands unchallenged. Our national past is often derided in the media as sexist, racist and generally repugnant, while soft-core pornography and mindless violence become ever more pervasive. When those with jaded tastes seek more elaborated forms of sexual perversion and cruelty, civil libertarians demand evidence of a kind difficult to establish before any restriction is considered. Attempts to restrict representations of vice, depravity or crime are castigated as unjustified intrusions into freedom of expression and individual rights, except in the case of smoking. Our children and young people are constantly exposed to cleverly-produced titillations of their most violent and destructive instincts.
By the late 1970s Australian social welfare agencies and criminologists had followed those of the United States and Britain in seeing vice and crime, in so far as such pejorative words could still be used allowed, as effects of external social forces or as forms of illness. Not only drug-addicts but drug-free criminals as well were absolved of individual responsibility and classed instead as part of a social problem which affected them largely by accident of their sex, age or race. This combination of pop-entertainment (and advertising), stimulating every desire and urging instant gratification, and a philosophy of structural determinism and individual helplessness, proved to be a destructive brew. One phrase of the most famous of all Christian prayers has been turned upside down: we lead our children and ourselves into more temptations than earlier generations dreamed of, but the hope of delivery from evil is derided by powerful agencies which proclaim that good and evil are merely social constructs of an arbitrary and ephemeral character.
The fragmentation of inter-generational activities, especially among non-religious families, and the reduced participation of mothers in community activities, including those related to schools, as more women have entered the full-time work-force, sorely depleted the social capital available for children in 'normal ', let alone disrupted, families. Even though their operation in no way eliminates free will from moral decisions, there is of course no doubt that external social and family structures and systems of belief powerfully influence the conduct as well as the academic achievement of children. James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer in their study of public and private schools in America found that students attending schools based on closely-knit communities with a common set of religious beliefs and moral values were on average higher achievers in school, and less likely to be drop-outs or in trouble with the law, than other students whose families were similar in terms of income or occupation. This went for single-parent families and other families with difficulties, as well as 'normal' families. The distinction drawn by Coleman and Hoffer was not simply that between government and non-government schools: in some communities, usually rural ones, strong shared values fortified the local state schools; in some wealthy independent schools there were few shared parental values to cement the moral order of the school. One of the ironies of the last three decades is that many organisations established to counter poverty and succour the poor and helpless took the lead in advocating social policies which were bound to increase the number of the poor and to render them ever more dependent. Policies weakening marriage and encouraging single-parent families were the principal agency in the creation of a new underclass.
Thus, there would be no justification for claiming that the schools are primarily responsible for our gravest moral problems. Nor should it be suggested that it is easy for schools to make a significant contribution to solving them. Yet schools, as well as being influenced by external social forces, also exert their own independent influence. Unfortunately, most schools and educators have responded inadequately to moral problems which to be sure had their origins elsewhere, and many have actually strengthened the most corrosive external forces. For example, we know that stable traditional heterosexual monogamatic families correlate very highly with law-abidingness among children, as well as with good health, academic success and many other desirable ends. In that light schools ought surely to do all they can to foster the vigour and resilience of such family structures, rather than represent all ways in which persons may cohabit as of equal value. Yet radical educators, even those who not only agree that children from single parent families and broken homes are disadvantaged but demand positive discrimination in their favour, claim it is unfair that such children should be told stories in school about happy and stable families, let alone for two-parent heterosexual marriage to be commended and given normative status. There is similar confusion in our schools about most important moral questions.
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Religion and morality
It has often been argued that the civil religion of the schools was in essence a secularised version of traditional Christian ethics, and was thus bound to decay in a post-Christian era. Some people conclude from this that the only way forward to a more moral and law-abiding society is through a religious revival. Most who think along these lines in Australia naturally think in terms of morality being underpinning by Christianity, although we now have some quarter of a million Muslim fellow-citizens, whose numbers, given current migration policies and comparative fertility rates, will rapidly increase both relatively and absolutely.
