Teachers: look up the word ‘authority’

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 10 August 2014, 11:00 Last update: about 11 years ago

Once upon a time, long, long ago (as all good stories begin), I received a telephone call at home from a young and well-meaning teacher who sounded a little upset. “Your son (son’s name deleted in the interests of a quiet life) is walking round the lab table tomfooling and distracting the others who are not concentrating on my lesson. And when I tell him to stop it, he ignores me and just carries on.”

I was flummoxed, trying to work out what was expected of me here. There was a little pause and then I said: “So you thought a good solution would be to tell him that you were going to ring his mother? That only undermines your own authority in the classroom. I’m the authority figure at home but you are the authority figure in the classroom and the headmaster is the authority figure in the school and none of us should trespass on each other’s territory. You lay down the law in class and I lay down the law at home. My only role in that is to back you up once you have laid down the law, but I can’t do your job for you and lay down the law in the classroom. Next time he walks round the lab table cracking jokes, instruct him to stop it immediately in a voice and tone that mean business, and if he doesn’t, remove him from the classroom to the corridor. If he carries on distracting through the glass panel in the door, remove him to the headmaster’s office.”

This was a novel concept to the young man who, when I look back, can’t have been much older than his charges. It might also have been a bit of a novel concept for a school that was fairly new and still trying to navigate the difficult territory of imposing discipline without ruling through fear.

But it wasn’t a novel concept to me and it certainly will not be a novel concept to anybody of my generation or to those a generation or two older, especially if they boarded at school. And here I don’t mean ruling through fear of violent punishment, caning or humiliation. There was none of that at the convent where I was schooled, but we were very clear in our minds that teachers and the headmistress laid down the law at school in a way that even parents had to abide by and not interfere with and could not rescue us from, while parents laid down the law outside of school. Parents whose children were at boarding school therefore ceded almost the whole of their authority to the school. With many of them, that was the whole point and purpose and even one of the main attractions. Whether this was right or wrong is beside the point. The point is that both school and parents recognised and understood the importance of delineation of authority, and not interfering with or trying to undermine the other.

Because teachers and heads of school are now so fearful of being reported by parents for wrongful punishment, they are not laying down the law at all. You can’t really blame them, given the scenes and news stories that parents create when a “nasty teacher picks on my poor little child”. Some parents will side with their child no matter what that child does, and a lot of parents think their children are incapable of bad behaviour, despite evidence to the contrary.

They will round on any teacher who tries to discipline that child and when that happens, the child’s behaviour becomes worse and topples over into outright arrogance, because he or she knows that the teacher is afraid to do anything, the head of school has been reduced to reporting the matter to mummy and mummy is in full-on tiger mode, protecting her defenceless baby and justifying his or her actions however indefensible they are. The result is one of the many insufferable children we now see all around us, and demoralised teachers who simply can’t do their job and maintain control in the classroom.

I was prompted to write this by a report in this newspaper which said that teachers are “increasingly coming across embarrassing situations that potentially jeopardise their careers”, including teenage girls going into class without their knickers on and spreading their legs for male teachers, and boys as young as 10 discussing hand-jobs and blow-jobs. I really can’t see what the problem is here. If any one of us had done that at school we would have been sent straight to the headmistress by the teacher in question, and would then have been expelled, or at the very least suspended for a considerable period of time and allowed to return to school only in disgrace. Girls were expelled for far less than that, as I recall. The teacher would have had absolutely no reservations about stopping the lesson immediately with a “Mary, out of class, NOW. And straight to the headmistress’s office.” Our only male teacher was a young friar who is now the Bishop of Benghazi, and we teased him relentlessly and remorselessly (and were disciplined equally relentlessly and remorselessly for doing so, though he himself tended to see the funny side) though I don’t think any of us removed our pants. One didn’t in those days. Sharon Stone hadn’t yet come on the scene.

As for the discussions on sex between boys of 10, I can’t understand why teachers are now panicking about this sort of thing. It’s always happened – the difference now is that children have a lot more details via the internet (and quite frankly, their own parents’ unwise behaviour) that we did not. But I clearly remember a bunch of us gathered, aged not more than 11 or 12, round a well-thumbed copy of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, sequestered from somebody’s holiday flat and left behind by a tourist, reading all the naughty bits. The teacher confiscated it. In the case of the boys and the far more serious discussion, parents would have to be brought into the equation but only because whatever is happening is obviously happening at home. But at school itself, all such discussion should be tackled by the teacher or head of school.

Unfortunately, teachers have been frightened into becoming total wimps where their charges are concerned, by parents who really don’t know or understand what is best for their children. Worse still, they then abdicate authority altogether and try to hand it back wholesale to the parent. The parent is then expected to be both the authority at home and at school, which would be unworkable even with parents who know what their responsibilities are in terms of discipline. It is particularly unworkable when the root cause of this problem is parents who are incapable of disciplining their children and who go ballistic when their children are disciplined at school.