American polarisation; School for New Stoicism; classroom behaviour

Published: Wed, 10/04/23

RSA Daily

For atheists, rationalists and secular humanists in Australia

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Rationale, the magazine of the Rationalist Society of Australia

Good morning ,

I spent a few years teaching maths at state high schools and (all boys) tech schools in my early twenties. Even then it was a challenge to maintain order so that the kids could actually learn something but I gather it's got a lot worse - Australian classrooms are, apparently, among the worst in the world for discipline, ranking 70th out of 77 in the OECD.

Medicalising bad behaviour won't solve the problem. In my experience, most kids want classroom order and get just as frustrated as the teacher when a few disrupt and are not dealt with.

The question, of course, is how to do it?

Thoughts?

Lead stories

America's Proclivity For Extremism Has Religious Roots

Was the United States founded as a Christian nation? It's complicated, explains John Fanestil.

“America has been entrusted with a sacred mission: to spread religion, freedom, and civilization — by force, if necessary .. If we want to understand the current political moment, we must confront the truth that our nation was born from a movement that combined radical political extremism with the exercise of racialized violence."

About US

Biologist turned philosopher Massimo Pigliucci is establishing a School for a New Stoicism, an informal institution that asks the question, "What would Stoicism look like today if it had had an uninterrupted history from its foundation in the 4th century BCE?". Would it have formed a better foundation for Western civilisation than Christianity? Sign up and be part of the journey to find out...

Our classrooms are among the world's worst. The UK's 'behaviour tsar' might have the answer

I spent some years in educational research but I must admit, much of it tends to be fashionable nonsense. Some sensible advice from the UK's Tom Bennett:

There is a lot of magical thinking in education. There are naïve people who, unwisely, claim that children can learn through anything other than intense focus, extended periods of thinking, listening and practice.
Fabulists in education claim that a well-planned lesson is sufficient to create good behaviour as students are naturally drawn into the joys of calculus, phonemes or the Corn laws. This is a fantasy propagated by people who do not teach children.
When schools (again, well-meaning) attempt to do away with sanction systems, school culture disintegrates.
What is not reasonable is for schools to imagine that they have the resources or the capacity to treat every act of misbehaviour as indicating a need for therapy, or therapeutic processes.
Another profound, and related, wrong turn is when schools attempt to build perfect cultures by replacing all sanctions with another popular therapeutic mistake, restorative justice.
Treating ‘all behaviour as a communication’ is another popular dogma that has little basis in reality, and teachers that attempt to be amateur sleuths, telepaths and psychiatrists will find themselves confounded by reality.