Now that decades have passed since the abolition of corporal punishment it has become very difficult for educational progressives to assert their moral superiority simply by saying they oppose it. Sure, they can lay it on thick about how much they oppose it, they can call it “child abuse” and demand that every teacher who doesn’t oppose it be immediately sacked, but they can’t actually mark themselves out from the crowd with their disapproval. Not only that, but a policy of forcing out people who had happily used corporal punishment in their teaching career would mean a mass exodus of recent immigrants from countries in the developing world where corporal punishment is normal, at the hands of white, middle class English people, something which would be hard to paint as a victory for social justice or political correctness.
So for this reason, there has to be a new way to declare one’s boundless compassion and, if a teacher, condemn the moral degeneracy of one’s peers. There has to be a new moral dividing line between the goody teachers and the baddy teachers. There has to be a new basis for the self-righteous superiority of middle class liberals. In recent years it seems to have become shouting. For as long as I remember anyone arguing for teacher authority, the importance of obedience, or the need to end the chaos in the classrooms, could expect a straw man attack along the lines of “well, you think teachers should always be shouting at children”. It was always a ridiculous attack as order in the classroom and well established teacher authority takes away the need to shout. The truly terrifying teachers often shouted the least (although they sometimes shouted the loudest). The schools with the best discipline often had an explicit or implicit “no shouting” policy as classrooms were quiet enough for teachers to be heard and there were plenty of sanctions that were easily available and could be calmly applied. Not only that, but when direct instruction was the government approved method of teaching (in the late nineties and the early part of this century) then every teacher was required to get attention in class, and it was hard to condemn shouting when you knew that you might have an observation where getting the class to hear you would be expected. Indeed, I have lost count of how many “shouted” plenaries I have observed over the years resulting from belief in a three part lesson and the normal tendency of classes to get louder over time if they are allowed to speak.
However, the move away from teaching, and towards activities, in the last few years has led to a new breed of “punishment puritans” who disapprove of the raised voice. Often it is simple self-aggrandisement. I have heard aspiring members of SMT insist to NQTs and student teachers that they never, ever, shout even though their bellowing is often heard through the corridors. Similarly, I have heard teachers condemned for shouting because they confront bad behaviour in their lessons (regardless of the volume at which they do so); because they have become upset or angry, or because they will shout back when students shout at them rather than letting the students take verbal control of the classroom.
Recently, I have seen the disapproval of shouting take the same tone as the opponents of corporal punishment took, that of complete and unquestioning disapproval from a position of moral superiority, unsupported by a rational argument. It’s put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have worked in both “shouting schools” and “no shouting schools” and have preferred the latter. I trained in a school with an explicit no shouting policy and actually rather enjoyed it. When I worked at the Metropolitan School the students were savvy enough to know that forcing a teacher to shout at the class would be a sure sign that they had got to them, and, therefore, raising your voice in class would just make kids laugh at you. The discipline system there had clear sanctions which did not include taking a kid out and shouting at them. Therefore, there was very little point to shouting at all. Even when I have worked in a “shouting school”, I would try hard to avoid shouting at classes; it was a high risk strategy and I was experienced enough at managing classes to know how to deal with noise in a more structured and careful way. Therefore, I have no particular support for shouting, and little reason to advocate it as a form of behaviour management.
However, the moral indignation and hypocrisy have got to me. I simply cannot abide some of the attempts to demonise teachers for shouting that I have heard recently. And in particular, I cannot tolerate the trend I have noticed in managers suggesting that teachers who shout at students are to blame for the students’ poor behaviour, as if children had no free will, and their behaviour simply reflected the moral deficiencies of their teachers.
So let’s be clear about a few simple points. Teachers shout for three reasons.
1) To get attention.
It is a fact of cognitive psychology that if we are not listening to someone then our attention cannot be grabbed by the content of what they say, but will be grabbed by its volume.
…unattended speech is not analyzed to a semantic level, that is it is not analyzed for meaning. Instead it is analyzed for physical characteristics such as pitch and loudness … all stimuli are analyzed for their physical characteristics, but only a limited number (those to which you attend ) are analyzed for their semantic content. .. unattended stimuli must be processed in case something important requires your attention. If you are in a crowd and someone shouts “Fire!”, the loudness of the unattended message will make you shift your attention to the source of the sound…But presumably if someone merely said “Fire,” you wouldn’t hear it because the word doesn’t stand out from any other stimuli
(Willingham, 2007)
In a relatively quiet room you might be able to get attention by becoming quieter. In a room where all the noise is of one pitch you might be able to get attention through the pitch of your voice. If you have a whistle you could certainly go without shouting. However, in a noisy classroom, teachers often have little hope of gaining initial attention from a class if they don’t raise their voices. There are ways around this, slower methods that involve getting attention one student at a time, or making students scared to let their attention drift, and in a tough school you will have to pursue these methods or you will wear your voice out. But there are always going to be situations where it would be irresponsible not to shout in order to gain attention. If a kid you don’t know is behaving in a dangerous manner then it would be better to yell “Oi!” and be considered rude than to let someone come to harm while you agonise over a more polite way to intervene. There is no way of making the act of shouting beyond the moral pale here, even if, like myself, you prefer to avoid it.
