Schooling the Violent Imagination

John F. Schostak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367441494
• eBook ISBN: 9781000769616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The violent imagination begins in experiences of violation against the self and grows through the stories, myths, folktales and anecdotes of everyday life. Originally published in 1986, John Schostak discusses the educational, social and moral implications of the violent imagination in connection with theories of violence, childrearing practices, and schooling as a childrearing institution. He also looks at the relation between sexism, racism, drugs and the emergence of a vandalised sense of self.

The book explores the complex ways in which images of violence pervade society, inform action and provide interpretations of events. Schools, the author argues, contribute towards the development of a violent imagination which guides judgements and actions. The child's images and experiences of violation may involve physical assault or psychological forms of assault. Some of these experiences of violation and violence are considered normal, even moral ('spare the rod and spoil the child'); others are considered abnormal, criminal, pathological – although the abstract logical form of each may be equivalent. Nevertheless, all such images contribute towards the development of a sense of violation, and children are schooled to accept normal forms and reject abnormal forms.

Chapter 1
Introduction

I hate school. I hope it burns down and some of the teachers. I like some of my lessons. We should be able to wear what we like and if we don’t like to go in any lessons, we don’t have to, but we have to. We should be able to smoke in school. I hate it. (Written comment, fifth-year girl)

Expressions of hatred, fantasies and acts of violence may often be attributed to the abnormal, deviant or perhaps immature mind. Removing violence from the sphere of normality is a typical strategy. Nevertheless, from another perspective it is quite normal, or typical of human social behaviour. Historians tell us that violence has been pervasive in society throughout history (Robottom 1976). Yet the eruption of violence in a supposedly stable society always comes as a surprise. Consider some of the events of 1981.

During the summer of 1981 street disturbances broke out in many of our major cities - Liverpool, London, Manchester, were the headline catchers. The scale and the ferocity of some of these riots took the authorities by surprise. Reasons had to be found to explain them; particularly as the participants were predominantly school age children and recent school leavers. An examination of the newspaper coverage of the riots reveals a number of simple if not simplistic explanations. One simple explanation involved the alleged existence of ‘masked men’ who went from city to city stirring up trouble (e.g. New Standard, 10 July 1981). Another championed by Boyson, the then Junior Education Minister, involved ‘Poor discipline, lack of moral guidance and the style of religious education’ in schools (Times Educational Supplement, 17 July 1981). Thus If we destroy the authority of the staff, society will reap dragon’s teeth in the form of juvenile revolt’, he continued. A picture of children as vacuums vulnerable to the anarchistic slogans of ruthless men was painted. Other explanations involved placing the blame upon the parents of the rioters (e.g. News of the World, 12 July 1981). Yet others involved trying to shift blame from such contentious issues as unemployment and the economic policies of the Thatcher government. Thus, Peregrine Worsthorne wrote under the headline ‘Unemployment is NOT to blame’ (The Sunday Telegraph, 12 July 1981) that:

All sections of society today are dangerously prone to lawless violence, and it is the merest cant to blame Mrs Thatcher for a development which is social, even spiritual, rather than economic. When the miners besieged the Saltley coke depot in 1972, under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, driving the police from the streets by brute force, was this because of their material suffering? Then, as now, the miners were the aristocrats of labour, rioting for privilege, not against injustice.

Where Worsthorne found fault was in failing to strengthen the state on law and order. On the same day in the Sunday Express essentially the same message was presented by Teddy Taylor, Tory MP for Southend East - ‘Violence has soared. Vandalism has become endemic’ therefore ‘we must impose tough and nasty penalties on vandals, arsonists and looters caught in the act and found guilty by the courts.’ There developed the cry for a new Riot Act and the necessity of experience of a ‘short sharp shock’ for young offenders being sent on remand. However, as the Manchester Evening News commented (10 July 1981):

in all this flurry of belated activity the main root cause of all the troubles must not be forgotten.

The problems are stark and clear in Manchester. As they are in all inner cities. They are problems that have been vigorously spotlighted in this column over many years. They are problems based on cities deprived of proper support and attention by successive governments - both Tory and Labour - over many years. Bad housing facilities in certain areas, lack of job opportunities, particularly for y ounger people, lack of social and training facilities. One could go on ad infinitum.

Scarman (1981), when he came to report on the Brixton disorders, highlighted just these problems together with racial disadvantage and poor police and community relations. There were many people who were not surprised by the riots - only that they had not come sooner. Indeed, in the Guardian (30 June 1983) it was reported that the ‘“Disorders of the summer of 1981 we believe were both predictable and predicted,” says the all-party committee of MPs from the last Parliament, whose study was completed just before the general election.’ The report, it was said, was ignored.

