Schooling as Violence

How Schools Harm Pupils and Societies

Clive Harber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134287314
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Asking fundamental and often uncomfortable questions about the nature and purposes of formal education, this book explores the three main ways of looking at the relationship between formal education, individuals and society:

* that education improves society
* that education reproduces society exactly as it is
* that education makes society worse and harms individuals.

Whilst educational policy documents and much academic writing and research stresses the first function and occasionally make reference to the second, the third is largely played down or ignored.

In this unique and thought-provoking book, Clive Harber argues that while schooling can play a positive role, violence towards children originating in the schools system itself is common, systematic and widespread internationally and that schools play a significant role in encouraging violence in wider society. Topics covered include physical punishment, learning to hate others, sexual abuse, stress and anxiety, and the militarization of school. The book both provides detailed evidence of such forms of violence and sets out an analysis of schooling that explains why they occur. In contrast, the final chapter explores existing alternative forms of education which are aimed at the development of democracy and peace.

This book should be read by anyone involved in education - from students and academics to policy-makers and practitioners around the world.

1 Is formal education always good for you?

Schoolchildren, teachers and teaching union representatives legged it to Downing Street last week to present Tony Blair with a book to highlight the lack of free education around the world. It contains letters and pictures written and drawn by children in England and Africa to show why education is an important right… Chris Keates, deputy general secretary of the teaching union NASUWT, said: ‘It's important for children in this country to avoid taking for granted the education to which they are entitled. Although they might complain about school, at least they have the right to be there. This is not the case for an estimated 125 million people worldwide’. Try telling that to the 50,000 truants every day whom the government wants to catch in a fresh burst of ‘sweeps’ next month.

(Education Guardian 30/4/2002)

The impact of violent conflict on schooling

Schooling internationally takes place in many different contexts and violence is certainly one of them (Harber and Davies 1997: Ch. 1). In 2000 1.6 million people worldwide died as a result of self-inflicted, interpersonal or collective violence (WHO 2002: 9). War and violent conflict are universally seen as bad for socio-economic and political development and one reason is the effect that war and violence has on young people and their education. As UNICEF recently put it,

In the armed conflicts of recent years children have been not only unintended victims but deliberate targets of violence. The number of children who have been directly affected is enormous. Millions of them have been killed, disabled, orphaned, sexually exploited and abused, abducted and recruited as soldiers, uprooted from their homes, separated from their families and faced with heightened risk of disease and malnutrition.

(UNICEF 2001: 1)

A casual glance at a world atlas brings home the wide range of countries where such conflicts have recently taken place – Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia, Chechnya, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Nepal, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda, Zimbabwe and so on.

Such conflicts have regularly directly affected the provision of schooling and in such circumstances pupils are not necessarily safe at school. Examples could be found from most of the above countries but the following four extracts from articles in the Times Educational Supplement provide graphic illustration of the impact that violent conflict has on schools.

Nepal

After a brutal week in which teachers and schools have endured bombs, murder and kidnap by Maoists, a British-run charity is launching a human rights education … Maoists have been accused of recruiting child soldiers, abduction, torture and murder while the police have been accused of killing civilians suspected of Maoists activities. Last week, in the remote area of Gorka, the headteacher of a village school was taken from his bed and hacked to death by insurgents … In Jumla, Nepalese Teachers Association President Ishwori Datta Neupane, who is also a head, was abducted from his home after refusing to make a donation of NRS 80,000 (£800) to Maoist rebels. A few nights earlier, school buses belonging to the Modern Indian School in Kathmandu were destroyed by bombs … A bomb hurled at Vishwa Gorkha Academy made a one-metre hole in the wall of the school on the outskirts of the city.

(Wiggs 2000)

Turkey

About 4,000 villages in the south-east, where 90% of people are Kurdish, were forcibly evacuated by the security forces as part of the counter-insurgency campaign. Many villages were also burnt to the ground. With the resultant migration to the cities and no investment in new schools, in 15 years, class sizes have shot up. ‘We have 150 primary and secondary schools in the Diyarbakir region for 173,000 kids. That's about 80 to a classroom’, said Figen Aras, the union secretary and a high-school teacher. ‘How can they get an education this way?’ Within this traditional society of south-eastern Turkey, a collapse in the education system hits female students hardest. ‘We estimate that that about 30% of boys and 60% of girls don't get any education’, said Mr. Aras.

(Gorvett 2000)

Chechnya

According to Ramzan Avtorkhanov (a school director at a tented camp for refugees), there has been virtually no education system in Chechnya for five or six years. The present generation of children and adolescents has grown up amid the violence, wreckage and poverty of conflict with no schooling. When the first round of fighting ended in 1996, many schools, especially those in villages, did not re-open.

