The fact that the U.K. Government has had to say it will prohibit children from using mobile phones in schools is just a glimpse of what is wrong with the education system. The problem does not lie with the students but with a cross-section of adults who are charged with looking after and educating them. Strong teachers, headteachers and school principals do not need to be told from on-high which path to take in a given situation. They think critically about a topic, intellectually assessing a situation against values such as morality and high standards, and then act accordingly.
Over the last three decades, the sector has been steadily diluted by a diminishing pedigree of teacher. Adults who are more interested in what happened on X Factor the night before than in educational philosophy and ethos. This is why some of them think that a man can give birth to a baby and that there are 100 different genders. Many of them are dangerously unintelligent, and when it comes to safeguarding children against harm, this is very worrying indeed.
My favourite teacher, when I was a teenager at secondary school in the 1980s, was Mr. Winter. He taught English literature and was a master within his subject. The school had within it a number of rough and challenging pupils who were not automatically obedient and compliant with authority. Nonetheless, the adults at the school won the respect of the children by being experts within their respective fields. Many of my teachers were relentlessly inspiring and all of them possessed a zero tolerance of poor behaviour. However, Mr. Winter, with his combination of maverickism and intellectual genius, set the bar for the entire staff. He could get the most disruptive child to become passionate about reading novels and produce engaging creative writing. It was he who inspired me to become a teacher myself and eventually a headteacher. I realised that I too could inspire kids with challenging behaviour and educate in an innovative and creative style. But it was Mr. Winter’s very high expectations of pupil behaviour which underpinned both his and my own practice. The notion of a child playing about with his or her mobile phone in a classroom would have been unthinkable to Mr. Winter. Great teachers do not need to tell children what they expect of them in terms of classroom behaviour. They resonate a gravitas and presence which speaks for itself and the students just follow suit.
I believe that many teachers within the school system today simply do not know what is right and wrong for children. Those who do know often lack the backbone or moral courage to act on it, preferring instead to fall in line with the herd and go along with the profession’s latest groupthink for fear of reprisals. Regarding children using mobile phones in schools, of course they create disruption and negative behaviour. In terms of the content viewed by many children, this is often wildly inappropriate and has no place within an education setting. Teachers and headteachers should have banned them from the start, as I did very easily when I ran my own school. But the profession is saturated with the sort of adults who think that drag queens should be reading stories to little children and that teaching teenagers about choking and fisting is appropriate. The mobile phone debacle is quite mild compared to what is also going on.
When I trained to become a teacher in 1995, there was an intellectual interrogation at interview. It was an attempt to assess our critical thinking capacity. Successful applicants also had to be genuinely enthusiastic about academia and learning. We studied Vygotsky and Piaget while training and I remember staffrooms in my early years being full of conversations about educational pedagogy. This was a period when the likes of Mr. Winter were still working within the system and inspiring the younger generation of teachers entering the profession: masters within their field of expertise whom we could look up to and learn from; teachers and school leaders who were not distracted by popular culture and navigated by the latest trend. That is what children do. Instead, they were highly respected professionals who took the job of educating children seriously and with a very clear idea of what constituted right from wrong.
Over the years, I have cultivated a philosophical belief in the importance of critical thinking, freedom of speech and safeguarding children. Put very simply, I challenge orthodoxies and then express my views about my observations. If I think that something is potentially or directly harmful to a child, I will say so publicly. Of course, critical thinking goes way back to the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Socrates. Many excellent educators, past and present, use the Socratic technique. But it must be combined with freedom of speech. There is no point in noticing something, particularly if it is harmful, and then staying silent about it. All that ends up happening is the matter becoming worse in the long-run. This is what has taken place with the mobile phone fiasco. Effective teachers would have concluded early on that mobile phones in schools would cause disruption and then taken the decision to ban them immediately. Not wait for years until the situation is out of control, to the point that the Government has to step in to sort it out.
Furthermore, all adults working within education have a legal duty to safeguard children against harm. Every year, there is compulsory safeguarding training which educators must undertake. Within it, there is always the scenario of institutionalised abuse: situations in which entire organisations and schools are involved in sexual, emotional and physical abuse. We are told that even if we are the only person within an organisation to notice harms taking place, we must fulfil our legal as well as our moral obligation and raise the alarm. This is where critical thinking, freedom of speech and safeguarding children go hand in hand. They feed into one another and form a very strong protective shield around children and education as a whole. However, teachers often choose to stay silent out of fear of reprisals from others. They worry about their career prospects, their finances and reputations if they report abuse and wrongdoing. When I have attended safeguarding courses and case studies have been presented where this has happened, the delegates will always tut disapprovingly, imagining themselves to have acted completely differently if they had been in that situation: the principled individual who would have gone against the groupthink and spoken out about the abuse, putting self-sacrifice ahead of self-preservation. Virtue signalling in this way, which teachers are very good at, is very easy. It requires a lot more than that in practice. Not least of which is to acknowledge that the path of speaking out will be challenging and incur various losses, but to do the right thing anyway.
The mobile phone situation in schools provides a window through which to see the erosion of the education sector. Much of the blame for this is unfairly placed on children, their families and societal challenges. However, I would argue, having worked within schools and seen how they have changed over the last 30 years, that education professionals are the problem. Many of them do not think critically at all. Those who do so often remain silent, allowing things to happen around them which they know are harmful to children but are too weak to do anything about it. Banning mobile phones tackles one of the many symptoms of the failing education system, but we must also be transparent about the root cause of the problem. Perhaps, eventually, we will succeed in restoring the education sector to an example Mr. Winter would have recognised, where children flourish and which we can be proud of.
To support Mike’s case against his former employer for wrongful dismissal, go to the Democracy 3.0 website, navigate to ‘campaigns’ and click on ‘A Legal Battle for Free Speech‘.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.