Teachers who Bully (3)

In contrast to, me my sister was a whiz at maths. Not sure why, but she seemed to "get" all the little bits that defeated my sense of logic ! Maybe she just picked up little subtleties that escaped me or maybe she just accepted the rules as presented and didn't question them, I don`t know.
There were several children from middle class homes who were in the top half dozen in all subjects in this class a few years below me. All through my sister`s primary education things went well, usually with her vying for top spot in the class against the odds determined by favouritism.
Then something very strange happened: the Headmaster marked her way down for maths in her last report. When she arrived in secondary school she was in a C.S.E. set. Not only was this deeply upsetting to her to be down-graded and split from her friends, it was also a serious injustice because her maths was always more than excellent. Of course, no one questioned or challenged teachers in those days so nothing was done. My sister had to go through Secondary School in this set and received a CSE in maths. Since she wanted to be an architect or a surveyor this caused massive problems later on.

This example is a classic in the annals of animal behaviour. My sister was deliberately disadvantaged by a man who clearly did not like us and who, as a bully, was able to hurt children in any way he wanted to off the bat of his paranoia. Of course other children were very badly disadvantaged by his displeasure at them too; me included ! The reason for exploring this though, is to demonstrate just how the jockeying of our animal drives plays out in a group environment like a Primary School.
Whether a child wins or loses in school has little to do with their intelligence. When I arrived in Secondary School, a refugee from teacher bullying, a child made to fail, I would obviously fail in an even tougher animal environment. There would be no one to pick up the pieces, no one to restore my pride, self-esteem or love of learning. I absolutely loved history, music, reading, nature studies, well everything, actually, at the start of my learning, and left Primary School stupid and utterly defeated. The greater tragedy is that this is the sob story for a huge percentage of young children.

But I promised to talk in this blog about why, in the face of my biggest scoff at class teaching and its population of non-specialist teachers, I am a supporter of Home Education. Surely, you might be thinking, the same problem would apply? Parents are non-specialists in many, if not most, of the subjects required in home learning.. so why should I accept this at home if I don`t accept it in schools?

I think the simple explanation is that in a classroom a teacher cannot attend to detail, even if they wanted to. "Rote" is the hammer of necessity. At home, even if a parent is not the most understanding of maths, he/she can search-out why a child does not understand and learn more himself to enable greater understanding. The learning together process is the enabler. Further, a parent does not want his child to fail. This seems obvious doesn`t it, so why state it? Well, as we have said in this blog, a class teacher has inbuilt animal motivations,usually not conscious, let`s be a bit kinder and say that they show "expressions of their own psychological makeup" which impacts in different ways upon the children they teach.(For example,the willingness of teachers to see children with so called A.D.H.D.as needing medication is a conformity to the larger animal pack`s need to label and "runtify"*,as I call it, children who are a problem to the healthy and successful larger social picture.Teachers accommodate and support doctors' needs to push these children onto medication because they instinctively want to support the medical profession. Please see my later blog, "Psychiatry in Medical Damage".) They disable and disadvantage some, teachers-pet-ify and feed success to others. If your child, in a classroom environment, is the child the class teacher does not like or maybe your child doesn`t "get it" in the way I didn`t, he/she may be seriously disabled by the teacher. Parents who home educate their children are wanting to make learning enjoyable and to furnish all its joys and success. In a class situation it is not possible to give this to every child, both because of the numbers of children involved and group dynamics.

Please join me again later.

Some of my readers may have had experiences like these and I hope you will tell me about them......If you have been educationally damaged, please always remember that the class system is a master of imposed failure! Just because you have been made to fail does not mean that you are unintelligent. It is very hard to escape being made to be stupid, I know. That kind of imprinting is hard to shift. Maybe some of you have reached a point where you know that you are intelligent after all, maybe some have not realised this yet, but I think that knowing how classrooms function and why will help us to support ourselves.

* Runtify: this is my pejorative term for "natural selection".

Classrooms: Survival of the Fittest.

Having just drafted my thoughts for this blog, I realise that it will probably spread-out into two blogs....or even three!!