It is true that the civil religion owed its original force largely to traditional Christian values, that in general personal and public morality is stronger if the population fears Divine Judgement as well as human law, and that law-abidingness and strong religious belief enjoy a highly positive relationship in our own society. There are important considerations on the other side, however. Several of the most insightful moral thinkers have been non-believers, whereas many contemporary religious leaders advocate doctrines of personal irresponsibility for actions and are part of the problem, not the answer. Furthermore, many of the best Christian moralists have maintained that God commands the good because it is good, rather than that the good is good because God commands it, and thus accepted that moral questions are independent of religious ones. A consideration of immediate practical importance is that at present the low numbers of our young people understand the fundamentals of the Christian faith. If religious belief were an indispensable condition of moral regeneration, it would seem vain to try to improve moral education or strengthen law-abidingness, unless a new wave of mass conversion takes place.
This is not to deny that religious faith is often a powerful agency of rightful conduct, but to urge that any effective opposition to antinomianism requires a basis broader than religious faith)s). All schools, including Catholic Anglican, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist and other schools associated with religious faith which may consider themselves exemplary in their fostering of moral standards, but especially government schools, should ponder deeply how they can strengthen in their students an attachment to virtues such as truth-telling, fidelity to promises, honesty, self-control (including sexual restraint), industriousness, perseverance and the like, as well as commitment to defend our political and legal order. One source of encouragement is that, despite powerful antinomian incursions, most people still accept the rightness in principle of traditional moral goods and virtues. As Ronnie Barker often noted in his role as Fletcher in Porridge, thieves have a keen sense of the sanctity of their own property and criminals who habitually disregard the rights of others are highly sensitive to possible infringements of their own moral and legal rights. In many adolescent male cultures there is some prestige in successful seduction, but at the same time deep resentment against other men who successfully seduce their own sisters or female relations. We should also take heart from the way in which many radical ideologues, despite having first rejected the validity of universal moral principles, seek to persuade school students to embrace campaigns in favour of racial or sexual equality, peace or the environment, which only gain meaning in so far as they relate to universal moral principles.
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Moral and values education
Lack of consensus on many moral questions in our highly pluralist society leads some to argue that schools should limit themselves as far as possible to instruction in skills and specific knowledge, but others to hold that schools should expand their role to make good the deficiencies of irresponsible or misguided parents. Radicals and conservatives often play 'Ins ' and 'Outs ' on this question, supporting an expanded role for schools when they are in power, but a restricted one when they are on the outer, but even the most restricted view of education surely involves many important moral questions, on which to say nothing is to say something important. Silence can be eloquent and inaction a form of action.
Our government school systems should explicitly commit themselves to an interlinked set of moral imperatives. This integrative function should be carried out at school level as well as in classrooms and specific activities. Our schools lack rites and a sense of occasion: many young people probably experience more ceremony at the start of a football match than at any time in school. There is no easy solution, but we should consider restoring the saluting of the flag, and use school assemblies more imaginatively for the celebration of the best achievements of Australians, at work as well as in sport and the arts.
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The cultural curriculum of schools
Viewed aright, study itself is an arena for moral development, especially in terms of grappling with weakness of the will, and fostering the capacity to defer immediate pleasures for more lasting goods. Laborare est orare, and the encouragement of perseverance and consciousness in students is a prudential and moral as well as an academic good. To acquire a sense of duty about one's school work and to transfer this to one's trade or profession is one of the best paths for avoiding crime, as well as an intrinsic good. One strange aspect of modern educational radicalism is that it claims to be supportive of the working class and all underprivileged groups but is contemptuous of ordinary jobs. A large number of the most essential jobs are stereotyped as 'dead ends'; girls who take up 'traditional women's jobs' are dismissed as victims of false consciousness. To inculcate contempt for so many of the world's essential tasks is to sow seeds of alienation and resentment of civil society.
Sports and other disciplined activities also provide highly propitious conditions for moral development, if they are conducted in the right way. Every force for good can be perverted and many of us feel deep sorrow at the abuse of competitive games and of the spirit of emulation. We should rectify abuses, however, not make proper uses impossible.
Some branches of the school curriculum have particular potentiality for moral development. The capacity of science to arouse moral sentiments has been amply demonstrated in recent years by the involvement of children in various 'Green' causes. Many of the greatest children's literary classics continue to live because they appeal powerfully to children's sense of pity and justice. Among the great values of the study of history is to meet with men and women, among the rank-and-file as well as the great, who, without our engaging in hagiography or the worship of power, can be seen as exemplars of virtues. It is wrong to see the value of history and literature only or even primarily in terms of their capacity to sustain moral values, but even more mistaken to fail to realise that capacity. At present unfortunately much teaching of history, social sciences and related subjects undermines rather the strengthen the values schools should foster. Although the idea is often taken to unjustifiable lengths, there is some sense in the view that we should wish our children to have high self-esteem, provided that it is warranted and not vainglorious. This is the case also with national esteem: it would be wrong to encourage a mindless chauvinism, but it is even worse to foist on Australian students an unduly negative view of their national traditions, including their systems of law and justice.
