‘Beatings will continue until morale improves” is an old joke often seen pinned on the inside of work cubicles.
No joke, however, for Australian schoolchildren if Kevin Donnelly, co-chairman of Australia’s national curriculum review, has his way.
Donnelly is quoted as claiming that corporal punishment in schools and elsewhere was effective during his childhood and still has some merit.
This theory — apparently based on the 19th-century belief that beating children will somehow enliven their natural curiosity about learning — has, fortunately for vulnerable children, not found favour among educators for many years.
Donnelly has previously attracted controversy for suggesting the school system isn’t the only thing about Australia that needs fixing.
“Multiculturalism is based on the mistaken belief that all cultures are of equal worth,” he has written.
His views on religion, homosexuality and gender in education have divided opinion and caused widespread criticism over his high-level appointment.
But there he is, firmly entrenched, a controversial and strongly opinionated individual in a position of considerable influence, attempting to impose 19th-century thinking on the conduct of 21st-century public education in Australia.
Times have changed, yet polemicists like Donnelly who have ascended to positions of power often appear immune to the significance or the implications of social evolution, especially as it applies to the education of children.
Praised by some conservative groups, Donnelly claims that the best education systems are grounded in “rigour” and “discipline,” both of which apparently recognize generous corporal punishment administered by adults on children, despite extensive evidence that such treatment often develops serious anger issues in adult later life.
Fortunately, Donnelly’s ideas about schooling have limited popular traction, both in Australia and in Canada.
In fact, the Toronto board of education pioneered the abolition of corporal punishment in 1971.
On Feb. 14, 1973, B.C.’s NDP then-education minister Eileen Dailly successfully pushed through some groundbreaking legislation banning corporal punishment in schools. It is an irony that, as a result, Dailly received hundreds of death threats.
The most recent and, I hope, final word on the matter arose from the Supreme Court of Canada decision in January 2004. While it abolished physical forms of discipline in schools, it ruled that “teachers may reasonably apply force to remove a child from a classroom or secure compliance with instructions, but not merely as corporal punishment.”
That’s an interesting insight into our less-violent culture, but the bigger issue is the vulnerability of public education to the influence of individual demagogues and polemicists who have climbed to positions of potential power and are bent on shaping the system according to their own ideas.
That was not as possible when school boards still played an effective role in public education. The presence of one or two tub-thumpers on a board of otherwise sensible people made little difference.
But with the diminished capacity of school boards, shuffled aside by government in the current contract negotiations, and with the fading interest of sensible people in becoming school trustees, boards are being gradually replaced by weaker candidates and provincially centralized government thinking.
Here in B.C., the endless conflict between the political left-right philosophies of the personalities heading up both the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and government contract negotiations not only compromised the validity of the all-important Grade 12 English exam, but shut the schools and sent kids and teachers home with the threat that they might not reopen in September.
It is not so long ago that communities, represented by effective school boards, would never have allowed this to happen.
It might seem a stretch to draw a parallel between extremists and demagogues like Donnelly in Australia and the endless BCTF-government problems in B.C.
Yet the centralizing of power among a few individuals, along with the erosion of distributed authority and the lack of interest in strong community school boards, might open the door to incremental control by top-down extremist thinking.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
