Schools are not Mental Health Clinics
Teachers, it’s not your fault.
Educational academics keep handing you a bag of rotten apples.
The Greek philosopher Socrates was condemned to death in 399 BCE for the crime of corrupting the youth of Athens. His offence was to tell them the truth. Ancient Athens has returned.
Indigenous people of this country place great importance on the process of Truth Telling so why don’t we do it in our schools?
Of all the lies we tell our children the most egregious is that many of them are mentally ill.
We know this because of a large book, a catalogue of mental diagnoses called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the United States of America. The late Oliver Sacks, the great neurologist, hated this catalogue and said that using it was equivalent to taking a sledgehammer to the mind.
It has also been described by Dr, Stephen Seager as the Chinese menu of Diagnoses because it promotes the “labeling of normal variations as pathology”. The menu consists of combinations of symptoms that when cobbled together into a certain order produce the desired diagnosis.
Teachers must toe the party line. They are told that if they refuse to acknowledge these conditions and generate the endless Education Plans that arise from them there will be “legal consequences”. Schools that tell them this are never clear what this means but if you are not seen to be taking account of a child’s “disability” you will be watched, monitored and “corrected.” Presumably you could be “reported” for discriminating against a child. Reported to whom?
These are empty threats used to stop you from questioning schools that are over-inflating the number of disabled children on educational support lists in order to benefit financially.
Child Psychologists generate expensive reports about children who are alleged to have disabilities and make recommendations for how they should be taught that involve further deceit.
I provide examples from actual reports.
“Make him think that the idea is his.”
“Tell him he is very intelligent.”
They may even advise that if something is disturbing to the student or making them feel anxious the teacher should avoid it at all costs. This last idea is completely contrary to every tenant of modern psychological therapy. If a child is afraid of making oral presentations in front of the class, he should be making oral presentations.
In the mantra of Positive Education, short form “Pos Ed”, nothing negative must be said to a child. Herein lies the problem in that most of life involves negative experiences and we are not preparing them for this.
I am yet to see a single psychologist’s report that concludes,
“There is nothing wrong with this student.”
Teachers are told that each child has a unique learning style, visual, aural, social, and so on. This leads to a “differentiated” curriculum that allows each child to be taught according to his or her style.
As more teachers desert the profession and class sizes grow it is not uncommon for teachers to be confronted by thirty children, each of whom they are told must be taught according to a unique style.
But all this was long ago proven to be a myth as even a cursory glance at the published literature will demonstrate. This conjures up the strange scenario of a mother dropping her son, who has just graduated, off at a building site for the first day of his apprenticeship and telling the site manager, “You should also know that he is a visual learner.”
Differentiated learning is simply another broken cart beside the long road of educational reform failures.
I saw all these carts when I did a teaching degree: Marzano’s Dimensions of Learning, Rich Tasks, Functional Grammar, Bloom’s Taxonomy and now the latest, Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The list goes on.
Who could forget De Bono’s ‘Six hats of Thinking’. Marzano had two bites of the apple. After he confused everyone with Dimensions of Learning - many are still trying to work out the difference between Procedural and Declarative Learning - he came up with The Art & Science of Teaching. Harold Bloom (not the Taxonomy Bloom), the great literary critic, said that the first duty of an Education Academic was to confuse everybody.
These are all desperate solutions to distract from the fact that children don’t read.
Teachers are constantly warned about ways to treat children whose behaviour is aggressive and unacceptable because of their “diagnoses”.
Where did this come from? Children with genuine autism or attention deficit are not violent and abusive by nature. Who coined this discriminatory notion? Could it be the same people who insist that the mentally ill are violent?
Unacceptable behaviour is unacceptable no matter who has it yet more and more teachers are confronted by furious parents who insist. “How dare you treat my child like that, he/she has a diagnosis.” Don’t expect the school to back you either. The New South Wales government is planning to establish a hotline for parents to complain about teachers.
Teachers are not psychologists. It is time to just let them teach and to have their backs.