Discipline overthrown by the new-found tyranny of niceness
Kenneth Minogue | March 21, 2009
WHY have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively?
The collapse has not happened on all levels of society but it is widespread enough to affect everyone. The statistics, for what they are worth, are remarkable. According to Dispatches, a program aired on British television in January, a poll conducted for the National Union of Schoolmasters-Union of Women Teachers suggested that 97 per cent of teachers had disruptive children in their classes. Almost three-quarters (74.4 per cent) claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half (45.5per cent) noted the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence.
In some British primary schools, each class is equipped with women who function as behaviour support assistants. They take over the disruptive children and thus allow the tranquillity needed for a little actual teaching. A difficult child, reported Dispatches, might be asked to choose -- choose! -- whether he was prepared to go back into class and behave, otherwise he would be shepherded into a "quiet room" without distractions to cool down. These children are 10 or younger, and the pathos of their being asked to make choices when they have never acquired the integrated mentality needed for that sophisticated act is piteous to behold.
Think back before the watershed 1960s and the contrast is instructive. Then, children had defined places in a classroom and learned rapidly the decorum necessary for school life. There was no question of choosing whether or not to behave because there was an order of conduct enforced by the teacher and it applied to everyone. The teacher was an authority figure and, like all authority figures, inspired a certain amount of fear, part of which depended on the possibility of physical punishment. Such punishment was seldom used, but it was part of an understood world. As a supply teacher in a variety of primary and secondary modern schools across Brixton, south London, for 18 months in those days, I only once had occasion to call for the cane, which was sent (with the caning record book) straight up from the headmaster's office. As I raised the cane over the offender's hand, a chorus came from the class: "Mustn't raise the cane above your shoulder, Sir, LCC (London County Council) regulation." These were children who had not yet been accorded the absurdity of rights, but they understood very well that they lived under a rule of law.
The insistent question is this: How is it that so many schools have moved from the orderly world of that time to the violent distraction and educational failure of today? It is a complicated story in which the causal links can only be speculative. We must recognise, of course, that we are a different society from that of two generations ago, better no doubt in some ways, worse in others, and the causal links we detect are only part of the story.
To lose one's grip on the centrality of punishment in our civilisation is to destroy the crucial balance between punishment and reward. Without the balancing severities of punishment and criticism, praise and reward take on the aspect of bribes, which demeans those who give and those who receive. But themanagers of our world increasingly resort to inducements.
Seventeen and 18-year-olds from poor families in Britain have been given educational maintenance allowances to induce them to stay on at schools after the age of 16. Schools reported that most of the beneficiaries exploited the system, turning up to the classroom only to qualify for the grant.
The idea that people should be paid to perform their duties is a pure case of the corruption that has doomed underdeveloped countries to poverty. The destruction of the punishment-reward balance is importing the same moral collapse here.
The niceness movement, then, is a central part of the answer to the question: How have we moved from the disciplined and largely successful schools we had before 1960 to the disorderly educational failure common, though obviously not universal, today? Much that happens in schools depends on family life, of course, and some of the most radical changes clearly have little to do with politicised compassion.
From television to the mobile phone, the enclosed character of family life has been opened to outside influences, of which the most powerful is probably the peer group. The peer group locks individuals into the much narrower experiences of contemporaries rather than the intergenerational wisdom of the family.
Nevertheless, the niceness movement has powerfully changed family life. Sixties' liberation detested the frustrating conventions by which (to put it crudely) sex had to be traded for commitment. Commitment is painful, especially to individuals with little talent for controlling impulse. Many restrictive conventions were abandoned so that the young should be free to follow wherever their impulses might lead.
Divorce became easier, yet the number of couples getting married dramatically declined. This left many of the resulting children in an unstable world, especially if they belonged to what was euphemistically called a single-parent family. Single parenthood often resulted from misfortune and could work well, but public concern has focused lately on one cohort of such abbreviated families: that of teenage pregnancy. In the past, the pregnant teenager faced painful options: the shotgun marriage, adoption or the backstreet abortionist. The state responded compassionately by providing accommodation and financial support to these young people.
But many of the children of such relationships grew up to be no less feckless and impulsive than their mothers. In the 1990s, the British government made a late start in trying to identify the fathers of these children, partly to pay for child support and partly to involve men as well as women in these problems. They have not had much success. The children of such unions have been prominent in the annals of gangland and delinquency. This is a classic case of compassion in one generation leading to misery in the next.
My argument is, then, that the collapse of family and school discipline largely results from a dominant moral sentiment that we may call "the niceness movement". Niceness as a political sentiment has many departments -- political correctness is one, for example -- but I am concerned largely with its sentimental undermining of authority in family and classroom. The selling point of this niceness was, as it were, that pupils would become a nicer, gentler generation, but in fact the disorderly tendencies that teachers soon lost the power to check have spilled over into the playground, where bullying has long been increasing, and from the playground this disorder has spread into the streets. Thus can politicised compassion lead to misery.
Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require. And it has spread throughout our societies because it is often popular with voters. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and so is a good deal of democratic politics.
One last point about this moral corruption: it is in important ways irreversible. I have emphasised that the campaign against physical chastisement in schools and families is an important element in the collapse of discipline. But one cannot have discipline back merely by changing the rules because it would need a platoon of soldiers to deal with the riots likely to follow any revival of the cane. Nor could one withdraw the rights to sustenance that dependent mothers have acquired in the 20th century.
This does not mean that there will not be a backlash against politicised decency as its nastier consequences become intolerable. That backlash is likely to make the well-judged pains of past practice look merciful indeed. But that is what happens when moral structures collapse.
Standpoint
Kenneth Minogue is emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics. His publications include The Liberal Mind, Nationalism, The Concept of a University, and Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.
