A little discipline goes a long way
SEVERAL years ago, when my children were small, I worked as an artist-in-residence at several public high schools in Sydney’s south-west. My job was to help the classroom teachers show the students new and innovative art techniques. It was great fun, the teachers were welcoming and most of the kids loved making the art.
But what surprised me was the lack of discipline at some schools.
Some boys brought basketballs into the classrooms, bouncing them on the desks every so often, disrupting everyone and shaking the artworks. Some kids wouldn’t remove their school backpacks when they sat down, so they sat awkwardly constrained in their chairs.
How some of the teenagers spoke to the female staff was a revelation.
Another teacher later told me the school hierarchy would not back them up on matters of discipline.
So I wasn’t surprised when I read a policy paper from the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) recently, pointing out that Australia is ranked 70th out of 77 countries around the world on discipline.
We’re hopeless at it.
And it’s showing up in the abysmal fall in our academic results. Our 15year-old boys and girls are months and, in some cases, years behind in their subject knowledge compared to students from the early 2000s.
Two in five students say their classmates don’t listen to what their teacher says and nearly half say there’s noise and disorder in most or all lessons.
Discipline is a dirty word these days. It’s rejected as old-fashioned by many modern educational theorists, just as progressive theories about “student directed learning” and flexible and open-plan classrooms have taken hold.
One Nation MP Mark Latham has raised alarm bells about this for a while now, concerned so many new classrooms built since 2017 feature “modern and flexible spaces” — new buildings which can have up to four classes in the one open room with moveable walls.
There’s no distinct front of classroom. But students find it difficult to concentrate and there is little evidence of improved academic outcomes, Latham says.
Other politicians are waking up to the connection between disorderly classrooms and our plummeting results. Our pollies might save a bit of time if they have a good chat with Britain’s “strictest” and “meanest” headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh.
Her London school is so strict that detentions are handed out for talking in the corridors or forgetting to bring pens. Good manners are drilled into the children; they learn to be grateful for small things, to thank their teachers and even stand when the headmistress arrives at assembly.
When the UK tabloids dubbed her “Britain’s meanest headmistress”, Birbalsingh’s answer was that “true meanness is to keep a child illiterate and innumerate”.
New Zealand born, she created a remarkable new school from scratch in London, against much opposition, eight years ago called Michaeala Community School.
It’s based on traditional ideas of explicit instruction and tough love, a no-excuses behaviour policy. The school recently topped the British Progress 8 tables for maths and came fifth best school in the country.
The Centre for Independent Studies brought Birbalsingh out for lectures recently, and she mentioned an earlier visit to Australia in 2011 which “rang some warning bells”.
“I remember there were a lot of Aboriginal children in the school,” she recalled.
“They were playing guitar, the teachers were playing guitar and they were doing a lot of singing.
“I was there for a while and I said, ‘So are we going to see some maths? Are we going to see some English?’.
“The teachers said to me, ‘Well these kids aren’t going to really amount to much. Let’s have fun while we can. Let’s sing some songs and let them enjoy life’. And their teachers, through what they believe to be compassion, are constantly letting those children down by not holding them to account. The children end up in prison, on welfare or in some deadend job.”
Yes indeed. And we’re seeing the results of this Kumbaya approach in society. The hardest job will be to turn this all around.
We must empower our teachers to create orderly classrooms by giving them the right skills at university in the first place and, more importantly, to have school bosses and families back them up 100 per cent.