Malcolm McLean's Blog: Faith schools and Catholic culture., page 2

Formal vs informal discipline

In every school, whether the most selective independent or the slummiest state comprehensive, classroom discipline is what everyone notices. The good teachers are the ones with effective classroom discipline, give or take.

That leads some headmasters to set out formal discipline policies or frameworks. Discipline is so important, the thinking goes, that we need to actively manage and control it. So there are all sorts of systems put in place, at a minimum there's usually a formal "detention" process. The detentions are then recorded. That's the point at which parents start to get concerned, if their child has a bad disciplinary record, that might affect setting, or choice of secondary school. So the school tends to lose the support of parents the more formal it makes it's disciplinary procedures.

There's also a danger of creating a court-room atmosphere, especially with suspensions and expulsions. If a sanction is reversed, that fatally undermines whoever imposed it, not something you want in a school.

Informal disciplinary measures are better. They work for the particular teacher and in his hands. A children tend to respond better. Obviously you can't have informal suspensions or expulsions, but there is no need to overformalise the detention procedure.

Selection

Much of secular life revolves around selection and exclusion - bright children are selected fro the grammar school, or for top set within a non-selective school, Football teams are highly selected. Then later in adult life, big employers interview cohorts of candidates and select the top 10% or so, rejecting the rest. It can seem that life is about passing selection.

Except not really. Many activities are open to anyone. As Woody Allen said, "90% of life is about showing up". That's true of clubs, political movements, and so on, it's also very true of the Church. As long as you show up, you are a known face.

That;s why, in Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's Abagail doesn't have to do anything particularly special. Unlike Adam, who is challenged in every way, Abagail just sails through school life with scarcely a care in the world. Some are called to a lot, others just to showing up, they are selected by virtue of being sent to the school - even the choice to attend St Tom's wasn't really made by Abagail but by her father.

St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's day today. Basically an excuse to drink Guinness. I'm not Irish and I don't have any Irish relatives, but I'm Catholic because my grandmother converted as a teenager, at the same time as her elder sister married and Irishman. So like most British Catholics, my faith is from Ireland.

in Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's the children get a free day for All Saints Day. All Saint's day comes at the start of November, so about the middle of the autumn term. It's very important that schools mark these types of festivals. Which for a day school leads to a bit of a contradiction, if you give children a day off, most of them won't attend mass, because even if parents are good weekly mass goers, a lot of them don't attend holy days, because it's a difficult disruption to routine. If you don't give children a day off, it's not really a holiday, and the "feast" can easily degenerate into just a hastily organised and partly resented compulsory school mass.

A boarding school doesn't have those problems. A feast day can be marked properly, and it can always be marked.

Animal rights

Quite a lot of Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's deals with animal rights. The novel is pretty clear - hunting is fun and vegetarianism is self-indulgence. But animal rights activists are pretty passionate about their cause, and gratuitous cruelty to animals is an unattractive trait. But it's impossible to raise animals for food without some compromises to welfare standards, and ultimately the animal must be slaughtered. Surely by extension we should have vegetarianism.

In fact, as every vegan knows, vegetarians are living in a world of illusion, Drinking milk doesn't involve killing cows, right? And eating eggs doesn't mean killing chickens. But what do they think farmer do with boy calves? It's necessary to be vegan - not to eat any animal products at all 0 if you wish to separate yourself from industrial exploitation of animals. And in fact vegans are also pretty deluded about agriculture. How do they think farmers prevent rabbits from eating all the carrots? Arable farming also kills wild animals.

Animal rights is mainly a revolt against reality. It's driven mainly by women, who instead of the world as it is, want the world to be a chocolate box. A fluffy pet animal is sometimes part of the illusion. In fact what is wrong is the entire "rights" narrative. "Rights" are something granted by an authority to a privileged group under its authority. So golf club members, but not non-members, may have the right to use the links at any time. But the golf club must own the course for that right to be effective. the UN has tried to grant certain "human rights" to everybody, but it's effective only in so far as the UN's writ runs, in fact it's largely an exercise in tokenism and groups such as the Isis have contempt for the UN.

Now a civil government can't grant many effective rights to wild animals. They live an existence substantially beyond its control, they have no medical care, no guarantee of food, most are predated upon by other animals. The human authority can only ban or regulate certain human actions, such as the setting of traps. The civil government can give rights to farm or pet animals. But it's only prudent to do so as far as economics allow, the animals can't have inherent rights by virtue of being sentient. Nor can the humans who tend them. The rights come from a competent superior authority.

Divorce backlash

The good news is that, in Britain at least, we are seeing a fall in the number of divorces as the generation that was hit by divorce itself comes of age.



As we see from this chart produced by the British national statistical service, the mean age of divorcing couple has steadily risen. But the overall divorce rate is flat, falling slightly even. That means that more older people and fewer younger people are getting divorced, and we should see divorce fall back to low levels once the Baby Boomers have worked through the system.

Broken families

A lady called Jennifer just posted this sad image on Mercator



It's the number one issue facing children today. Traditionally, children's fiction featured orphans, in order to remove the protection of the parents and allow for some melodrama. But we no longer have to do that. The statistics vary a bit from Western country to Western country and how you count them, but something like a half of all children are living in a non-regular relationship.

