Now it seems to me that pupils can have civil rights. Or pupils can be made to be pupils whether they want to be pupils or not. But it's hard to see how both arrangements can be made simultaneously. But consider this story:
A 15-year-old schoolgirl is suing her education authority claiming that school punishments breached her civil rights, it emerged today. The case could lead to detentions being abolished in Scotland.Freya McDonald, from Tomnavoulin in Morayshire, claims that 11 detentions in nine months for offences she describes as "trivial" disrupted her education and affected her health.
A solicitor for the girl and her mother, Annie, has now written to Moray council intimating their intention to sue under the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming the detentions were unlawful and seeking compensation for stress.
The family solicitor, Cameron Fyfe, confirmed that if successful the action could mean the end of detention as a punishment in Scotland's schools.
Under Article 5 of the European Convention, detention can only take place if there is a "lawful order".
He said this would mean that a detention due to run in a child's free time, as it had in Freya's case, could not come from the school itself but would need this legal authority.
Now part of me is delighted at all this. If you can't have human rights for children and compulsory education, and if you are going to have human rights for children similar to those accorded to adults, then what will happen to compulsory education is exactly what I want to happen to it.
Yet the truth surely is that a lot of people are going to suffer from the appalling philosophical and legal incoherence of all this. No one is saying: "Compulsory education is an affront to human rights." But that is what should be said, by someone involved in this argument, for this argument to be recognised for what it is. Instead, the illusion is being allowed to persist that children can simultaneously be treated like people with rights, and as the legitimate objects of compulsion.
I think most of us are familiar with the idea that good teachers are not so much teachers who follow good rules, as teachers who are clear and honest and consistent and impartial in following whatever rules they do follow. A consistently and honestly authoritarian teacher is preferable to an inconsistently liberal teacher. It seems to me that the adults involved in this case are behaving like bad teachers in this sense.
The confusion is going to be bad for children, bad for parents, bad for teachers, and good only for lawyers.
Confusion is bad, of course, but that's how things change. Little insights, that contradict the norms, get taken up and grow, and hopefully in the end they have an impact.
It's not quite right that good teachers are ones who enforce rules consistently. They also have to *believe* in the value of those rules. Consistent evil is entirely wrong, and a bit of good is better than none at all, even though upsetting apple carts also causes fallout-damage.
The trouble is, the deeper the anti-freedom people who want to cling onto irrational old ways dig in their heels (and they will, and are, of course), the more likely it is that apple carts will be upset. Hanging onto nonsense with all your might is a form of storing up trouble for the future when that might is released and everything goes flying.
(And I think that metaphor has now been extended quite enough).
Frankly, I used to enjoy detention more often than not. The incarceration allowed me, for example, to avoid cross-country runs in the depths of snow strewn midwinter in Worcestershire. Being a lazy sod, I used to doodle on quarto sized sheets of paper for the hour or so the punishment lasted. It was really no real hardship in any sense that I could understand.
The reason was very simple, in hindsight, to see. I was at boarding school, already in the edu-clink, so there was no real meaning to detention for me. In my early school days, I attended many days a week and on most Saturday mornings. My point here is that detention isn’t a serious issue. To complain about the effect of it on education is an administrative point. Does the school require schoolwork to be done during the detained period or not? If it does, the homework won’t be eaten by the dog.
So what does this say about the lawsuit larryitis north of the border? Not a lot about detention, that’s for sure. It says much more about the law, though. Law was once used for the more serious stuff, such as hanging trials and the like, when things like mortality were at stake in the dim distant past of hanging Judges like Lord Goddard.
Now, for our sins, we descend into a legal game of Trivial Pursuits. To what end, that there will be punishment free state schools? That, folks, is already with us to a significant extent. The result is the chaotic education experience prevalent in modern state schools. Soon, effective expulsion will be outlawed by some Euro Court decision. Then the delicious situation will arise about how to run a state school when there is no power to do so. Punishment is about power as much is it is about cause and effect, with respect to misbehavior.
No private school system could allow punishment free discourse in the daily running of the school. And why? Simply, there would be no schooling without sanction upon those who have little wish to be educated. Most children fully understand that there are things of value that they must learn but have no inclination to do so. Parents contract under loco parentis terms to allow schools enough power to induce their children to accept an education.
You might like to debate the issue of allowing parents to incarcerate children in private schools if there were no compulsory requirement to educate children either in school or at home. I imagine that the need for some compulsion would be evident to ensure education for many children. Very few are self-starters in this world.
This detention lawsuit is largely bogus. Lawyers in Scotland are learning from the lawyers over here in the US that there is nothing that you can’t induce the public to pay for to fatten your pocket book (wallet). There are issues about schooling that are debatable, but the courtroom is a hideously expensive way to do it. If you don’t want your daughter on that particular educational stage, then withdraw her and either, home school her, or send her to a private school.
I really don’t buy into the free time invasion point under Article 5 of the European Convention. If there are any technical issues here, there needs to be an agreement between the school and the parents over the limits to detentions. If this trivial offender needs correction, then the court case won’t do it. So why rush to court? Here we are witnessing undergraduate indulgence in legal nitpicking. If a chum takes a bite out of my Mars bar without permission, is that theft? The answer is yes, it is, but I’m not off to the magistrate’s court to settle the issue, nor will I make out a small claim in the County Court, either.
The economics of lawsuits such as these are interesting. The right infringed against is all but irrelevant and definitely trivial. So where is the real benefit? The answer can only be in the fees to be earned.
All mandated education is 'detention', therefore a violation of human rights... state schools are, after all, educational conscription centres.
Mandated education, how so? Are we talking the state here or the parent? There is a very interesting point about the limits of rights to coerce for an alleged benefit. I entirely agree that mandatory state education is little more than day jail for children; the nature of this idea is now so obvious that I am no longer surprised by articles such as this one by Walter Williams on World News Net Daily: -
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30190
Every week or so in the New York post, or our local Bay News or some other New York paper, there is a story related to education or the lack of it in the state system. It is beyond the fixing stage.
The only surprise in all this is that the legal ichthyosaurs haven’t seen the damages to feed on from the lives ruined by the education system. We are dealing here with life times of income loss here per child for the last 40 years or more. It would pale slavery reparations into insignificance in the sheer scale of provable loss. Provable loss, I hear you mutter. How so? Well, if you can contribute to your own illness by being a smoker and still win damages, why not educative loss.
After big tobacco, what about big education? Doesn’t have a sensual ring to it, though, does it? That never stopped the average cartilaginous fish of a well-known legal variety from moving in for a damages feeding frenzy. Potential damages are rather like blood in water for these creatures.
The quandary here is that the claim might be too close to home. The result could be that taxpayers might line up in large numbers wanting their money back in a humungous law suit. That would never do. The point about the big tobacco suits is that the unfortunates saw very little money and the ichthyosaurs cleaned up nicely. Quo vadis tort reform or is that delict in Scotland? The other point is why were the States suing the big tobacco companies? Perhaps, methinks, there is a form of taxation by lawsuit going on here?
As for school detention and Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the matter is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The real lawsuit passes quietly by in the depth of night.
On second thoughts perhaps school detention should be outlawed with state school attendance requirements. Note I didn’t say abolish state schools merely the need to attend them.