Let`s kick off with a nice bold statement:

Classroom learning doesn`t work.

What? you might say. Surely this is nonsense, many kids achieve GCSEs and "A" levels in a class environment, so this statement must be false. Isn`t it?

I think firstly, we have to think about what a claim of success for this form of teaching actually is. Is success measured by percentage? Or should it be measured by success for all? And why doesn`t it work for everyone ?

To get a grasp of this we need to bring in our understanding of both the way children learn and the psychology of groups.

A classroom environment is in very basic terms an example of "survival of the fittest". It is not a "help everyone to learn equally so that everyone achieves the best of their potential", as we are supposed to believe. It can`t be that, it can`t even claim to be that, because different children learn in different ways and at different speeds. Some children have help at home, some are at different stages of development and some have issues of shyness, various inadequacies and some are bullied. So to claim from the getgo that a classroom education is about educating everyone equally, has to be false. I suppose, tiny little concession here, there might be not just a little naivety, maybe selective blindness too, in those who uphold classroom education, but the truth is that in a survival of the fittest test-tube like a classroom, some children will succeed, some fail, with a limping-on group somewhere in the middle.

The classroom is a place where the fittest, most adaptable, most fitinable children do well. It is also a place where the teacher`s personal issues bear on which children he/she likes, which he doesn`t like and how he, subconsciously, disadvantages certain kids beneath others.

We all know the phenomenon of "teacher's pet", but this is rarely seen for what it really is: an enactment of group/animal favouritism, pushing the child that we love or like best into a strong position of superiority over others. In fact, one could argue easily that the classroom is a place FOR the strongest kids and not a place for the ones who don`t make the grade in terms of our wider social group. The classroom functions as a place where the kids who will be a success in our world are formed.
The class, in terms of the children alone, creates popular kids and misfit ones, uplifts some to inclusivity and happiness and others to bullying, exclusion and misery. These are manifestations of our inbuilt animal selection, our animal impulse to make happy groups for ourselves and sustain ourselves by creating misfits and victims. But children aren`t consciously doing this are they? No, of course not, no more so than adults do, but they are doing it, that`s for sure. They are learning this behaviour from their parents and people around them and are practising it on their fellow little-people. It is a miniature of our adult world, where children are learning to be like the adult world around them.

Bullying is a product of this..and one would expect it to be. The classroom/school is the training ground for all our good and bad devices, where some children fall and some shine.
I think we can prove the underlying forces of group psychology here when we see the outcome of state school education. There is always ...and will always be... a fall-out statistic of children who fail in this group-survival boiling pot. I don`t say that just because of the nature of class teaching, the way it creates hierarchy and pushes down its inferiors, although this of course is the method whereby it is achieved , I say it because this is our biological nature at work, it is something that we struggle to shake-off, endeavour to rise above, but we don`t because it is our undercurrent.

See you in my next blog on this topic........

www.home-education.org.uk/family-rights.htm


daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/.../clause-26-and-schedule-1-are-on-way-out.html

Socially Acceptable Forms of Abuse, 4: Boarding Schools.

This blog discusses boarding schools and is continued from the previous blog:


Let`s look at the way children are typically treated and regarded in society as a default:



Children are treated from an early age, at least to some degree, as if they should be controlled and broken in, tamed into behaving suitably.This belief can even underpin the family life of loving, generally caring parents. Children are taken to nursery even if the child is caused to be desperately distressed, they are weened off breast milk prematurely because continuation is seen as giving in to their demands and being over indulgent. Generally, children are often subjected to lessons in life that are centred around some notion that kids need to be treated harshly in order to toughen them up (!!!!) and they need to be threatened and punished in order to make them behave.

This misregard for children is not only practised by the masses, it is reinforced by the system. Because most people are treated this way as they grow up, they instinctively treat the children around them in the same way. Many people don`t think that children will behave correctly if they are given too much respect, that they will not detach from parents and family in their own good time without being forced to do so, and that they wont learn unless they are compelled to do it. This notion is of course Victorian, and fits well with child labour and canings in school and a harsher, more severe lifestyle. So why do we still believe it?

