Remember when troublesome kids in a classroom were given a warning or two, and then sent outside when the warnings were ignored? Being sent outside was a biggie because it often meant a trip to the Principal’s office when the class was over and depending on how bad the behaviour was, a possible letter sent home or even worse, a telephone call made on the spot. Generally, the child’s parents would side with the school and deal with the little miscreant when they got home. It worked.
Everything changed, however, once children were handed more rights than they knew what to do with and every school got a counsellor to ensure that every child knew what those rights were. Problem children were no longer punished for bad behaviour because they had a talk with the counsellor instead who had a tendency to exonerate them from blame and the situation escalated when the parental trend to not control their child’s behaviour became the norm. Schools could suspend a student but expulsion became more difficult as various agencies stepped in support the child, leaving schools powerless to act. At home, as the child aged and the bad behaviour was no longer cute, parents who’d opted out of any type of discipline could fall back on such labels as Attention Deficient Disorder and Attention Deficient Hyperactive Disorder to get them off the hook. Lazy parents loved the ADD and ADHD labels because they could blame the “disorder”, not themselves and pop the little monster on behaviour surpassing drugs. Problem solved.
Not quite. Not every problem kiddy is medicated. A lot of them have parents who flatly refuse to accept their child is at fault. It’s the school’s fault, teacher’s fault, another child’s fault and in some cases, even the victims of their child’s bullying or violence is at fault! I’m not sure how they can arrive at that one, but they do. Then the whole thing goes beyond them and they “need help” and want “the government” to fix it.
Well possibly that may be on the cards now, with new laws being introduced into state parliament which will force students who pose a significant risk to others to enrol in distance education were they will be monitored and study online from home while the danger they pose to teachers and other students is assessed. This is a very good thing, even if it is at least a decade or so late. It means that students who commit crimes outside of school hours, especially when that behaviour can cause issues in the school as well, can be stopped from returning to school. Under the proposed Education Amendment (School Safety) Bill 2017, school principals will regain control and it will bring the 30-year-old Education Act up to date with the kind of threats posed by radicalised students and those who pose a genuine threat via anti-social or violent behaviour.
And so it should! And it will put the onus back onto parents to curb their children’s bad behaviour; something many of them haven’t been doing for a couple of generations now, leaving it up to others to do the “parenting” because they didn’t want the inconvenience of having to do it themselves, “inconvenience” being the key word here. But these new laws should change that (so long as they really are put into practice and child agencies/counsellors butt out and let it happen) because the thing with lazy parents is this; they tend to ignore their child’s behavioural issues, no matter how bad, when it doesn’t directly impact on them. Banning the little monsters from the classroom though, and forcing them to enrol in distance education means they will be at home which puts them back under parental control and when suddenly lumbered with their problem offspring, they will no doubt act. A school principal once said to me “The best way to get some parents to actually do something about their kids’ bad behaviour is to make it inconvenient for them. Once they can’t unload the problem onto someone else, they soon step up to the mark.” Something they should have been doing from day one.
Anyway, on paper it looks good and if the bleeding hearts are kept out of it, schools should be able to return to being safe places again and the flow-on will apparently see teachers having more powers to deal with those uncooperative, troublemakers and classrooms should go back to being the more peaceful learning spaces they used to be. The physically and/or violent schoolyard/social media bullies could be in for a shock too from the flow-on effect because I think the laws apply to them as well. Either way, many of the social/behavioural problems that have been allowed to infiltrate schools for too long will now be addressed.
See? The government is fixing it, after all!