(Brooks 2000)

Zimbabwe

More than 2,000 teachers were assaulted and at least one was murdered in Zimbabwe during the run-up to the nation's elections last weekend. Government militia targeted teachers as part of their months long campaign of terror against all opposition supporters … The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe said that more than 9,000 teachers and 551 schools had been affected by the Mugabe-led wave of political violence and 2096 teachers had been assaulted. It also received reports of 12 teachers or their wives being raped and 25 pupils being abducted or raped by Zanu-PF thugs.

(MacGregor 2000)

Furthermore, in Zimbabwe, in the midst of serious food shortages, Mr Mugabe's Deputy Foreign Minister said that anyone who voted for the opposition could not expect to get food aid from the government and the self-styled war veterans have enforced this by deliberately stopping the distribution of food to schoolchildren in areas where their parents have supported the opposition in elections (Black 2002; Meldrum 2002).

The negative impact of these types of violent conflict on schooling is universally regarded as especially serious not only because of the obvious physical and psychological harm done to the pupils and teachers concerned but also because schooling as an institution is normally seen as inherently beneficial to society because it is a key agency of human development. But is this necessarily so?

Is formal education good for development?

The children learn nothing that is of use to them in that school. All the teachers do is to stop them from doing useful work. There is not enough water in the village and it has to be brought in. It takes three hours to walk to their fields and they often have to stay overnight. They cannot leave their children in the village. Who would look after them? The teachers? Once, long ago, the old man recalls, his grandson came home and showed him how to make compost. That was the only time either of them had profited from school.

(Zimmer 1992: 240, recounting discussions in a Mong village in northern Thailand)

Every year the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) produces a book called the Human Development Report. This is perhaps the most authoritative international statement on issues surrounding human development. In this annual publication the UNDP ranks all the countries of the world from 1 to 162 according to a wide range of variables, but special emphasis is laid on what they term the ‘Human Development Index’. This is a composite index of what they consider to be the four key indicators of human development. These are life expectancy at birth, the adult literacy rate, wealth per capita and, most important for present purposes, the combined enrolment rates for primary, secondary and tertiary levels of formal education. Thus it is assumed that enrolment in formal education is necessarily and inherently a ‘good thing’, that it is a key indicator of development and that what happens inside schools and higher education is automatically of benefit to both individuals and society. This assumption is shared, most of the time, by national governments, global institutions like the World Bank and international aid agencies where the dominant concern is with access to schooling rather than what happens in schooling. This is reflected in the enormous global expenditure on formal education and the major conference held at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 when most governments of the world met to plan how they would provide universal primary education for all children by the year 2000 – followed by a similar enormous conference held in Dakar, Senegal in 2000 where they met again to explain why they hadn't achieved their targets for 2000 but would do so by 2015. Globally, there is far more concern with rights to education than rights in education because formal education is perceived in an overwhelmingly positive light. An example of this is UNESCO's publication Education for All: Is the World on Track? (UNESCO 2002). This is the report of the team set up to monitor global progress in Education For All since Dakar. This portrays education (largely interpreted as schooling) as an undisputedly and unproblematically good thing, even claiming that,

education is also an indispensable means of unlocking and protecting other human rights by providing the scaffolding that is required to secure good health, liberty, security, economic well-being and participation in social and political activity. Where the right to education is guaranteed, people's access to and enjoyment of other rights is guaranteed.

(UNESCO 2002: 14)

Yet in reality education is paradoxical in that under the general rubric of ‘education’ many good things take place but many bad things (as well as many indifferent things) take place as well. Despite the global emphasis on access to education described above, there is nothing inherently good about education, schooling or learning. Learning can either be very good or very bad depending on what is learnt, how it is learnt and what it is designed to do. This is a quotation from a teacher which captures this dual potential well,

I have come to a frightening conclusion: I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate, humour, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanised or dehumanised.

(Ginott 1972: 15–16)

The bulk of this book explores ways in which formal schooling has often been harmful to children and their wider societies in the form of both being violent and helping to reproduce and perpetrate violence. However, even though schooling may not necessarily do anything directly violent or harmful, it often doesn't do anything positive for pupils or their families either. As a result there are significant levels of rejection of formal schooling globally and this rejection can be for good reasons as well as bad. It is certainly not always based on blind ignorance or irrationality. Low levels of school enrolment are common in developing countries and a particular problem is that of retention – keeping pupils in school once they have been sent there. The term often used for these children is ‘school drop outs’. Oxfam, for example, in a major report arguing the benefits of the universal provision of schooling, states that every year 150 million children worldwide start primary school but drop out before they have completed four years of education (Watkins 1999: 1). Various reasons have been put forward to explain this, some of which are based on ‘irrational’ or cultural deficit factors such as traditional cultural hostility to Western schooling or gender bias and a reluctance to send girls to school. Poverty has also been identified as a contextual factor with the implication that if parents simply had a little more money they would immediately send their children to school in much greater numbers. However, resistance among parents in developing countries may be far more rational and informed than these reasons suggest and the problem may be more with the school than with the family.

