1
Schools, Complicity, and Sources of
Violence
Juanita Ross Epp
Violence: Physical force or activity used to cause harm, damage, or abuse. (Webster's Dictionary, 1988)
In this book it is argued that educational systems are complicit in the abuse of children through ‘systemic violence’ and that this complicity, and the students’ reactions to it, contribute to other forms of violence. My colleagues will, in future chapters, focus on specific aspects of systemic violence—exclusionary practices, toleration of abuse, discriminatory policies and the like—but it is my job to set the canvas. Systemic violence has been defined as any institutional practice or procedure that adversely impacts on individuals or groups by burdening them psychologically, mentally, culturally, spiritually, economically or physically. Applied to education, it means practices and procedures that prevent students from learning, thus harming them (Epp and Watkinson, in press).
‘Harmful educational procedures’ should be a contradiction in terms. However, even successful participants in the education system recognize the potential for systemically inflicted damage. The term ‘systemic violence’ gathers together the fragments of doubts and suspicions that make us distrustful of the compulsory education system. It reminds us of the incidents that were ‘just not fair’ and the situations that seemed fair on the surface but failed the test of equity. It describes the taken-for-granted ‘common sense’ (Ng, 1993) pedagogical approaches and educational practices that lead to success for some but to failure for others.
Systemic violence is not intentional harm visited on the unlucky by vicious individuals. Rather, it is the unintentional consequences of procedures implemented by well-meaning authorities in a belief that the practices are in the best interests of students. Systemic violence is insidious because those involved, both perpetrators and victims, are often unaware of its existence. The students, accustomed to learning about the world in positivistic terms reflecting a ‘white wealthy reality’ (Carnoy, 1974, p. 365), do not see their own ‘failure’ in any other terms. When students are not capable enough or compliant enough, the failure is not shouldered by the school as a failure to provide a meaningful educational experience: the blame is shifted to the student for lack of industry or ability—or to the parent for lack of a positive environment or for failing to support school initiatives. The students most damaged by systemic violence are removed from school, or remove themselves, and suffer the lasting disadvantages of an incomplete education. They accept the personal blame and economic detriments associated with academic failure as their own. The irony is that when students who are compelled by law to attend school are failed by the school system, they accept responsibility for the institution’s failure.
From the school administrator’s point of view, when students drop out of school, it is often deemed to be ‘for the best’. The students’ behaviors have often been disruptive and their marks are usually poor, so their removal can be seen as an improvement in the environment for those who remain. Sometimes students respond to systemic violence in violent ways, and administrators are forced to remove them. In these cases, school authorities feel vindicated. They can focus on the students’ acts and justify their removal as necessary to preserve the harmony of the school building. They see no need to examine the circumstances to ascertain whether or not there was systemic violence predicating the students’ actions (Lee, 1994). Occasionally, when the results of systemic violence are particularly obvious or disastrous, school personnel stop to question the role that they have played. A student suicide, for example, will cause authorities to pause to consider their complicity. In one case, the suicide of a Grade 7 student who had recently been suspended caused a special kind of grief for the administrators and teachers in his school (Sakiyama, 1996). Their intention in upholding school policy had not been to cause the child harm and there was no way for them to ascertain the effect that implementation of school policies had had on the child’s life.
What makes systemic violence ‘systemic’ is the fact that there is no-one to blame. People applying the violence are only a part of a larger process. Administrators and teachers do what is expected of them. They follow protocol, they maintain standards. They do what they believe to be in the students’ best interests (Miller, 1990b); it is the protocol itself that is sometimes damaging.
Complicity
Perhaps the most useful beginning for an examination of systemic violence is in the commonalities shared by critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy. Critical and feminist pedagogy share a belief in ‘self and social empowerment’ as elements of ‘broader social transformation’ (Gore, 1993, p. 7). They both pay attention to student experience and voice and raise concerns about teacher authority (Gore, 1993, p. 7). These issues are also important to people concerned about systemic violence.
Work on systemic violence is also linked to advocacy literature in which there are calls for inclusionary education for traditionally excluded groups of people— special needs students, economically deprived students, students from minority groups, girls and women, or gays and lesbians. Ellsworth (1994) suggested that disadvantaged students might include all students who are not ‘white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, intelligent, thin, middle-class, English-speaking and male’ (p. 321).
