Garth George: System failure ends in school violence

I believe that it is the almost total lack of discipline in our classrooms today that contributes to the sad and sorry state of education.THINGS have come to a desperate pass when we read that in primary and secondary schools throughout the Bay of Plenty violence seems to have become endemic.

And the enormity of it is that is not simply physical assaults by children on other children - which are as old as schools themselves - but violence by pupils against teachers.

For many of us such a thing is almost beyond comprehension, but it is not in the least surprising - and it can only get worse.

It is simply more evidence - if any were needed - that the David Lange Labour Government's "Tomorrow's Schools" experiment, even with all its superficial amendments over the years, has been a colossal failure.

It is all very well to indict poor parenting for the distressing amount of violence in our schools, but that is simplistic. The entire education system, including teachers, must carry most of the blame.

Tauranga clinical psychologist Tanzi Bennison put her finger right on it when she said: "I'm surprised it's got to the point where primary children are assaulting teaching staff but it fits with the overall picture of where we are headed. It's very sad.

"Quite often children will use aggressive behaviour to try and get their message across. If it works a few times ... it is likely they will do it again. Eventually it will stop working, however, and the only thing they will know how to do is increase the aggression."

And why are so many children unable to get their message across? Because they have not, in our education system, been given the tools to make them able to communicate either orally or in writing.

I have been persuaded for years that it is an inability to communicate which is the root cause of violence, not just in schools but in the community at large. The inability to articulate wants and needs, hopes and fears and all the other essential communications which make life liveable leads invariably to frustration, and frustration to physical violence.

And who is to blame for that? You can't hang it on their parents because many of today's schoolchildren are the issue of parents who themselves, as the education system has become more and more addled, were never taught how to communicate.

Yet that was never the case before the late 1980s when the implementation of Tomorrow's Schools began.

In my day, and for centuries before and decades after, the first things we learned were the basics of communication and numeration, starting with learning the ABC and the times tables.

As we progressed from Primer 1 to Standard 6 (note the terminology) we progressively learned more advanced ways to spell and read and write and count so that by the time we were ready for high school we were both literate and numerate.

And at home my father, who had been through the same system more than three decades earlier, read stories to my brother and me at night before we went to sleep and bought us a comic book each every Friday.

In addition, at all schools there was a very clear division between teachers and pupils and the behaviour and correct dress of the teaching staff reinforced that. Teachers were Mr and Miss and Mrs and Sir and Ma'am and in high schools all students were known by their surnames.

Discipline was maintained by authority and misbehaviour quickly punished, and while I would not support a return to some of the punishments I suffered, I believe that it is the almost total lack of discipline in our classrooms today that contributes to the sad and sorry state of education.

We desperately need a thorough, wide-ranging and impartial investigation into our entire education system, preferably before some teachers and/or pupils get killed.

garth.george@hotmail.com