I think the bottom line is teachers need to once again be empowered to control their classrooms. At minimum this means giving them the authority to remove students from the class - whether by force or otherwise. They must be able to expel violent students. We need to radically dismantle the "no child left behind" bureaucracy which has placed violent and special needs children into regular classrooms.
Teachers can still lose their jobs for failing to control (with zero contact) said child and prevent the assault.
There is this elite ideology that produces rules like this, circles thinking of themselves as being progressive and socially concious. It is exactly the opposite: Kids from the bottom ranks of society are often in dire need of any feedback loop from society, as most often their own family does nothing or even worse promotes bad behaviour. Often a judge is the first person that gives them an honest assessment in their lives.
Of course the question is then why we need judges - or teachers - to fill out that role in the first place, but that is for another day.
But the fact is that in Germany physical attacks on teachers are now a daily occurance at most urban public schools, which in the long run will undermine the whole school system even more by parents voting by foot and moving their kids to private schools.
Fast forward a couple of decades and you get Paris-levels of private schooling market share (ie. > 40%) with the "socially concious" and "progressive" riots as a result.
The funny thing is that it's the parents who demand that their kids behave when they start paying a pretty penny for their schooling, while when it was "free", they let them run wild and put the blame on the (underpaid) teacher.
> Starting in August 2027, they will be allowed to 'hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room' if the student disrupts the class.
Far from what I imagined as 'physical force'.
This headline implies misleadingly that teachers in Denmark are reintroducing the cane or something.
What the law says on paper is one thing, who the school administration will believe and back up is another
Notice none of the steps need your behaviour to amount to a legal assault. Just what your school and the Dfe thinks goes against "safeguarding" which is broad. God forbid if you are a man.
The greater scandal is that the average time to clear each case was around 103 weeks.
I have no direct experience of this being an engineer rather than a teacher. I have been subject to an HR complaint once in my career. At Cisco. I’m not sorry. I can easily believe that it’s a stressful and unpleasant experience, especially for those people, the great majority, who are exonerated.
… and I "experienced" that (until class 7) – a lot. Became hostel prefect starting in class 8, so teachers were kinda scared of me after that. There were precedents for that though.
It (the "beating" kind) hasn't stopped in my country. Even in the cities, some parents look back on it nostalgically, and some, who are bigger morons, want it practised.
Danes calling their approach "physical force" feels like a personal attack and restrospective gaslighting :D
So it uses the terms "physical intervention", and "use of force", although that's using Google Translate.
And there certainly was elements of "holding students" for my entire period of elementary school, as certain groups of kids are just insane hurting each other.
But glad for the teachers they get tools to control a situation as police is not likely to be available to come to every school all the time. and hope the teachers are not getting hurt in the process, as some kids can be quite violent.
Generally teachers have suffered from increased scrutiny from all directions in Denmark for the last 8 years, which have caused a lot of people to leave the career and choose another career. This, same as rest of the world I imagine has mostly been due to the parents not taking responsibility of their kids, and the kids have been uncontrollable and the parents have always taken the kids side in any argument where a kid was not succeeding in school. Which in the 90's and 00's was much less frequent.
That is shocking to me and I went to school in the 80s. Sounds like there was good cause but the pendulum swung too far. Now it’s coming back and things are settling.
It’s funny because you normally think of the Nordics as being so far ahead in things like this but I guess we all have our blind spots.
There is no mention of force as a punishment (such as spanking), and force means things like holding a student's hand firmly to stop them throwing food. It's not whacking them with a nightstick.
The guiding idea should be "minimum necessary force used". Sometimes the this includes physical force.
An ex-military guy is given full immunity to go to schools and "discipline" students (he's basically having violent, over-the-top fights with students).
Based on Wikipedia, looks like it lead to a good amount of controversy in Korea.
You also need to restrain kids sometimes (could be often, if for example they are in the spectrum), because they have trouble regulating their emotions and they can hit others, and even themselves in crisis situations. However, you should explain them later, why that was necessary.
The teachers not being allowed to do that is mind-boggling to me. What do they do now, bring their parents with a helicopter?
Now when you authorize a restrictive / possibly violent behavior on people having authority, and you will default to "believe them" (because they're the literal "adult in the room") you also open it to abuse
See what happened with police in the US...
There were cases where parents who found it challenging to control their kids, would encourage teachers to use physical force on them. Parents deemed it was school's responsibility to instill discipline in their children.
As far as I can recall, use of violence to control kids was pretty common back in the day, both at home and at school. I don't see that happening nowadays, though.
And I say this as someone who can comfortably read Kant in (the original no less).
Not to mention that such sanctions end up being applied in a very selective and classist way. Try to send a kid from an affluent family to reform school, and you will have their parents, their parents' friends, the local council, and the local MP on your neck, trying to sway you. But it's "rules are rules" for the kid from the single-parent family who works 10h to make ends meet.
This sounds smart, but how do you imagine tolerance in this case? Student can beat other students and teachers, but only once a week?
School is also for learning how to function in society, and this means precisely that we need to teach students consequences for their actions. Beating someone up when they are adults will not end up with just stern talking.
A zero tolerance policy doesn't even sound smart, so it's even more surprising to see people arguing for it.
This affect the poor more than the rich and to not sort it out affects the learning and safety of the people with less resources.
I am a parent with two young kids. My older one is difficult. He has had behavioral problems since very early on. Looking at the current set of "disorders", he checks all the boxes for OCD. I am putting "disorder" in quotes, because I don't consider it an illness to be defiant. It's annoying AF, but in the wild he'd be just another ape. Btw, there is no "cure" either, the "treatment" is to help parents dealing with it.
So my kid does talk back to teachers. He does hit his friends. He probably steals. He probably lies. I dont know the full extent.
Day in, day out we hear:
- kids these days are treated like kings
- their parents let them do whatever they want
- kids hit their teachers and nothing happens
- schools level plummet cause kids are making a mess
- it wasn't like this in my days
and so on and so forth
As the parent of my kids, I can assure you that we've never been permissive or lax with them, and neither have been their grand parents, or their teachers. The older one getting under our skins easily, we did use quite a lot of "force" in trying to stop him as the article puts it.
I think there might have been a time when those children were meant to be "broken", as in beaten so much so you suck the life out of them. My father got whipped, not sure he came out much wiser for it. So yeah, maybe there was a time when the "bad seeds were rooted out" and life was better for everyone else.
Luckily, many professionals are aware of this, his teachers understand how it works. The people we've seen were very helpful.
My personal experience is that: it's not permissivity, it's physically wired in the brain. If kids overall have more problems than they used to, look not for parenting problems, look for environmental problems.
Maybe it's the ecology, maybe it's increased overall stress. I don't know. Just don't blame it on parents.
Most of us try our best.
> Since 1967, teachers could only physically intervene with students if their safety or that of others was at risk. Starting in August 2027, they will be allowed to 'hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room' if the student disrupts the class.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR1GZVogy24
Eddie: Oh, and if Tom or anyone else for that matter feels like givin' them a bit of a kickin', I'm sure it won't do any harm.
Soap: Yeah, little bit of pain never hurt anybody. If you know what I mean. Also, I think knives are a good idea. Big, ****-off shiny ones. Ones that look like they could skin a crocodile. Knives are good, because they don't make any noise, and the less noise they make, the more likely we are to use them. Shit 'em right up. Makes it look like we're serious. Guns for show, knives for a pro.
Tom: Soap, is there something we should know about you?
Bacon: I'm not sure what's more worrying. The job or your past.