KEY POINTS:
The article on chaos in our classrooms in the Review section of the Weekend Herald left me both despondent and faintly amused.
On the one hand, we had a couple of psychologists trying to tell us that increasing violence in the classroom is not the fault of the
children and blaming the teachers. On the other, a teacher of 30 years' experience tried to tell us it's not the teachers who are to blame, it's the children.
My amusement came from the fact that both the mind-benders and the teacher are wrong; my despondency from the fact that what we are confronted with is one of the inevitable penalties of the pernicious philosophy of political correctness which has infected our society over the past decade or three.
The nearest any of these so-called experts came to the nitty-gritty is the teacher, Graham Woodhead, who observed that the world has gone politically correct and nowhere more so than at school.
The educational psychologist, a former teacher also of 30 years' standing, pooh-poohs, in the most unprofessional language, teachers' claims that violence is becoming endemic in classrooms, describing them as "crap".
Says Kevin Knight, who travels the country giving seminars on behaviour management in the classroom: "Don't blame the kids - it's the teachers who are not handling their classrooms well."
And Otago University's Professor David Fergusson reckons violence and aggression in children isn't any worse than it ever was and suggests that complaints about violent toddlers in kindergartens are simply a case of the "terrible twos".
What staggers me about all this is that nowhere in the article, nowhere in the opinions expressed on this vexing subject, is there a single reference to parents.
Surely it stands to reason that if children are impudent, disobedient and/or violent in the classroom, then that behaviour has been tolerated, even learned, in the home and in the community of which that home forms a part.
It seems to be taken for granted these days that teachers are surrogate parents and that they are somehow responsible for moulding the behaviour of the children under their care. That places an unbearable burden on people who - unless they are parents themselves - are not equipped to deal with it.
All three protagonists - Knight, Fergusson and Woodward - agree that the art of classroom management has been eroded, and so it has.
Slavish adherence to political correctness has robbed teachers of the tools they once had to ensure discipline in their classes. And I'm not talking about corporal punishment, although the banning of that marked the beginning of the situation our schools face today.
I'm talking about things like the atmosphere of distrust that permeates our educational institutions, in which male teachers are scared to go within six feet of female pupils and vice versa. And in which, as Mr Woodward says, children know their "rights" and can quote chapter and verse of young persons' legislation and threaten to call the police.
But that aside, it is not the job of teachers to correct the behaviour of their charges, but only to enforce the standards required of the school.
Thus, any child who is unwilling or unable to abide by the rules of the school should be removed from that environment unless they come to heel.
It seems to me that the simple answer to the epidemic of classroom misbehaviour is for the school authorities to return offending children to their parents on the understanding that they will be readmitted to school when their behaviour has been modified.
Just imagine the consternation that would engender in families in which both parents work and in which recalcitrant children have been allowed to thrive because parents don't have the time, the talents or the inclination to bring them up properly.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. The increasing violence in our society is not confined to schools. It permeates our nation like a plague.
That is the problem we have to get to the root of, for if we cure violence in the individual, we cure it in the family, in the community (including the schools), in the nation and ultimately in the world.
And what breaks my heart is that there is an answer, but only a handful of people want to know about it.
Meanwhile, read what Judy Firkins, yet another teacher of 30 years' standing, had to say to the annual conference of the primary teachers' union. "As a senior and experienced teacher these children are demoralising and destroying my enthusiasm ... "
If that's the sort of grammatical construction our kids are being taught, no wonder so many of them can't string a literate sentence together.