On 8 December 1941, John Curtin, one of Australia's greatest political leaders, responded to the entry of Japan into the Second World War with a radio broadcast, in which he told the nation:
We here, in this spacious land where, for more than 150 years, peace and security have prevailed, are now called upon to meet the external aggressor...We Australians have imperishable traditions. We shall maintain them. We shall vindicate them.
Many children at present in school in Australia find it hard to understand what Curtin had in mind when he spoke of Australia's 'imperishable traditions', because the Australian past is constantly and systematically denigrated. The new teaching follows the view of Manning Clark that 'the coming of the British was the occasion of three great evils: the violence against the original inhabitants of the country; the violence against the first European labour force in Australia, the convicts; and the violence done to the land itself'. Many secondary schools, non-government as well as government, now use textbooks such as A People's History of Australia, edited by Marxist-feminists Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee and published jointly by Penguin Australia and McPhee Gribble, which rejects 'myths of national progress and unity' and declares, 'Held up against the millennia of Aboriginal experience, the last 200 years seem but a brief, nasty interlude'. Far from praising Governor Phillip for bringing eleven small ships half way round the world with hardly any loss of life and successfully establishing the new colony in very unpromising conditions, the People's History tells students, 'Before the first week of the invasion had passed, Phillip and his fellow marauders had sacrificed the lives of a thousand trees'. After two hundred years of their illegal occupation of Australia, according to Barry Butcher and David Turnbull:
The descendants of the white settlers find themselves living in a depleted quarry surrounded by woodchipped forests, salinated rivers and pastures that are turning to desert.
Students who accept such a misleading picture of a depraved and illegitimate Australia are very unlikely to respect its laws or to submit themselves to any sacrifice or self-discipline on its behalf.
Curtin and the men and women who defended Australia during the perils of this century were not fanatical nationalists; they knew there were blotches on their national record, as on those of all peoples. Yet they believed and rightly so that the generations since 1788 had achieved much of which they should feel proud and defend with might and main. They valued their political and religious liberties: representative government, unrestricted political parties, votes for women, a free press, freedom of worship, the right of assembly, and the rest. They valued their cultural heritage, centred in the language of Shakespeare and Milton. They appreciated that, despite some material hardships, they lived in a country which scores of people wanted to enter for every one who wanted to get out, since few other lands enjoyed institutions as good as theirs. They acknowledged they had failed to integrate Aborigines successfully, but knew that in every generation since Governor Phillip many white Australians had tried hard and sincerely to find a just solution. They also valued the legal freedoms they possessed: freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury and equality before the law. They thought that mateship and 'a fair go' were basic Australian principles. These sentiments did not make them all law-abiding, and no society will ever be created which will lack violations of its laws and rules, but generally they respected the laws
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Values clarification and moral dilemmas
Separate courses in moral education are rare in schools, because of fears of indoctrination, the complexity of many moral questions, and a belief that the skills and understandings such courses are likely to foster may better be achieved in the study of established subjects, but topics based on Values Clarification or Kohlberg's 'moral dilemmas' strategy, have expanded within social studies, religious studies, humanities, health education, communication skills and similar courses. It must be conceded that children, indeed all of us, should regularly clarify our values, so as better to understand what we mean by them, how they relate to each other, and how we might apply them. What cannot be conceded is that all opinions, likes and dislikes, feelings and thoughts, constitute values which should be accepted in a non-judgemental way as worthwhile or as good as all others. It leads not to moral sensitivity but moral depravity to fail to exclude some desires and actions as fundamentally evil. Unfortunately Values Clarification in the classroom usually falls down a huge antinomian, value-free and valueless hole which is the negation of moral education and a barrier to it. Yet we sometimes find the self-proclaimed value-free and non-judgemental very value-laden and highly judgemental indeed. At first sight Values Clarification and other permissive pedagogies seem to have abandoned prescription or proscription, explicit or implicit, but a two-stage operation is at work. After moral relativism has succeeded in rooting out traditional values during the first stage, we then perceive a second stage in which attempts are made to establish new norms of a very non-traditional character.