I was careful to reflect this in Adam and Abagail Go to St Toms Mary Walker's parents try to have a "decent divorce" her parents are professionals, they come to visit her together at half term. But she is still in many ways the saddest child out of the ten, because no-one has told her that her situation is objectively wrong and she can have some legitimate self-pity. Instead she tries to tough it out, but she is simply not strong enough to do so, she becomes narrow and judgemental. The other girls don't mind at first, but then a dispute blows up, and she is absolutely hammered by blonde Mary.

St Tom's is in a way a refuge from bad parenting, but it should go without saying that a school, however good it is, cannot fix a bad home. A Christian school is in a difficult position. It must promote the Christian view of marriage, but it can't criticise parents too severely. A divorced Mum or Dad is still the adult with the closest connection to the child and the greatest interest in his welfare. A novelist is not so constrained.

Purple hair

Madison Holman, of Passmore Academy, age 13 was bullied so severely at school that her hair turned grey. So her mother paid for a "confidence-boosting" hair dye. The dye contained subtle purple highlights. The school objected and put Madison in isolation, and her mother went to the papers.

The school really didn't have a choice. Allow purple highlights, and soon anything goes. Hair should be its natural colour, there's maybe a case for relaxing that requirement if hair turns grey, but it must have a naturalistic dye. (One problem is that dye doesn't wash out, so if school clamps down on a dye, it must either isolate the pupil for an unreasonably long period, or it must insist on a neutral over-dye).

Children often say that if they are allowed to be more grown-up, they will be lesser targets for bullies. There's often more than a grain of truth in that. Smokers will bully non-smokers, given half a chance. A fashionable hair dye will raise a 13 year old girl's status. But it's ultimately a zero-sum game. The bullies might move on to someone else, but when everyone has dyed hair, it's on piercings or tattoos. Ultimately children must stand up against bullies, and be what they want to be, not what social pressure dictates. High status Mums don't allow dyed hair, and ultimately having a high status Mum raises a girl's social status more than any fashion statement.

Normal Food Users

Blonde Mary's mother is food faddist, as is, in a gentler way, Sebastian's father. They both expect great results from eating the approved diets. Because both are rich, St Tom's is a fee-paying school after all, they are immune from the worst excesses of food advertising, that you become a "healthy" and "natural" and therefore "good" person through consuming the right products.

None of the girls develop feeding problems at St Tom's. That's because the food is fairly horrible - porridge and undercooked sausages. So when they get an opportunity to eat halfway decent food, they lap it up. Cecilia was a faddy eater who had the crusts cut off her sandwiches, but she grows out of that.

In real girls' boarding schools, eating problems are a scourge. Too much pressure is being put on girls to look perfect and to be perfect, and they are told to do that through worldly measures, especially exercise and diet. Anorexia is the result, and it starts with healthy eating messages. Unfortunately, obesity is also a problem. I see children today go to the Indian takeaway to buy kebabs and chips. When I was a child, that would have been impossible, we just didn't have enough money to do that. But times change,, Mum is a work earning money, and junk food becomes everyday rather than a treat.

Food needs to be put in its proper place, You can't become a good person or even a particularly healthy person by eating healthily. You can become too fat by eating too much.

Exam and target mania

The British government is bringing in a new system to measure schools called Progress 8. The old system measured schools on the basis of how many of their pupils got grade C or above at GCSE (English school leaving exams, taken at 16), which encouraged schools to focus on their C/D borderlines and neglect both the bright ones and the no-hopers. One headmaster even had pictures of all his borderline pupils plastered over the staffroom, with standing instructions to teachers to greet them in the corridors to give them a sense of value and self-worth.

Needless to say, the new measure has instantly been criticised. Progress 8 measures the difference between a child's predicted grade at 11 and his actual grade. It has been criticised because it demands the same "gradient" from poor and good pupils. If a predicted B gets and A, that's worth the same as if a predicted E gets a D. There's likely a lot in that complaint, if a secondary school can get an illiterate child at 11 up to being able to just about read a popular magazine, it has done extremely well. But that would only be one point on the English GCSE.

The truth is that a really fair, centralised, top-down method for judging schools is impossible to devise. Another truth is that, given two schools, one with a poor intake and one with a good intake, and exactly the same effort from staff, the one with the good intake will be a lot better.. Teachers can concentrate on actually teaching rather than acting as social workers. What's the measurement actually supposed to measure, and what good is it to anyone? Time to abandon these measures totally, not ticker with them even more.

Cannabis damages the heart

A new study is just out that shows that cannabis has an effect on the heart.

It's from the Einstein Medical Centre in Philadelphia and a properly conducted piece of research. The researchers claim to have controlled for all the known variables - pot-heads being more promiscuous, more likely to eat diets high in junk food, more likely to smoke tobacco, and so on. The effect supposedly remains after all these are accounted for.

Now you always have to be a bit sceptical about these types of findings. You just can't control for everything, for example pot-heads are less religious than the normal population, and we know from other studies that regular church attenders suffer fewer heart problems than non-attenders, probably because the non-attenders get lonely in middle to old age. It may not be a direct, toxic, pharmacological effect on the heart as they suggest. But it's still something to think about.

The other weakness in the study is that they chose 1.6% of identified problem cannabis users as their pot-head population, and treated the rest as non-users. But cannabis use is far above 1.6% in the American population, so the non-user population must be polluted with pot-heads. That is likely to weaken the findings.

Anyway, get your copies of Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's into young people's hands, and lets get the anti-drugs message out.