2) Out of Anger.
It has to be said there exist schools and classes where losing your temper and shouting has a clear positive impact on the behaviour of the class by giving them a bit of a scare. However, the effect diminishes with the age of the students and with the frequency with which they experience it, and with tough classes it can have a negative impact (imagine being furiously angry and then once you show it having thirty kids laughing at you, it is not going to end well), so I would not recommend this as a behaviour management technique. However, there are two reasons why I will not condemn anyone who does use it. Firstly, if it is normal to use it as a technique in your school, then a refusal to raise your voice will undermine you by making you appear weak or unconcerned about poor behaviour. In those situations it can barely be avoided. Secondly, in those situations where shouting is having no positive effect then it is entirely possible that the shouting teacher has become upset and lost control. This is not a good thing and teachers should try to avoid letting it happen. However, as I argued before it makes absolutely no sense to condemn teachers for being upset. That is simply to blame the victim, and to make teaching the exclusive preserve of those who don’t care about their classes or their own dignity. Again, neither of these cases seem to suggest a moral transgression on the part of the teacher. In one case they have done what is necessary, in the other they have acted like somebody who cares.
3) As a punishment.
This is the one that I personally am most guilty of. If you are in a school where the sanctions are inadequate to deal with the behaviour then you have little choice but to look for sanctions that can be delivered on the spot and require no follow up. I wouldn’t ever recommend shouting within a classroom, or in front of other students, (it can backfire badly if a student has eye contact with another student when they are being shouted at) but one of the few instant punishments we have left is to ask a student to stand outside and then go and shout at them. Now, I am the first to argue that other sanctions would be preferable. I prefer sanctions that are recorded and public. I prefer sanctions that will mean something to every kid not just the weaker characters. I prefer sanctions that are less stressful for the teacher. I prefer sanctions that defuse a situation rather than risk escalation. However, there are plenty of schools where the behaviour policy is not adequate and the use of a good old-fashioned bollocking is a matter of necessity rather than principle. A puritan could self-righteously disapprove of it for being unpleasant, but that is because either they disapprove of all punishment, or because they haven’t grasped the basic idea that punishment is meant to be unpleasant. What they cannot do is argue against shouting as a punishment without accepting that teachers in those schools should, because of the circumstances of the school, tolerate bad behaviour in their classrooms because they’d rather kids lost their education and lived in fear of their peers, than teachers got their hands dirty in the pursuit of restoring order.
Now, I suspect that a lot of the punishment puritans will reject these arguments on the basis of the usual lies about behaviour. While hiding in their offices they will pretend that there is no need to grab attention, pressure classes into behaving, or punish the guilty. If you have good enough lessons then no child will ever misbehave and if they do it was obviously your fault – after all you shouted and that shows you are a bad person – and there is simply no need to raise expectations or challenge disruption. If you are upset by children then it simply shows you are incompetent and if they were still teaching a full timetable then they’d show you how to remain calm under pressure.
However, back on the frontline, teachers are put in positions every day where they have little choice but to raise their voices. I do not like that situation, and much prefer an environment where it is not necessary, but I can’t stomach the attempt to blame the victims by the very class of people who have created the situation in the first place. When blaming teachers is used to pretend that there is no Behaviour Crisis, and that the level of disobedience and abuse teachers endure is simply down to weak teachers letting the side down, then the self-righteousness has merged into sheer callousness. I can only hope and pray that one day those who consider their condemnation of their colleagues to be evidence of their own unbounded compassion come to see themselves as those around them see them, not as a beacon of decency but as opponents of teacher authority who fail children, again, and again, and again.
References
Willingham, Daniel T., Cognition, 2007
The Education Spectrum
January 9, 2012A version of this post has already appeared at http://www.labourteachers.org.uk/2012/01/09/the-education-spectrum/
What is often most noticeable about education debate is the extent to which people, who are apparently addressing the same issue, talk past each other without even comprehending the opposing view. I think that this is because there are two different debates going on simultaneously. It suits people to focus only on a debate where they feel they have a strong argument and ignore the debate where they have a weaker argument. I hope that what follows might help clarify what is actually disputed in a lot of discussion about education.