Kohlberg's 'moral dilemmas' system gains its appeal from two truths: that there is an important cognitive element in moral thinking, and that in real life two or more moral values often come into conflict. His approach is to pose such dilemmas and to develop students' moral awareness by discussing what they would do should such clashes occur. Students are constantly assured that there is no 'right' answer to the dilemma and to be sure it would hardly be a dilemma if the right thing to do was as plain as a pikestaff. Yet, although it is often very difficult to know what the right moral decision might be, there are usually several possibilities which ought to be ruled out as morally entirely inadmissible. Kohlberg's method also falls down because it expects children to run in moral terms before they can walk. There can be no serious sense of a moral dilemma in children's minds before an attachment to prima facie moral values has first been implanted in them. What all too often happens is that children conclude that if one moral value has to be discounted, it may not matter very much if they ignore all of them. The systematic presentation of hard cases may lead to moral cynicism or nihilism. Consider Kohlberg's 'Heinz's Dilemma':
A woman is near death from an unusual type of cancer. A special drug might save her, but its inventor, a pharmacist, is charging $2,000 for a small dose. The woman's husband Heinz does not have $2,000 even for one dose and cannel borrow it. The pharmacist would not reduce this price. Heinz decided to break into the pharmacy to steal the drug? Should he have done so?
Most students decide it would be right to steal the drug. They are then asked about the situation if the drug is so well guarded it cannot be stolen: would Heinz be justified then in stealing from a bank, a house, even your house? What if the pharmacist is charging a fair price, but Heinz still has not got the money?
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The role of the teacher
Precept and exhortation are important in moral education, but attempts to instil moral virtues may be vain without the right teachers. We cannot expect teachers, any more than parents, to be moral paragons, but we can expect a sincere effort to practice what is preached and some consistency in bestowing praise and blame. This latter can be very difficult to achieve. Teachers' responses to classroom conduct clearly ought not to be influenced by how they happen to be feeling at any given moment, but a larger problem is whether equal praise, or blame, should be given to different children who commit the same action, or whether the backgrounds and earlier actions of each child should be taken into account. In general teachers consider it right to take background factors into account, but children consider it extremely unjust. Teachers often give special praise to usually badly-behaved children if and when they behave better, but this may create resentment among the normally well-behaved, even if they know the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Problems such as those posed by attention-seeking children are also very troublesome, since the choice seems often to be between two nicely balanced evils, but others are more simple. For example, teachers should be condemned if they turn a blind eye to major offences committed by hefty and aggressive teenagers, but come down strongly on the minor misdemeanours of less threatening classmates.
The standards set by teachers, both individually and collectively as a staff, have an important influence on law-abidingness inside the school, and outside as well, as statistical evidence indicates, such as that gathered by Professor Michael Rutter and his colleagues in their Fifteen Thousand Hours research in London secondary schools in the late 1970s. Bad examples often seem to have a more immediate and obvious influence than good ones: nothing is more calculated to weaken the moral fibre of children than to be told to work hard by lazy teachers, to be considerate by thoughtless teachers, or to be tidy by careless teachers. Yet the impact of thoughtful and conscientious teachers, especially perhaps on children whose home circumstances have not given them high expectations of adult conduct, is often very powerful in shaping young lives for the good.
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Conduct and discipline
The ultimate aim of moral education is to help the young to exercise autonomous judgement in morally appropriate ways, so that they make good moral decisions for ethically good reasons and have the requisite will to carry them through. Whenever praise or blame, or reward or punishment, are given for children's actions, reasons appropriate to their age and understanding should be provided, so that our responses are gradually seen not as merely arbitrary requirements made by more powerful persons, but as based on rules and principles which are properly relevant to all persons. Yet moral autonomy can only develop in the child after a lengthy period of habituation into good conduct backed by relevant moral explanation. In the words of Richard Peters, we can only enter the palace of reason through the courtyard of habit.