The answer is that parents are typically brought up this way and simply don`t often question their behaviour. Other parents do the same, the same attitude exists in schools and there are just very few enlightened or introspective people who relate to children as equals. The result is that a conditioning exists that says it is okay to treat children in this way and the huge numbers of people who are conditioned determine that these attitudes are acceptable .

When we come to consider whether boarding schools for young children are a form of abuse, we are already up against a brain-washed mainstream that believes that raising children is all about disregarding their feelings and their rights and that forcing a child to detach is a "cruel to be kind" gesture of love. In so many ways the fact that families in home education are more likely to respect their children and attune themselves to the needs of the child, frightens people who know deep down that they pursue a "force the child to do it, and it`ll be good for the child in the end" method.

So we saw in a documentary recently how parents, and school staff involved in the rejection process young children have to go through, were desperately trying to find justifications for knowingly being cruel to their children. The child`s rejection would benefit the child in the end, so the whole thing is worth doing, approach. The very idea that non- disciplinary nurturing of a child can make a confident, independent child and that non-coercive learning also produces well educated, examination-replete, intellectually adept young people, without all the cruelty and the disrespect, seriously frightens people because it destroys their floundering justifications for treating their children the way they do.

In Part 3 of this blog I want to go on to cogitate the real cause of indiscipline in children and the benefits of not following the pack.

Socially Acceptable Forms of Abuse 3: Boarding Schools.

Boarding Schools:Part 1.


Having recently seen a television documentary about boarding schools, I wanted to examine whether sending young children away to school is in fact a socially acceptable form of abuse.
By young children, I am talking about children of eleven and under for these purposes.

We have seen previously that there are certain criteria that are employed to designate whether something constitutes abuse or not. These factors have to do with such things as how many people are engaged in the practice in question and certain social factors as well. In other words, a manner of behaviour towards children will be seen as unacceptable if a minority practice this behaviour and/or the people engaged in it have little social position.

The first reason for this is that, as we discussed, the law cannot encompass very large numbers of people and, in keeping with group dynamics, these large numbers find security within their particular group. The other reason is that those of lesser social position are consistently seen as "outside of the group" and therefore their behaviours are less legitimate and less defensible. The dominant class to a high degree, promote their behaviours as acceptable and, being directly or indirectly connected to people of social influence, the law making classes, they encourage laws that endorse their standards. This is the way a social animal group functions. It has a vested interest in creating laws that support its sense of right and wrong, according to its perspective.


Minority groups with ideas that do not conform to the mainstream have more difficulty in being able to be seen as acceptable due to their lesser social power. Example my previous blog about home education, where families are treated as virtual heretics for not complying with the manner of educating children accepted by the masses. So much so, that a humanistic educational philosophy that does not force a child to learn on command, is seen as aberrant by the masses who are desensitised to the way children are treated by the representative norm in schools. The difference between the two, in terms of the rights and wrongs of either method, is based upon sheer numbers, not upon the morality or efficacy of whichever method.

In general terms..and for reasons of group survival... the masses indulge in harsher educational practices, which are endorsed by the group leaders, with all sorts of justifications. We are presently seeing propaganda in the media, supported by television programs, to convince us that out of control children are the result of indiscipline, lack of parental authority and our hitherto liberal society. But is this really the reason for disruptive and anti-social behaviour in children or are we being duped again? I am beginning to think that out of control young people are just enacting the harsh treatment they have been exposed to.

This blog is continued directly.

Your Kids Belong to the State.

The present government is hell-bent upon inspecting families where children are being home educated. This crusade gathered momentum after the failings of social workers led to mistakes where children who were being abused at home died. None of these children were home educated in fact, but out of a drive to be seen to make sure the system protectes all children, the government decided to aim their cosmetic rightfulness at home educating families. Later, way down the line, they shifted their professed aims by claiming that they wanted to inspect children educated at home to make sure that they were receiving a proper education.

So what? you might say. Why should this be of any concern to me? Many people who send their kids to school, state or private, have said that they are all in favour of children who don`t go to school being properly assessed and monitored. Somehow it looks okay doesn`t it? You know, government protecting children, concerns about child welfare and suitable education. Whatever could be wrong with that?