Although the disadvantaged are more likely to be affected by systemic violence, even the privileged can suffer damaged self-concepts in competitive learning environments and experience dampened creativity in oppressive classrooms. Systemic violence is visited upon all students, but does not damage all children to the same degree. Systemic violence constricts and directs many student behaviors, but is especially damaging to those who are too creative, too sensitive or too discerning. Even children who fit the confines of ‘privilege’ find themselves being punished for defiance of senseless rules and for acts of rebellion against meaningless curriculum. All students are subjected to tedium in lesson delivery and to an expectation that they will sit still and perform tasks that often appear to have little value for them. Teachers may justify this as preparation for future jobs, and they will be supported in this view by administrators and parents (McLaren, 1986, p. 224), but conformity and routine can be mind-numbing and could hardly be classified as a meaningful learning experience. The intentional exposure to boredom and repetition is a part, but only a small part, of what is systemically violent in our schools.
Systemic violence is found in any institutionalized practice which adversely impacts on students. To be damaging, practices do not have to have a negative impact on all students. They may be beneficial to some and damaging to others. Many practices that are systemically violent are assumed to be beneficial to students in general, but the processes that some students find ‘nurturant and protective, providing them with a sense of security…[are for others] a manifold system of oppression and condemnation’ (McLaren, 1986, p. 219). For example, a marking system which provides positive reinforcement for only a few good students often has an adverse affect on other students. Intended to encourage the others, to inspire them, and make them want to ‘win’ the next time, this practice often has the opposite effect. The response is likely to be a wadded-up project in the garbage, a muttered acceptance of personal inadequacy (or dislike of the winning student) and a vow to try no more. Systemic violence occurs when the positive impact on some students is only possible through the negative effect it has on others.
The effects of systemic violence are exacerbated for disadvantaged students because their experiences in school are quite different from those of privileged students, even though they may be sitting in the same classroom. Systemic violence sometimes takes the form of colonialized knowledge, that is, the acceptance of a pre-ordained set of curricula which reflects the history, values and expectations of the dominant society while denigrating as untrue or lacking in value the experiences and heritage of disadvantaged students (Darder, 1991). The social hierarchy differentiates student experiences in terms of both cognitive and behavioral skills (Bowles and Gintes, 1976) as classroom interaction encourages different outcomes for different students. Middle-class males are encouraged to be aggressive and to use critical thinking skills, while girls and minority students are taught to be passive and ‘civilized’ (Bowles and Gintes, 1976; Sadker and Sadker, 1994).
Damaging as the colonialization of knowledge (Darder, 1991, p. 5) is to disadvantaged students, its detrimental affects are not felt exclusively by them. The school system teaches all children that they must ‘compete with each other for the few positions at the top’ while ignoring its own potential as a site in which children could be encouraged to work together ‘to improve their collective condition’ (Carnoy, 1974, p. 365). This trains all students for the reality of the current economy without offering them any alternative views for the future. It also conditions some students to be accepting of their own eventual ‘failure’. A meritorious view of success disempowers students to the extent that few place the fault or credit where it belongs, with an education system geared to perpetuate stratification (Darder, 1991, p. 5), all the while proclaiming equal opportunity.
Systemic violence encourages disadvantaged students to disappear from the school system and from competition for economic success, but the effect on the ‘successful’ is also troubling. The damage to the privileged takes the form of the ingrown isolation of ‘sexist, racist, elitist, ablist and heterosexist’ (Ellsworth, 1994, p. 306) attitudes. Privileged students believe that they have achieved success because of personal ability and superior intelligence. Separated by their own disdain from most of humanity, these individuals pay the price in terms of fear, vulnerability and self-doubt. Unable to understand their differences, they build walls to keep others at a distance and chain down their belongings in fear. The price of privilege can be isolation (Kaufman, 1987).