Furthermore, even if homes and schools act on the highest moral principles and if parents and teachers are the best possible moral agents, good conduct and law-abidingness cannot be successfully imparted without a structure of sanctions. Indispensable as reason and understanding are in moral formation, they are insufficient of themselves. The young child in what Jean Piaget termed the pre-conventional stage of moral developmental can only envisage right and wrong in terms of actions which secure praise and rewards or avoid rebuke and pain. Indeed children would be morally handicapped from the start if desirable forms of conduct were not encouraged by a system of rewards and punishments clear and coherent enough to be understood by them. For that matter both carrots and sticks remain valuable extrinsic supports to good conduct throughout our lives, since we are not saints. Mass looting after earthquakes or breakdowns in the civil order, or the 1929 Hartshorne and May experiments which showed that many boy scouts who paid apparently sincere lip-service to honesty stole when they thought they could do so unseen and with impunity, should not make us despair of the human condition, but remind us it is bad to be led into temptation.
Sanctions and punishments, provided they are appropriate and moderate, are not a barbaric relic of an ignorant past, but a vital element in moral education. We can only properly seek forgiveness for an offence if we accept we have done something wrong for which there is a fitting retribution. Only then can compassion be given full rein by the direct sufferers from the offence and atonement recognised by the community whose values and integrity have been violated. The belief that the erring child should be filled with shame or remorse as a step towards forgiveness and full reconciliation was a valuable part of the former 'civil religion' as well as of Christian ethics. Unfortunately this idea is anathema to current educational orthodoxy which, far from fostering the contrite heart, seems often to promote pertness and moral arrogance in children whose self-esteem is excessive, who know their wants and rights and want them now.
Broadly speaking in contemporary Australian education, the higher the level of decision-making, the worse the policy. Often this consists in holding that nobody is to blame for anything and punishment not only an evil but an unnecessary one. Robert Bluer, General Secretary of the Australian Teachers' Federation, claims typically
while teachers have an inescapable responsibility to their students and the wider community, they cannot be 'blamed' for student disruption in the current circumstances. In like manner, 'blaming' students is counter-productive and a recipe for continuing disruption.
On this view there are really no 'problem-students', but rather a problem society.
Yet, although many teachers pay lip-service to the latest fashionable theory, others, sometimes whole schools, try hard to retain some traditional beliefs and practices, even openly. Roger Slee, of Ballarat College of Advanced Education, editor of a collection of articles on 'Discipline and Schools' cites a school principal who wrote in a letter to parents on 'Disruptive Students':
The school is fully aware of the extent to which one or two disruptive students may interfere with the work of teachers and students. I therefore invite parents to contact the school if they feel that certain students are being so disruptive as to interfere with the education of their own children. Such complaints can be very useful in dealing with the situation and will be handled so that names and addresses are not disclosed.
Slee was shocked to the core by this 'vigilante-style' approach. I do not know whether the principal was dismissed for trying to protect the majority of students from an unacceptable invasion of their educational rights. Perhaps he pleaded victim-status himself and simply received a spell of 'time-out' during which he could contemplate his errors. I would like to see such a principal Minister of Education in Victoria. Like many other good teachers he clearly understood that their own level of stress and strain, as well as that of students, has risen step-by-step with the introduction of each new approach to 'behaviour management'.
At present a best-selling guide to 'classroom management' is Maurice Balson's Understanding Classroom Behaviour, which argues that 'all difficulties encountered in classrooms, homes, offices, and elsewhere are mistakes in human relationships'. Saddam Hussein and Jack the Ripper simply made a few more mistakes in human relationships than most. As for children, Balson claims 'in almost all cases it is the behaviour of other children which is the source of the particular child's problems...the so-called "poor student" or "problem student" is that way because of the behaviour of other children" '. Indeed peers are a particular source of discouragement because 'children are encouraged to excel', or used to be. Balson adds that ‘parents are the initial source of a child's discouragement', which is true, since they are the initial source for all of a child's experiences, discouraging as well as encouraging.
As with all claims that the human race is at heart entirely good but corrupted by society, one wonders how evil first arose. Balson has no doubts about human perfectability or about the irrelevance at best of punishment: 'a student who badly beats a smaller child will be punished and told what a horrible person he is...a child who steals money from lockers will be punished and reminded of his moral violation...All these punishments are ineffective'. All this is absurd enough, but 'soft' progressives such as Balson have recently come under attack from 'hard' radicals such as Roger Slee, who attacks them for trying to use "'time out", counselling programmes, behaviour modification, reality therapy, token economies or group dynamics', all of which are manifestations of social control, a dread wickedness, except in states in which the revolution has succeeded and 'social justice' is enthroned, such as Cuba and China.
