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Andreu Navarra

I leave a talk on inclusive education and classroom violence delivered by a representative of the Catalan government feeling genuinely shaken. It is always useful to know what is being discussed in the upper echelons, and what we are expected to anticipate in our profession: what future plans are being drafted, and how our work is being redefined.

The speaker explains what teachers should do when a pupil enters into crisis during a lesson. According to her, responses to violent behaviour “should resemble an embrace rather than a gesture of reprimand”. By now, we are beginning to grasp the official logic of today’s radical inclusion agenda: the erosion of the very spirit of shared rules, replaced wholesale by a new, explicitly therapeutic framework. In short, embraces instead of sanctions.

One might even be inclined to agree—were it not for the steady stream of cases reaching us of teachers who have been formally investigated for placing a hand on a pupil’s shoulder. One shudders to imagine what would happen to a teacher in present-day Catalonia who took the injunction to embrace literally. They would last barely a fortnight. The prevailing climate is tense, juridified and openly hostile: teachers are afraid to act, increasingly subjected to disciplinary proceedings for the most trivial of reasons.

Yet these remarks are not the most unsettling, nor the most serious, nor even the most surreal. A few minutes later, the speaker explains why violence perpetrated by someone diagnosed with a mental condition cannot be considered “violence”. The argument is predictable enough: there is no intent, or at least a different kind of intent, when a pupil requiring highly specific psycho-pedagogical support assaults a teacher. Inclusion, we are told, requires a change of perspective.

The simplification is glaring, and the consequences severe. One might accept the non-responsibility of the aggressor, but the teacher suffers no less in such cases—cases that are, regrettably, becoming ever more frequent. The proposed solution consists of six-hour training courses—rebranded as “knowledge capsules”. The same old tune. What remains conspicuously absent is any serious consideration of the effects of violence on teachers themselves, who are left entirely unprotected. A significant proportion of current sick leave due to stress, anxiety or depression stems precisely from this dynamic: teachers are subjected to violence, and the system’s response is null. Zero. Nothing. Worse still, the system often shifts responsibility onto the teacher, who may end up facing disciplinary action—or, at the very least, suspicion.

The implications go further still. Are teachers authorised—are they legally protected—when intervening in a mental health crisis? Two real cases, observed in an actual school, illustrate just how detached the Department’s discourse has become from reality.

A duty teacher hears an unusual uproar coming from a Year 9 classroom. The commotion is overwhelming. Entering the room, he finds a pupil diagnosed with ASD strangling the Catalan teacher. The class divides instantly: one group egging the aggressor on, visibly excited; the other rising from their seats in horror and calling for help. The teacher has been pinned against the wall; the pupil, clearly stronger and stockier, is quite literally strangling her. The duty teacher intervenes, shields his colleague and restrains the pupil. The teacher, unsurprisingly, will never return to the school. The pupil is later taken into the corridor, where an educational counsellor who is also a psychologist steps in.

Let us pause. Does the duty teacher have the right to intervene? Morally, yes. Legally, no. He risks his job to prevent an act of violence. The non-imputability of the aggressor does nothing to mitigate the damage: learning has ceased entirely in that classroom, similar incidents occur daily, teachers avoid certain groups or take sick leave, and the system responds with empty rhetoric—or thinly veiled threats. The teacher has the right to do her job without being strangled. And then comes the coda. By chance, the same teacher later passes the landing outside that same classroom. The pupil involved in the earlier incident runs out and attempts to throw himself down the stairwell. Once again, the teacher is forced to restrain him, this time to save his life. Are we truly protecting this pupil? Are his rights being upheld? What we have done, in fact, is abandon him—and in the process abandon teachers, overwhelmed, fearful, and compelled to perform tasks for which they are neither trained nor legally responsible. The scale of official negligence is staggering. A system that refuses to confront reality condemns itself to permanent failure. Moral sermons and idealised frameworks are steering us towards everyday catastrophe.

We know the standard replies: these are isolated cases; there is no cause for alarm; there is too much catastrophism. But what do we say to the colleague who last Monday had a brass knife held to her throat? The knife was fake; it was all a joke. The fear and anxiety, however, were very real. And so it goes: day after day, week after week, muddling through.

And still, I am not finished. The speaker makes another claim that initially sounds reassuring, even commendable: a violence protocol should be opened for every act of aggression and for every affected pupil. That sounds like firmness. Like resolve. But who opens these protocols? Who maintains them, reviews them, and eventually closes them? How is this meant to work in a school with five, ten, fifteen incidents a day? How many protocols are to be generated each week, each month, each year? Have these people ever spent time in a real school?

And when, exactly, are lessons meant to happen? Suddenly, a blinding insight presents itself—the key to everything. Of course. How could I have missed it? Teachers are no longer expected to teach; they are expected to open and manage protocols. Schools are to become a kind of digital panopticon. The goal is the proliferation of endless PDFs, not the accompaniment of pupils, and certainly not their learning. Management has replaced substance. There is nothing left to teach. That must be the point.

Devastating utopias, low-cost multi-employed staffing, perpetual “shifts in perspective”—and not a word about learning, or about the need to coexist peacefully. The system either ignores or denies the real conditions under which pupils and teachers confront one another every day. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. Mental—or moral—neoliberalism, compounded by budget cuts, dogmatism and wilful blindness, has led us into the present quagmire. It is time to listen to teachers, to stop blaming them, to protect them effectively, and to rethink an inclusive model of schooling that has ended up excluding everyone.

I rise from my chair, say goodbye to a colleague, and step outside. I realise I need the street. I need the door. I need air and light.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons