This week’s Comment article, my weekly rant in the local daily Plymouth Herald (3.10.23), has a hidden personal element having been outraged by the treatment of my teenage granddaughter at her secondary school. The Editor chose his own headline, cut much of the argument and disclosed my qualifications without my permission! My enquiries found levels of absurd rule-making and punishments reminiscent of Victorian England and exposing the enforced passivity of our new generation – a generation who will need to fight for their futures as climate change collapses the status quo. Why do teachers want to pacify them? and why don’t more teachers fight for their own liberty?

All individual power corrupts. We know this to be true. For a person’s authority to be accepted by others, they need to consider themselves accountable to those they instruct and those they make decisions on behalf of. At its core, democratic power vested in individuals is the humble power of responsibility, not an autocratic power over people.

And so we currently see groups of parents in Plymouth and across the South West challenging the apparent unaccountable power of teachers in schools. Reports of humiliation and degradation of our children by teaching staff behaving with unchallengeable power have grown in this new term, undoubtedly encouraged if not actively required by central government. 

Examples include locking the school gates in advance of the daily deadline for student attendance, despite it being a safeguarding issue and illegal for a child to be locked-in anywhere, anytime, unless convicted of a heinous crime. A one-pass-per-class policy that means only one child in a class of over thirty teenagers can go to the loo at a time, despite the challenges of being a girl on her period or a boy with a medical condition, and the sheer longevity of a timetabled double-session. 

Then there are the punishments. If you’re late to a class expect to be sent to isolation, meaning you altogether miss the class -and the learning – that, for a myriad of possibly justifiable reasons, you were a little late for. How is that a lesson in justice, proportionality or fair play? 

Or try being a child with attention deficit, expected to sit upright and silent for an hour. Slouching is punishable with a period of enforced “Reflection”, again separated from your classroom and curriculum. Speak out-of-turn and expect an enforced “Reset”, alone in a cubicle for a day or two at a time. Receive supermarket-style points for good behaviour (as defined by the Authorities) and receive negative points, deductions towards Detention, whenever not compliant.

It appears that teachers have the right to remove children from learning for extended periods, whilst parents are being threatened with prison sentences should their child not attend these regimented barracks.

This is military-style authoritarianism. Our children are expected to work to a one-size-fits-all standard defined by the Department for Education and imposed by the local Academy – not any elected governing board but a business-style consortium headed by highly-paid bosses wielding total control.

Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, waxed lyrical at this week’s Tory Conference about more discipline, including the banning of mobile phones from schools. This simply betrays a lack of any knowledge of contemporary schooling, where students manage their learning, homework and timetable online through the school online application, downloaded onto their mobile phones! If you can’t have your phone you can’t access your timetable (schools generally don’t have enough computers to go round). And why would parents want to lose track of their children who are forced to leave their expensive phones at home and so wander the streets unable to call home or be called?

Scrabbling for sound bites to prove the Government’s authority, Tory Ministers are inventing spectres of threats to social cohesion that don’t even exist. The “our children are out of control” slogan was used by the elite class in the Victorian Age, the 1920’s and the 1960’s, and every time it was working class parents who fought back for the rights of their children: care and investment, not punishment and put-downs.

Human beings are all different. Raise two twins and you’ll know that much. Teach a class of thirty youths and their individuality, both in terms of personality and ability, will astound you. 

So how does any teacher, learned and trained in child development as well as the psychology of education, justify the deepening level of unquestionable power-and-control they are required to exert over school students? Individual power-and-control is the essence of coercive behaviour and abuse.

What’s their motive? The attendance and behaviour crack down is creating more school refusers, the opposite of the role of the teacher, the true pedagog. There has been a huge increase in Home Education, falsely blamed upon the COVID-19 pandemic but more accurately laid at the door of the sheer discomfort of school life. 

In reality, our secondary school regime is all about the targets and school performance indicators. The most callous know that to suspend and expel the non-achievers raises the Ofsted-determined school rating to “outstanding”.

Wait a minute. Even if preparation for employment is the only honest goal of teaching today, doesn’t that mean the development of initiative and empowerment, not standardised automatons? 

More broadly, is schooling expected to break children’s dreams and hopes? Are our children now becoming groomed and penned into an authoritarian society and the dissolution of democracy? It was not long ago that elected local councillors oversaw the education of our children and could be held to account, whilst schools had elected parent representatives on Governing Boards, together ensuring a level (never enough it can be argued) of transparency of school life. Public scrutiny and challenge. 

No more. Our children are experiencing the hard-end of a social transformation towards dictatorship devoid of debate or reason. This is the continued pursuit of neoliberal free-market competition even while the global economy is in crisis because of its failure. Our children are expected to grow-up in contrived and inhuman competition with each other, striving ever harder to achieve ill-conceived standards, jumping hurdles ratcheted ever higher, towards ever more precarious employment in conditions absent of any degree o1f autonomy, self-expression or voice in the workplace.

Today’s working class children face a future so much more challenging than their parents, despite how hard it’s been to date. The obvious challenges of climate adaptation, global economic crisis (the so-called “Age of Austerity”), protectionist border controls inhibiting movement, and destabilising wars, will require strength and resilience.

The future demands independent decision-making and self-determination – the opposite of unquestioning obedience. 

Teachers should be open to question and debate at the hands of both students and their parents. They should lead by example, abide by the rules they set, encouraging open and wide enquiry, empathy and understanding. Routinely walk in the child’s shoes to stay in touch with the world through their eyes. Ask what the circumstances are which leads the child to be late to school, and recognise the depth of emotional distress that is now observable in one-in-six teenagers, the majority young women. 

Teachers should be asking why, not donning uniforms and high-airs to exert individual power over those not yet adult enough to stand up for themselves. Stop the blame-and-shame culture pushed down by The Management on High and now enveloping pupils and staff alike. A good starting point would be to ask why one-in-three school children in England are eligible for free school meals, and, instead of consolidating the pecking-order, challenge the gross social inequality in front of all our eyes. 

Thankfully, indeed bravely, trade unions in education have been taking action against this deteriorating of our education system, the enforced “managerialism”, rote-learning and faceless herding of young humans towards a dystopian world of artificial intelligence. In truth, knowledge is Power – those in control are trying to ration knowledge in order to maintain theirs. Our children must rebel.