The recent history of debate in Australia about punishment has some interest. The 1972 Dettman Report, Discipline in Secondary Schools in Western Australia, was widely praised by progressives for its opposition to corporal punishment in schools. The Dettman Committee asked boys what they thought about corporal punishment. No girls were asked: as is so often the case they were discriminated against by not being liable to corporal punishment Many boys said that they did not much mind corporal punishment, some indeed expressing a strong preference for it over detentions and other forms of punishment; the Dettman Committee held these replies showed corporal punishment was ineffective and should therefore be abolished. Other boys said they strongly disliked it, some expressing very strong antagonism to being hit; the Dettman Committee held these replies showed that corporal punishment was repugnant to boys and should therefore be abolished.
The rapid tide of advanced thought has since left the Dettman Committee far behind and instead of being praised for rejecting corporal punishment, it is attacked for recommending suspension in its place. Just as corporal punishment was castigated as judicial brutalization, so detention is judicial incarceration. In addition suspension, like other forms of punishment, entails 'labelling' students and is inflicted on some groups more than others, thus undermining equity. Radical criminologists know, of course, that no group really contains a higher proportion than any other of deviants or criminals, except males, whose larger representation among offenders is seen as an objective indication of their greater propensity than girls for violence and crime.
One striking aspect of discipline problems in schools is paucity of accurate information. For example, the Education Department of South Australia claimed recently
a significant number of schools had not used corporal punishment this decade. These schools had not experienced an increase in disruptive behaviour: in fact many believed disruptive behaviour had decreased (my italics).
Belief and surmise is all that is open to the public, since it is easier to get details about the Australian presence in the Persian Gulf than about the incidence of misbehaviour, truancy and discipline-related teacher stress and strain in this country. The S.A. Education Department claims it phased out corporal punishment 'because it was incompatible with a commitment to child protection and the reduction of domestic and social violence', but no evidence was provided that families or schools which administer mild physical correction to their children protect and care for them less adequately than others. Another claim was that 'students are more likely to produce responsible behaviour when school adults and home adults agree on consistent expectations and consequences'. This is true, yet the S.A. Department of Education does not seek agreement with the large numbers of families who use mild corporal punishment when their children badly misbehave, but instead condemns them out-of-hand as perpetrators of social and domestic violence. It will not permit a school to use mild corporal punishment even if every parent and teacher there wishes it.
The S .A. Department of Education claims that 'participatory decision-making processes are the key to effective management of student behaviour', but there is no evidence which links student decision-making significantly with law-abidingness. The S.A. Education Department even asserts 'a teacher's responsibility is not to control students, but to create and coordinate the environment so that students develop age appropriate control of their own behaviour'. Outside Cloud Cuckoo Land teachers are expected to control their students and are provided with the means and backing to do so. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, with its very minimal expectations of 'age-appropriate behaviour', what happens if some students fail to develop adequate controls? Many Australian states use versions of the American Glasser system. This is the South Australian version.
a. Sit out 1
The misbehaving students are removed from normal classroom activity to a separate space which is 'pleasant and secluded, but still under teacher supervision', ideally in the classroom where the initial misbehaviour took place.
b. Sit out 2
The misbehaving students are removed to a pre-arranged place where 'the process is monitored by Senior Staff'.
c. Take home
Families of misbehaving students are required to collect them and take them home, but if this is inconvenient to the family, staff members will take them home.
d. Conference re-entry process and intensive personal supervision programme with cross roads counselling
After re-entry students may need 'a behaviour tutor on a one-to-one basis...the...tutor may be a teacher, a Student Services person, a retired person, or a final-year teaching student'. The Cross Roads Counsellor is to ensure that 'the student contracts to record and visit appropriate people/ places and/or to record and undertake employment, skills development or intensive therapy'. (Comment: These appropriate persons are expected to succeed where the original teacher and 'senior staff' failed)
e. Alternative placement review
If the misbehaving students still 'refuse to commit themselves to producing responsible behaviour, then the school recommends them to the Alternative Placement Review. (Comment: In country areas alternative placements may be hard to find; in the towns other schools may be reluctant to accept students who have withstood the expertise of so many helping-persons).
f. Supervised correspondence school
If no alternative placement is possible, then the misbehaving students will be enrolled with the Supervised Correspondence School. This 'would mean several home visits per week by Student Services personnel'. (Comment: Since many teachers transferred to Correspondence Schools because they could not maintain control in the average classroom, it seems unlikely they will be more successful with recalcitrant students in their own homes than senior staff were when confronting them in school.).
