Is there any justification for that conclusion?
When education commentators miss out all the important bits in their arguments.
People who complain about the standard of education debate on social media often claim that the problem is people are too polarised or ideological. However, very often the biggest issue is that many people in education are very bad at arguing for what they believe. One of the most common ways people argue is to make a very dubious, but emotive, assertion and then refuse to justify it. If one wishes to have a productive debate, the following five claims about an educational practice or idea should only be made with a strong supporting argument. Unfortunately, they are often asserted without any reasoning at all.
1) This is cruel.
Want to increase academic rigour? Work in silence? Use effective routines? Do something unfamiliar? Give teachers the authority they need to run a class? Say any of these things in public, and you are likely to encounter someone who thinks you are motivated by sadism. Those of us who have worked in challenging schools know that the absence of these things is rarely a kindness. But people will imply that it is an act of deliberate cruelty to give pupils anything less than complete freedom, and that a compassionate teacher would actively encourage them to chat for most of the lesson. A teacher can be sadistic, but it would be rare for anyone to proudly proclaim it. If you are going to claim cruelty is the motive behind a pedagogical practice, your argument should be 100% rock solid. Nobody will ever be persuaded by “I am kind; you are not” as an argument, but using it can discourage discussion. Yet even the vaguest possibility that a child might be inconvenienced, discomforted, or challenged is framed as deliberate shaming, child abuse or even torture.
2) This is totalitarian.
I have previously discussed those who raise the spectre of fascism in education arguments. The most striking thing they (and those who refer to other types of totalitarian states) tend to get wrong is the nature of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not entirely synonymous with authoritarianism; it is not about strict rules which are harshly enforced. Totalitarian states are obfuscatory bureaucracies with arbitrary and inconsistent sanctions that are often conspicuously inflicted on the innocent. Nor would it be correct to say that all totalitarian states have had the same type of (traditionalist) school system. Schools under Mussolini and Lenin were highly progressive. Schools in Stalin’s Russia were much more traditional. In Hitler’s Germany, the emphasis was on PE. The ultimate extreme of educational progressivism, or rather, the ultimate nightmare of educational traditionalists, was seen in Mao’s Cultural Revolution where enlightened school pupils were encouraged to murder their teachers for their ideological shortcomings.
It is difficult to draw a parallel between a classroom and a totalitarian state. It can be done, and I recommend “The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie” to anyone who wants to see a great example. But the laziest attempts to do this are those that portray the authority of the teacher as tantamount to dictatorship, or the teaching of knowledge as a form of indoctrination.
3) This will harm mental health.
“Mental health” can be a vague term. There are mental health comorbidities, i.e. mental health conditions that are likely to occur together. However, there are many differences between the many conditions that are classed as “mental health” problems. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, self-harm, borderline personality disorder, suicide, PTSD and gender dysphoria are all very distinct, even though they sometimes overlap. In this list, I’m just mentioning some of the conditions and behaviours that come up in discussions of mental health. Some people also include neurodevelopmental disorders under the umbrella of “mental health”. Others add conditions that are not even in the main diagnostic manuals, hoping teachers will recognise them as valid diagnoses even if doctors do not. Not only are there many different mental health conditions, there are many, many different causes of mental health problems. There are also many conditions where we really can’t identify the cause. Discussion about the causes of mental health problems can in itself be highly ideological.
Yet, we still have people who think they can look at a classroom, a school rule, a sanction, or a teacher’s opinion and say: “This is going to be bad for the mental health of children”. Often this is done without specifying which mental health condition they have in mind, or why they think it will be affected. Frequently, those who blame schools or teachers for mental health problems imagine that anything they don’t like causes stress and that any stress is a cause of mental health problems. Sometimes, they assume they know the best way to address mental health problems in schools, and that anyone who doesn’t support their proposals is conspiring to make children’s mental health worse. Rarely do those who make claims about mental health and education come up with anything more than slogans to justify their claims.
4) This won’t work for children with SEND.
If “mental health” is a vague term, SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) makes it look like a model of precision. Almost any problem a pupil might have in school (except those arising from not having English as a first language) will be framed by someone as being about SEND. Mental health problems, poor behaviour, disappointing academic performance, and deficits in social skills can all be thrown into the SEND mix, along with diagnosed medical conditions and obvious physical difficulties. Incredibly, however, people will argue against educational ideas by claiming that they are to the detriment of those with SEND. Often, no details are given as to how they are detrimental.
When details are given, they are usually based on the most ridiculous claims about particular conditions. It is argued that children with ADHD cannot control their behaviour in any way. Even more bizarre are the claims about ASD. I frequently hear it claimed that large numbers of autistic pupils in mainstream schools cannot even look at their teachers, or meet other basic expectations. Worst of all is when pupils with SEND (particularly ADHD and ASD) are characterised as uncontrollably violent. This uncontrollable violence is something that teachers in mainstream schools are to blame for and should be expected to put up with.
5) This is racist.
Of the claims mentioned in this post, this should be the least vague. The moral force of the word “racist” derives from the fact that racism is a form of irrational and harmful prejudice, and from a broad consensus that discrimination based on race is patently unfair. Few people will explicitly defend racial prejudice or discrimination, and this tends to extend to prejudice against ethnic and cultural groups that cannot easily be classified as distinct “races”. If you have a strong argument that an individual is motivated by dislike or hatred of an ethnic group, or that their actions will have a detrimental effect on people according to their race or ethnicity, that will always be important.
In recent years, there have been attempts to broaden the scope of the term “racist” beyond prejudice and discrimination. I don’t intend to reopen that debate here. Nevertheless, I would point out that if one is claiming that an idea, person or institution is racist, one needs to be clear if one is using a definition of “racist” that most people would not be familiar with. This is particularly important when statements using the word “racist” would lose all moral urgency if stated unambiguously. Some arguments hinge on using the broadest possible definitions of the word “racist” and the lowest possible standards of evidence for accusing others of racism. This is most obviously a problem where the relevance of race is either tenuous or non-existent. At their worst, efforts to bring race into contexts where it is not relevant can be racist; for example, when people argue that standards of behaviour or academic performance should be lowered because black pupils are less likely to be able to meet them.
Are you saying that cruelty; valid comparisons with totalitarianism; mental health problems; SEND, or racism don’t exist?
I will finish by stating that I am not saying that any of the conclusions I have discussed are automatically invalid. If any of the claims outlined in this post can be made reasonably and sincerely, then they should be made. I believe that I have made each of these claims in an education debate. What concerns me is the extent to which these claims appear as conclusions without any justification and without any expectation that justification is necessary. Where that happens, one has to suspect that the intention is to stifle debate.