But parents who educate their kids at home have opted out of mainstream education for good reason.They have concerns about educational methods in schools and the ever-present culture of bullying.They are concerned that schools absolutely fail a huge number of children, not least because children are demotivated by a "sit down and learn what you are told to learn" mentality. Having opted to imbue their childrens lives with a nurturing educational ethos based upon harnessing a child`s natural instinct to learn,the government then decides that it doesn`t trust them to do this: It wants to inspect them, invade the family, direct what should be taught, how and when and for how many hours. The government wants CONTROL and it wants it`s eyes all over the private life of a family..just because the parents are opting out of a standard education for their kids.

Why?

Human rights alarm-bells ring out a cry of suppression as we become aware of very basic group psychology playing out it`s desire to punish people who do not conform to the wider group: in this case there is a larger group unease at some parents rejecting the school system. The fact is that with children being withdrawn in ever greater numbers from schools, the state has to try to protect itself by shifting the onus of suspicion away from a failing educational system onto the educational heretics, "home edors". People in home ed. who simply want to educate their children in a non-coercive way, inadvertently end up reflecting guilt back at the "powers that be" as they try to avoid looking in their own mirrors.

To avoid guilt/responsibility the state ...as is common practice in guilt avoidance... tries to shift guilt onto home ed. It wants to control it because it needs to deflect it`s own guilt away from itself. In the most simplistic terms the phenomenon of guilt-shifting is no better played out than by sending the authorities to the door of innocent people: it makes them LOOK guilty of something. The game-play of any authority casting suspicion, publicly, upon a person or group, has the affect of cohering the masses against a common "enemy". It is precisely the same process as all forms of bullying, racism, etc.

The reason why this should concern everyone is because the state is pushing it`s way into all of our private lives, we are all under suspicion, civil liberties are under assault. Home educating families have become part of a slippery slope that will, if the government get their way, invade us all.

If you look you can see the signs everywhere: The state thinks it has the right to dictate what you do in your own home and it`s moral high ground is getting bigger all that time. We have seen how fat people cannot adopt, black children must be adopted only by black families, etc. Parents who eat the wrong fatty food have more recently become in danger of having their kids taken away. The most recent imposition has been that everyone must be CRB checked if they are involved in looking after children. The drive against home educating families and the self-righteous invasion of their human rights is all part of the wider picture of a moralising state that damages its ordinary citizens in the name of protecting children!!

So let`s have a look at those instances I mentioned above, measures supposedly to protect children and look after their best interests:

1/ Fat people cannot adopt because they might die all the sooner due to being overweight, not to mention that they would be a bad example to any children they adopt!!! So who suffers most as a result of this policy? Children. Children in children's homes or children shunted from one foster family to another and who are desperate to be adopted.

2/Black children must be adopted into black families because it is deemed "better for them" to be brought up by their own people, so to speak. Who suffers? Black children who spend endless years in children's homes because there is no black family to adopt them.

3/Parents who eat the wrong kind of food and feed their children the wrong kind of food are guilty of a form of child abuse and should have their children taken away. And who would suffer if children were to be removed from their parents? Children yet again. Children who would be traumatised by the powerlessness and incomprehensible cruelty of being pulled away from their parents.

4/ And the CRB checking of adults who help out with looking after kids? The kids will suffer... because people do not want to be impugned by a CRB check and children will miss out on activities if adults do not volunteer their time.

Now you can see the pattern.... So when we get to the issue of forcing a misguided and backfiring morality on home educating parents by wanting them inspected and forcing them to follow the government`s narrow and regime-based educational models, we can clearly see exactly who is going to suffer. Children. Children in families where they are loved and nurtured, where education is not a regime but a joy, who will be forced to accept that the state has the right to override their parents, invade their family, dictate how their parents should educate them ... and the frightening lesson that the home is violable by the Local Authority.

With the government`s proposed violation of the home, the precedent has been set that children belong to the state, not to parents.

We will come back to these, and related issues, in later blogs.