South Australian teachers are admonished not to step along this punishment road lightly. 'Minor irresponsibility', such as 'smoking, littering, graffiti, out-of-bounds, punctuality [probably unpunctuality was intended], truancy, equipment and uniform infringements' should not be taken beyond SIT-OUT. The students will not get away with it, of course. O dear, no! They will 'still experience consequences. They make up for late arrival, or they undo damage, in their own time ', unless doing so contravenes Departmental Regulations stating that 'the period of detention after school hours should not be of such duration that a student is prevented from returning to home by his normal train or bus', that 'no student should be detained for such a time that the parents would be justified in becoming anxious', and that 'due consideration is given to traffic and the timing of traffic warning systems'. This type of suspension system is likely to prove highly expensive, yet, as the Dettman Committee conceded in 1972, is 'relatively ineffective' as a deterrent to 'extremely disruptive behaviour’, partly because 'the students most likely to incur this punishment are the students who dislike it least'. Much effort has gone into devising unworkable and very expensive systems of behaviour management which succeed only in giving badly-behaved youngsters greater confidence to go on to wider challenges to law and order, once they find out how easy it is to disrupt schools without incurring what they consider unpleasant consequences.
A striking feature of contemporary education is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Politicians and administrators promise great things, but schools lack both the formal authority and the effective power to deliver the goods. Many teachers are afraid to bring cases of verbal abuse or even physical assault by students to the notice of their principals because they fear they will get no support and be blamed themselves for the situation. In one case in South Australia of a P.E. teacher bashed by students with baseball bats, the response of the Education Department was to urge the teacher not to press charges, but accept transfer to another school. That is Alternative Placement with a vengeance! The impotence of the schools gives ill-disposed adolescents even greater contempt for processes of law, whilst others lose confidence in the law's efficacy. There is no simple solution, but the last thing we should do at present is to weaken the totally inadequate sanctions available to schools. Yet that is what has been and continues to be done, not only with the support but at the instigation of teacher unions, the only industrial organizations which consistently use their influence to worsen the working lives of their members.
All my proposals are necessary if we are to combat moral confusion in our schools successfully, and to strengthen law-abidingness among our young people, but, even taken together, they may not be sufficient. Yet it is a task we must undertake, however falteringly. We should seek to restore the type of civil religion we once knew and which served Australia well, and to eradicate baneful antinomian influences. We should re-establish orderly classrooms over which the average teacher, backed by adequate sanctions, can exert reasonable control without undue stress and strain. We should foster, both by precept and example, the attachment of students to good moral principles and virtuous habits. We should seek to educate reflective students who make good moral decisions on good moral grounds, but understand that moral autonomy can only be built on a foundation of virtuous habits. We should bolster, not undermine, the confidence of students in the moral and political legitimacy of this fine country, which acts as a magnet to less fortunate peoples in every other continent. This task is by no means an easy one. Yet earlier generations of Australians faced greater odds in building a law-abiding society. We should try to prove ourselves their worthy heirs.
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References
M. Balson (1988). Understanding Classroom Behaviour. Hawthom, Victoria, Australian
Council for Educational Research.
R.N.Bellah(1975).The Broken Contract: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, .New York
Seabury Press.
H.W. Dettman (1972). Discipline in Secondary Schools in Western Australia. Report of the
Committee into Discipline in Secondary Schools in Western Australia. Perth, Education
Department of Western Australia.
W. Classer ( 1969). Schools Without Failure, New York, Harper and Row.
W. Glasser(1985).'Discipline has never been the problem and isn’t;t the problem now' in Theory Into Practice, 24 (4).
M. Rutter et al. (1979). Fifteen Thousand Hours. London, Open Books.
R. Slee (ed) ( 1988). Discipline and Schools, A Curriculum Perspective. South
Melbourne: Macmillan.
South Australian Department of Education. (1989a).Student Behaviour Draft Policy. Adelaide, Government Printer.
South Australian Department of Education . ( I 989b). Draft Guidelines for Practice in Student Behavlour Management. Adelaide, Government Printer.
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