Banned wagon A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
THE NSPCC's Stalinist ideas on childcare, mentioned in this column before, are being adopted by those in positions of power. Edinburgh city council has banned teachers in its schools from shouting at pupils. Raising your voice, explains the city's education director, Roy Jobson, is 'inappropriate and unprofessional', even if the little tykes are flicking ink pellets at each other at the back of the room. 'If young people feel valued and they feel they're being treated with respect it can go a long way towards having their behaviour improve,' he says.
Few would question that it is a good idea for pupils to feel valued, but it doesn't follow that valuing pupils rules Out disciplining them. The NSPCC's campaign against smacking, Edinburgh's ban on shouting: they are not part of a process of enlightenment, but a game of power politics waged against figures of bourgeois authority by those who claim to speak on behalf of children.
While teachers are gradually being disarmed of every weapon of classroom discipline, and are increasingly facing the sack for single incidents of momentary loss of control, the standards of behaviour expected of children are slipping. Thanks to government pressure, it is becoming ever harder for schools to expel pupils, who must now be given chance after chance to improve their behaviour. Expulsions have fallen by 50 per cent since the mid-1990s.
The childcare Stalinists argue that children should be treated like adults — at least when they are campaigning against a specific form of punishment. Yet if schools were allowed to treat children like adults, schools would rapidly empty. The minute Buggins of the lower fourth landed a punch on another boy's nose, he would be marched off to a disciplinary tribunal and expelled. Not only that, he would very likely be banned from ever studying in a British school again.
Ross Clark
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