The first of the two debates is about the content of the curriculum. Opinions differ on the extent to which there is a recognised body of knowledge to be passed on to the next generation. Traditionalists believe that there is a body of knowledge (which we can call a tradition) composed of the best that has been thought and known. Accordingly, traditionalists will tend to describe the aims of education in terms of the academic above everything else. They will advocate: the employment of teachers with expertise in academic disciplines; the use of clearly identified subject areas, and methods of teaching, organisation and discipline that allow for teachers to directly pass on their expertise. Radicals will reject the existence of any particular tradition to be passed on, and will instead suggest that skills and dispositions are more important than knowledge and that learning is to be based on the interests or needs of the individual child, or the requirements of a future which is unlike the present where people will value different knowledge and skills to those which are valued now. They will doubt that present forms of organisation in schools are appropriate, particularly the role of knowledge and the position of discrete subjects in the curriculum, and the position of teachers and adults as authorities over children. They will favour teaching methods which avoid the need for teacher authority or subject expertise, seeking to maximise the amount of activity and autonomy on the part of children, and to allow for the acquisition of qualities other than the academic. This debate between traditionalists and radicals is reflected most clearly in the discussion of “standards” and behaviour, which breaks out on a fairly regular basis in the media.
The second debate is about entitlement to the curriculum. Opinions differ about who should be able to get particular types of education. Elitists believe that the full benefits of education can only be gained or appreciated by a minority. Educational institutions will be expected to differ in their aspirations, and those schools with the strongest academic aspirations will be expected to find students who are suited to academic achievement and the system will be judged to a very large extent on its provision for those most able students. Egalitarians will want all schools to provide the curriculum to all types of children. The benefits of education are for all and attempts to discriminate between children will be viewed with suspicion, as will attempts to create a hierarchy of schools. The traditional faultline in this debate is, in England, over selection at 11: the division of academic children into grammar schools and other children into secondary moderns which was the norm for two decades from the mid-1940s and still exists in some parts of the country. Similar arguments are also had about the place of private schools.
Now, obviously, in sketching out these two debates I have tended to simplify or exaggerate positions. Few people are complete traditionalists; almost everyone accepts that the curriculum can change to accept new disciplines and contemporary concerns. Few people are complete radicals; everyone identifies some knowledge that is useful to all, even if it’s just the ability to read and write. Most elitism is moderate enough to accept some form of academic provision for the masses, and often to accept routes into the elite by those who missed them the first time. Most egalitarianism stops at some age, usually 16, and I have never met anyone who advocated that everybody should study for PhDs. We are talking about two spectrums of opinion as opposed to two divisions into binary categories.
The important thing here is that we understand that these are two separate debates even though both are often considered to be debates between political left and right. Traditionalists and elitists hold what are often recognised as “right-wing” positions. Radicals and egalitarians are typically described as “left-wing” positions. However, traditionalism and elitism are not the same position at all, nor are radicalism and egalitarianism. A lot of reason for the poor quality of much education debate is due to attempts to conflate this into a single spectrum, where the two alternatives are the “right-right” position of combined elitism and traditionalism and the “left-left” position of egalitarianism and radicalism.
This can be seen more clearly if we put our two spectrums of debate on a pair of axes.
Most of the volume in the education debate comes from the “progressive” top-left quadrant of the diagram (where we’d find the likes of Melissa Benn , Fiona Miller and Lord Hattersley) and the “conservative” bottom right quadrant (where we’d find the likes of Melanie Phillips, Chris Woodhead and Lord Tebbit). It suits people who hold these two positions to act as if they are the only positions available and so most media debate seems to take place on the red-arrow above. Both camps know that there are limits to which they can gain public support for their positions. Grammar schools, if reintroduced, would not be popular with the vast majority of parents whose kids would not go to them. Trendy teaching methods are held with contempt by parents who actually want their kids to achieve academically. It is far easier, therefore, for educational conservatives to focus on standards and the educational progressives to focus on structures when having the debate anywhere the public can hear. It is in both their interests to maintain the debate along the red line, and to pretend that everyone is arguing from a position on that line. It suits both camps to pretend that everyone is either a left-wing supporter of child-centred education or a right-wing supporter of selection and no other position is possible.
Astute politicians have discovered the benefits of arguing for rigorous academic standards and comprehensive schooling (or at least no increase in selection), which places them somewhere low in the top right quadrant. This is the territory that Tony Blair and David Blunkett staked out in the mid-to-late-nineties. It is probably where the current government is, although one cannot be certain as it is unclear where the push for academies and free schools is meant to lead and the Tory backbenches seem keener on grammar schools than the coalition front benches. It is key political territory, because it is what most parents want for their children. They want their children to be entitled to a good academic education, without having to fight for a place among a privileged minority. It is also the territory with the strongest arguments in its favour, as it combines both a call for justice and a resistance to educational fads. It is opposition to both dumbing-down and to writing off a large section of the population.
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