‘Human capital theory’, perhaps the dominant discourse in global debates on education and development, is the idea that education is a form of social and personal investment and that ‘rates of return’ can be calculated for both society and the individual. The World Bank, for example, has stated that it ‘has no genuine rival of equal breadth and rigour’ and is used by them to explain the economic success of East Asia (Samoff 1999: 68). However, in many developing countries it may be that the direct costs of sending a child to school (books, uniform, etc.) plus the opportunity costs of labour lost to the family simply outweigh the benefits of schooling. Schooling therefore becomes a bad personal investment. The academic literature on access to education in developing countries recognises that the poor quality of schooling is a disincentive to enrolling pupils at school (Colclough with Lewin 1993) and this is supported by a study of the Dagomba people of northern Ghana which found that school drop out was not just caused by the need for children to work on the farms but because parents knew that the quality of schooling on offer was very poor and in particular because of high levels of teacher absenteeism. Elders in the community put it that ‘If the child is not learning in the school and not learning on the farm, where will the child be left?’ (Casely-Hayford 1999: 160). Evidence from Pakistan (Farah and Bacchus 1999: 233) equally suggests that parental willingness to send children to school depends more on the availability of good quality schooling than on cultural resistance.

In China, Cheng Kai-Ming (1997) describes a report on low school attendance of girls among the Miao ethnic group. The report identified a number of reasons for low enrolment: economic underdevelopment, parents’ discrimination against girls, early marriage, high private costs for parents and the irrelevance and low quality of schooling. Recommendations to overcome low enrolment were reduction of private costs, expansion of the public schools sector, development of vocational education and propaganda and education to discourage early marriage. This study described the key role played by embroidery in the lives of girls in the Miao ethnic group. Embroidery skills were an important indicator of social prestige and were crucial in terms of finding a good husband. In this context embroidery has much higher economic value than schooling. Local educational planners saw low enrolment of girls as ‘discrimination against girls’ and ‘backward institutions’ and the solutions lay in ‘educating parents’ and ‘promoting the Marital Law’. Kai-Ming notes that,

The planners were thus thinking in the framework of universalising basic education and hence anything that presented obstacles to such a course needed to be rectified and changed … (but) … To the Miao parents and the Miao girls, schooling is something imposed on them because of an importance that is not felt within the community. Meanwhile in order to attend schools, they have to put aside their embroidery exercises, and because of that they worry about their future. Schooling causes problems for girls with immediate effect. From a local perspective, it is therefore not embroidery that is causing the problems but compulsory education that is disturbing their normal lifestyle and culture.

(1997: 78)

However, it is not just a case of poor physical teaching resources and costs – the irrelevant, alienating and even threatening nature of schooling can play a significant part in low enrolment and school drop out. As Samoff notes in relation to the World Bank and human capital theory, Much of the concern with education as an investment self-consciously ignores the process of education. Adopting an economic systems approach, it focuses on inputs and outputs, leaving inside the black box most of what those involved in education do every day.

(Samoff 1999: 68)

Yet there is considerable evidence that the nature of education offered is a major factor in school drop outs and low enrolment. A DfID/Save the Children study of schooling in India, Mali, Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Mongolia, Ethiopia and Peru stated that while many people put their faith in schools to offer children a better chance in life, for some,

the local schools are of such poor quality that it is developmentally healthier for children not to be in them. The school systems are run by inflexible bureaucracies – if children face difficulties in attending because of the constraints of their lives, that is their problem, not one for the school system to sort out. What is taught in school is often incomprehensible (in a language children have never heard) and unrelated to their lives. Teachers are harsh, unmotivated and unmotivating. Children drop out, having learnt little.

(Molteno et al. 2000: 2)

In India, a recent study concluded that for many parents and children the combination of expense, large classes, unmotivated and absent teachers, an overburdened and meaningless curriculum and an oppressive pedagogy are deeply alienating and account for many of the difficulties of enrolment and retention. It is not so much a problem then of school drop outs, the term often used in the literature on education and development, as school ‘push outs’ (Alexander 2000: 99). In Mali the DfID/Save the Children study suggested that not only could parents not manage without their children's contributi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1 Is formal education always good for you?
• 2 Authoritarian schooling
• 3 Schooling and violence
• 4 Control, surveillance, reproduction and perpetration: Schools and inhuman capital theory
• 5 Schooling as terrorism: Physical punishment
• 6 Schooling and learning to hate the ‘other’
• 7 Schooling as sexual abuse
• 8 Schooling can make you ill: Stress, anxiety and examinations
• 9 Learning to kill: Schooling and militarisation
• 10 Education for democracy and peace
• References