What appeared to capture the imagination of the headline writers and the article writers was that the rioters were so often children, school children. Indeed, rioting took place at St Saviours primary school, Toxteth (see St John Brooks, 1982), Devon’s Bideford School, a comprehensive school (Eastern Evening News 13 March 1982), and a Durham comprehensive in December 1982, amongst others. In general terms the history of riot and revolution is very much a history of youth rebellion (Heer 1974). In particular, Humphries (1981) has written a history of working-class resistance to schooling during the period 1889–1939 which involved delinquency, school strikes, truanting and so on. Unrest and rebelliousness by school children is no new phenomenon attributable to some breakdown in moral authority or parental care. Such explanations are as old as governmental manipulation and control of the masses. Such explanations imply some golden age which historically has never existed.

If we really want to understand the causes of violence in young people, particularly school children, we must examine carefully our most cherished beliefs, our social practices, and the organisation of schooling. We must learn to listen to the children. Furthermore, we must ask probably the hardest question of all, is the violence justified?

Central to the argument of this book is that violence is more than simply a nihilistic act. Violence has to be interpreted and is thus always ambiguous in meaning because its meaning depends upon context and viewpoint and is thus political in its implications. The difficulty involves trying to define what is to count as normal. Structurally, an act defined as normal may have an identical abstract form to an act defined as abnormal. Indeed, from different perspectives the same act may be defined as ‘just’ from the one point of view and as barbaric from an alternative point of view. The case of caning in British schools illustrates the point.

The head teacher of a boys’ school still using corporal punishment says:

‘If [misbehaviour] occurs then I think boys must know where they are in terms of sanctions and I believe it’s important to have … gradation of sanctions. And I think also in school terms it’s important that the teacher is seen to be capable of imposing his own sanctions. To begin with one may refer a child to somebody else for punishment or for correction but in the long term the more you’re able to do it yourself successfully the more likely you are for the question of misbehaviour to diminish.’

For this teacher, as for most of his staff, ‘most boys naturally will take advantage.’ Two or three times a week he could be seen overseeing the movement of boys along the corridor, arms folded, cane erect against his shoulder. The myth at the basis of his ‘philosophy of punishment’ is that it is in the nature of boys to take advantage. In religious terms this is enshrined in such conceptions as ‘original sin’. In clinical terms, as Toch (1972) has pointed out, it has been assumed that man in general seethes with the forces of destruction, such forces only being kept in check by internalised and external social controls. There is also some felt need for punishment - punishment appeases guilt and vengeance. As a senior teacher in another school which had long since given up corporal punishment recalled:

‘… sometimes the police would come to me and say look “if he goes to court, he’s going to get off, gonna be let off but he’s done wrong. He knows he’s done wrong. His parents know he’s done wrong. And he should be punished. Will you punish him?” And once or twice, I said - I’m very naughty, but I … I did punish boys, so they didn’t have a police record. And the parents were very grateful. The boy as it happens was glad. He hadn’t got away with something.’

The distinction between punishment and violence is entirely social; corporal punishment is simply legalised violence. In the above case the corporal punishment meted out in school was simply an extension of other forms of lawful punishment. The internal system of punishment mirrors the punishment structure external to the school. Birching as a punishment for offenders has been given up (although often called for during the 1981 riots), whereas caning has not; school detention may be seen as a watered-down form of prison detention. The seduction toward the use of corporal punishment and forms of detention is great. It is simple and it is cheap. Of the two the following teacher prefers the use of corporal punishment:

T don’t know whether you want me to say this but I shall say it anyway. I’m a great believer in corporal punishment. For that reason I think if a child is asked to do something on at least two or three occasions and he still defies you then that defiance should be, you know, considered insolence and should be corrected for it in a very severe way rather than just this business of detentions which … just soul destroying for both the boy and the teacher who puts him on. Whereas a short sharp reminder is usually more efficacious I’ve found.’

Young teachers can find the ‘short sharp reminder’ almost irresistible, particularly when parents and even pupils appear to favour it. However, the cane brutalises both teacher and pupils:

‘… the time did come when we sort of looked at the punishment book and we said “On occasions somebody who is maladjusted is being punished. And it’s wrong. You mustn’t do that. These names are coming up again and again. It isn’t working is it? It’s wrong.” … and one of the … the things that concerned me more than anything else was the fact that it wasn’t the boy it was the teacher. That teachers were pushing pupils sometimes a little too far … provoking them. That sometimes the teacher was bad tempered … and a boy reacted … in a way he shouldn’t have done. But it didn’t always need corporal punishment and yet that was … for extreme rudeness to a member of staff in front of the class, then that was the accepted punishment. And I had to do it and I, I used to feel sick when I had to do it. I, I always made the person who had made the complaint come along and be the witness. And I was deliberately, you know, I, I would provoke them not to make me have to do this ever again. They could see how upset I was having to do it. And always of course, a letter to the parents explaining exactly what had been done and why, when it was corporal punishment. We looked at these reasons and said “Right, just for six months we’ll see if we can do without….. ” No problems. Even though the school next door, you see, still has corporal punishment…. And the six months became a year, and the year became fifteen years. And we still don’t need corporal punishment. And we never will.’

