What are the lawmakers doing to protect teachers from their students and deter violent children from attacking their teachers?
Increasing numbers of children in the first years of primary school are being suspended for attacking their teachers, shocking statistics show.
More than 4,000 children aged four to seven were sent home for violence against those teaching them last year, according to most recent figures.
Suspensions for attacks on teachers of Reception, Year One and Year Two classes rose by nearly 50 per cent in the last five years – with 20 pupils now being sent home every day over the issue.
In the 2008/2009 school year, just over 2,880 four to seven-year-olds were sent home for attacking their teacher – but that had jumped to 4,210 youngsters by 2012/13.
The figures, published by The Sun, lay bare the increasingly violent classrooms of England and Wales’ youngest schoolchildren.
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Tags: Education, News, suspended for attacking their teachers, Teachers Stress
Topical Teaching 
September 2, 2014 at 7:17 am |
Shocking? Not surprising. These data describe symptoms of a body under stress. This violence is not the problem. It is symptomatic of a much deeper problem which is not being addressed by the education system, instead, by focussing on the symptoms the problem is only exacerbated.
At one stage of my career it was my job to work with children presenting with behaviour issues. It was expected that I would somehow come up with a program that measured every aspect of a child’s dysfunctional behaviour, institute a short term program using stick and carrot technology, so that the dysfunctional behaviour could be managed.
I wasn’t in that job long before I realised that the behaviour did not define the child. What would you think of a doctor who prescribed aspirin for a headache only to have his patient die of a brain tumour? This, in effect, was what I was expected to do in an educational setting. I was supposed to make the headache go away. It wasn’t possible. Some of the children were extremely violent. The worst one could not be allowed into the classroom in case he literally killed someone. What to do?
It became apparent that many of these children had needs that were not being met in the classroom. It also became apparent that what was expected was for square pegs to be driven into round holes. It was also blindingly obvious that to focus on the behaviour was no way to engage the student.
Intuitively, children were engaged in some activity that would have a calming effect. Art, craft, games, stories, puzzles, nature study (not the pseudoscience that is forced on children today), basically anything that children enjoy doing were employed. At one school a bicycle was constructed out of parts scavenged from broken and discarded bicycles.
What am I saying? The more we attempt to educate with processes akin to the force feeding of a goose to fatten its liver, the more we are going to see the kinds of problems mentioned above. Education is not about the future. Children do not live in the future. Education has to be child centred or it is not going to work.
I never cease to be amazed at the resilience of children. I see, every day, beautiful, living, breathing, active young people being subjected to hours of boring, humdrum, repetitive drilling of the spelling of endless lists of words, of multiplication tables, barking at print. Nobody stops to consider whether these children actually understand the meaning of what they are expected to learn parrot fashion. They are hammered with textbooks that are so poorly written that even teachers have difficulty understanding the language that is full of ambiguities. Understanding? There isn’t time. We must learn these facts! We haven’;t time to understand them, let alone the relationships these facts bear to each other.
All this is increasingly driven by the need for children to perform on standardised mass tests.
Don’t be surprised by the increasing violence in schools. Be surprised at the mentality that thinks it can be managed by enforcing more of the same.
September 3, 2014 at 10:14 pm |
I think the surprising thing is that we are talking about Primary aged children. Having said that, I have been hit and kicked a few times.