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‘It’s Nothing To Do With Race’

Veteran British teacher writes that many UK public schools suffer from disordered classrooms -- and the problems come from lower-class whites
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A British schoolteacher comments on the “Busing Or Bust” post from the other day. I’ve adapted it slightly for a separate post. The emphasis below is mine:

I’ve taught here in the UK for over 40 years (officially retired two years ago, but still going into school on a voluntary basis), and we have exactly the same pathologies in so many classrooms here: what’s euphemistically called ‘low-level disruption’, something that covers everything from pupils shouting across the room to their mates to telling a teacher to ‘F- off’. It’s practically impossible to teach everyone in these circumstances: the most one can do to control the disruption enough to enable the pupils who want to work to do so, knowing that they’re quite likely to get beaten up outside the classroom by the thug tendency. And younger, inexperienced teachers can’t manage to control the class at all: it’s unsurprising that many drop out. And that seems to be worsening. The statistics from the National Foundation of Educational Research are worrying:

“The retention rates of early career teachers are also lower now than they were a few years ago. Around 87 per cent of teachers who enter teaching remained in the profession at the end of their first year, which is a figure that hasn’t changed since 2010, until this year, when it decreased to 85 per cent. Worse still, the three-year retention rate has dropped from 80 per cent in 2011 to 73 per cent in 2017 and the five-year rate has dropped from 73 per cent in 2011 to 67 per cent in 2017.”

In other words, a third of new teachers leave the profession within five years of starting. (It’s slightly better in primary schools and worse in secondaries.) And the two factors most mentioned in surveys of teachers leaving are workload (which is huge during term-time) and behaviour.

The thing is, though, that it’s nothing to do with race: the major offenders are white — but they are disproportionately from (another euphemism) ‘deprived backgrounds’: mother’s never been married, has several children by various fathers, and lives on state benefits (which are not particularly generous: poverty is part of the problem, though not the largest part). Drugs and alcohol are always in the background, and boys in particular carry knives. Culture matters, not race.

Here’s a City Journal article from nearly 25 years ago (!) by the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple (pen name of Anthony Daniels), in which he discusses at length British schools as failure factories. In this first excerpt, Dalrymple, who spent his career working in prisons and with the lower classes, talks about how lower-class kids in the UK are socialized:

Alarmingly, this arbitrariness reinforces precisely the kind of discipline which I see exercised around me every day by parents whose philosophy of child rearing is laissez-faire tempered by insensate rage. A small child rushes about noisily, creating havoc and wreaking destruction about him; the mother (fathers scarcely exist, except in the merest biological sense) first ignores the child, then shouts at him to stop, then ignores him, pleads with him, ignores him again, laughs at him, and then finally loses her temper, screeches abuse at him, and gives him a clout on the ear.

What is the child supposed to learn from this? He learns to associate discipline not with principle, and punishment not with his own behavior, but with the exasperated mood of his mother. This mood will itself depend upon many variables, few of them under the control of the child. The mother may be irritable because of her latest row with her latest boyfriend or because of a delay in the arrival of a social security payment, or she may be comparatively tolerant because she has received an invitation to a party or has just discovered that she is not pregnant after all. But what the child certainly never learns is that discipline has any meaning beyond the physical capacity and desire of the mother to impose it.

Everything is reduced to a mere contest of wills, and so the child learns that all restraint is but an arbitrary imposition from someone or something bigger and stronger than himself. The ground is laid for a bloodyminded intolerance of any authority whatever, even should that authority be based upon patently superior and benevolent knowledge and wisdom. Authority of any kind is experienced as an insult to the self, and must therefore be challenged because it is authority. The world is thus a world of permanently inflamed egos, trying to impose their wills on one another.

How do you suppose kids who are raised that way do in school? Answer: the way the British schoolteacher says they do.

Here’s a second bit from Dalrymple’s 1995 essay:

There is one great psychological advantage to the white underclass in their disdain for education: it enables them to maintain the fiction that the society around them is grossly, even grotesquely, unjust, and that they themselves are the victims of this injustice. If, on the contrary, education were seen by them as a means available to all to rise in the world, as indeed it could be and is in many societies, their whole viewpoint would naturally have to change. Instead of attributing their misfortunes to others, they would have to look inward, which is always a painful process. Here we see the reason why scholastic success is violently discouraged, and those who pursue it persecuted, in underclass schools: for it is perceived, inchoately no doubt, as a threat to an entire Weltanschauung. The success of one is a reproach to all.

And a whole way of life is at stake. This way of life is akin to drug addiction, of which crime is the heroin and social security the methadone. The latter, as we know, is the harder habit to kick, and its pleasures, though less intense, are longer lasting. The sour satisfaction of being dependent on social security resides in its automatic conferral of the status of Victim, which in itself simultaneously explains one’s failure and absolves one of the obligation to make something of oneself, ex hypothesi impossible because of the unjust nature of society which made one a victim in the first place. The redemptive value of education blows the whole affecting scene apart: no wonder we don’t want no education.

Read the whole thing. 

We can’t talk about these things, of course.

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