Often those working within the school system do not even recognize this alienation. Administrators and teachers who cannot perceive their own biases cannot see the systemic violence happening around them. The negative ways in which disadvantaged students respond to systemic violence encourage the privileged to assume that the inequities are the fault of the disadvantaged. Thus privileged students remain unable to recognize an uneven playing field, especially if they are standing on it. Eventually the privileged learn to view attempts at equity as invasions of their personal rights (Thornhill, 1995).
There are so many aspects to education that it is difficult to focus on particulars in seeking sources of systemic violence. The daily activities of education may be endemic with violence, but systemic violence can also be manifest in particular incidents. Many of us have walked away from our own elementary education with generally positive memories mixed with the odd painful experience. I teach aspiring teachers in an after degree BEd program. When my students are asked to remember the worst incident of their educational experience, and share these incidents in small groups, they regularly comment on the emotional residue that the exercise touches in them. They are surprised that a long ago, half forgotten moment can still affect them with such force, and they are a little embarrassed by the tears that sometimes attend the exercise. When individuals look back at the pain of an education, can they distinguish among simple mistakes, intentional hurts, and systemic violence? To focus the search, I propose three basic sources of systemic violence: standardization, pedagogical practice and punishment.
There But for Fortune: Standardization
Most people in positions of authority within the education system are not people who suffered debilitatingly from the effects of systemic violence in their own educations. Those who have suffered systemic violence are unlikely to want to have anything to do with schools and are even less likely to have stayed in the system long enough to have the qualifications necessary for them to re-enter it as professionals. Thus educational institutions are peopled by individuals who have accepted the positivist ideology, that is ‘an empirical analytical method of inquiry that incorporates the notion of quantifiable objective facts and neutral observation’ (Darder, 1991, p. 6). Most teachers and principals believe that there is a ‘standard’ that can be applied to students and to student learning. Inclusive policies, intended to allow ‘disadvantaged’ students more access to education are often scorned as a diminution of this standard.
Standardized Tests
The word standards is a code-name for ‘an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture’ (Lessing, 1972 cited in McLaren, 1986, p. xvii). The idea of a standard is based on the improbable premise that students of the same age will have similar abilities and backgrounds and that those abilities are measurable. My own first memory of a standardized test takes the form of a picture test in which we were instructed to circle the appropriate object when the teacher read the word. The word was ‘icebox’. My experience did not include an icebox so I got it wrong. (That is why I remember it.) I now understand that standardized tests are ‘necessarily embedded within a cultural frame of reference’ (Samuda, 1995, p. 294). Much later, after my ‘high IQ’ had landed me a spot in a university, my wariness of IQ testing was confirmed by something called the Chitling IQ test. In it I was asked questions about Black American culture and failed miserably. My failure was not surprising, considering my background, just as the failure of others in the ‘real’ IQ tests is not surprising considering theirs. But I was lucky, in my case the test was not being used to assess my potential as a scholar as it is for them. The only difference between us is that my origins are in the dominant culture.
Another way in which standardized tests are biased is in their dependence on timing as a means of discriminating intelligence. The mistaken assumption that a quick response is the best response (Samuda, 1995, p. 295) makes timed tests biased against the poor reader, the slow thinker, and people who want to reflect on answers and assess the alternatives before going on to the next question. Timed tests create both a gender and culture bias (Sadker and Sadker, 1994; Samuda, 1995). The first time I did the Miller’s Analogy test I had not learned the importance of speed. I was shocked when I was told that the time was up because I had completed only about two thirds of the paper. Fortunately, that proved to be enough to get me into graduate school. Years later, when I applied for a doctoral program, I was advised to take the test again to bring up my score, but to first buy the practice book and study for it. This brought my score up 15 points. Was this an intelligence test? All it proved was that I had the connections necessary to find the appropriate practice book.
Cultural Bias
Standardized tests, as we know them today, are based on the Army Mental Test devised by Carl Campbell Brigham early this century. The test was devised to sort soldiers—to determine appropriate ranks and tasks for new recruits. Brigham believed in the intellectual superiority of northern Europeans and felt that there was a need to prevent the ‘continued propagation of defective strains’ in the population (Sadker and Sadker, 1994, p. 152). It is not likely that his test reflected a balanced class and cultural component. By 1915, Columbia University feared that it would be inundated by the children of refugees. Brigh...