The structural habit of corporal punishment can be kicked, even in an area considered tough by tough standards - an area of massive youth and adult unemployment and all the social problems that go with this. Part of the motivation for this senior teacher and his colleagues abandoning the cane was a sense of revulsion and partly a sense of immorality or injustice.

Nevertheless, the structures of violence are deep within society. The images of force are everywhere. The image of manliness is also one of forcefulness, toughness and even violent action. One fifteen-year-old boy who had been expelled from two previous secondary schools equated discipline with physical violence. He respected the teachers of his present school because they were not afraid to use corporal punishment. He gave an example of the educative effect of such discipline from his experience at a disruptive unit:

Dave ‘… Like when I went to me disruptive unit it was um ex-copper was the bloke who owned it right. There was only two teachers there an’ about five kids went there. An’ the atmosphere, it was really great. An’ you knew if you did anyfink wrong ’e’d just beat you up. An’ ’e did like you know, I … ’

J.F.S. ‘You mean physically beat you up?1

Dave ‘Yeah! ’e used to get ’old of you an’ give you a good kickin’ y’ know ’e’d slap you about. There was one kid there called Joey, an’ ’e was, obviously ’e was well backward, you could tell that an’ that was why ’e messed around and uh when ’e went there - right next to it was this other school an’ we opened the gates an’ chucked ’im (laughing) in the other school an’ shut the gates. An’ like y’ know ’e run ’ome this Joey an’ the head, the copper, said, “Where’s Joey?” So we said, “Dunno, sir,” y’ know. An’ ’e come back the next day an’ ’e said, “Where did you go?” He said, “Ah, I went ’ome sir. They frew me in the next school so I run ’ome.” And so like ’e got us, ’e took us outside an’ ’e just got this big stick an’ ’e ’it us. An’ ’e said “You won’t do that again will you?” You know, you know you wouldn’t do it again.’

Dave desired to be controlled, it took away any need for irksome self-responsibility. Dave could continue - and he did - to be a villain where control could not reach him, and a model pupil where it could.

Dave, although his school career is atypical, does not have atypical attitudes towards caning. In a survey carried out for ITV Times Magazine (18–24 June 1983) by Audience Selection, following a series on schools, 62 per cent of pupils, 54 per cent of teachers and 81 per cent of parents approved of corporal punishment. STOPP (an anti-corporal punishment pressure group) estimated that there were 238,000 beatings a year (as reported in TES 5 August 1983). The question becomes: because a majority appear to support corporal punishment does that make it right?

An answer may be provided by considering a case taken to the Court of Human Rights. The European Convention on Human Rights holds that:

Protocol 1 Article 2: No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the state shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Article 3: No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment.

Two Scottish mothers in 1976 took to the European Commission for Human Rights a complaint concerning the use of the tawse (a strap) in punishment of their children. In March 1982 the court decided Britain was in violation of Article 2 but not Article 3. The decision showed a clear concern for parental rights although curiously no concern for individual rights as implied in Article 3 on punishment. Children were not asked if the punishment was considered inhuman or degrading. As Holt (1974) has written, children have no individual rights which would enable them to lead an independent existence.

The response of the British government to the ruling came in 1983. Parents would be allowed to ‘opt out’ of corporal punishment for their children. In effect, in a caning school there would be two classes of pupil, those who could be caned and those who could not. This right has become very controversial. It is clear there is a great reluctance to abolish corporal punishment outright in school. Schools, I argue, condition individuals to accept a form of authority which he or she will meet in later business, political and even married life. Without punishments coercive authority ceases. In adult life the cane is substituted by fear of unemployment, prison, loss of earnings - and in extreme circumstances, riot police wielding truncheons.

The boundary between the normal and the abnormal use of violence differs between societies. Children learn to make distinctions. Thus, according to McWhirter, Young and Majury (1983), after a decade or more of ‘the troubles’, Belfast children accept violence and violent death as normal. Even in the horrific situation of the Nazi concentration camps, the brutality of the guards became normal to the extent that many prisoners modelled their own behaviour upon that of the guards, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceiving violence
• 3 Rearing children
• 4 Schooling, community and the emergence of the vandalised self
• 5 Racism
• 6 Sex and sexism: public action and private parts
• 7 Violence and the construction of reality
• 8 Lessons of violence
• Last rights
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index