Classroom incivility
A new Canadian study suggests that classrooms are becoming less civil. Covid, technology and generational issues are cited. Are classrooms seeming less civil in other countries or have recent studies been done?
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/kids-ruder-classrooom-incivility-1.7390753
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/kids-ruder-classrooom-incivility-1.7390753
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All in all, while I'm prepared to acknowledge that covid might have changed things a bit for the worse(*), I'm always a little wary of "Golden Age" thinking when these types of complaints surface.
(*) I'll also note a certain irony, in that during the pandemic, it was the opponents of social-distancing who were portrayed as selfish and unwilling to heed legitimate authority. But now, at least in regards to the youth, the thought seems to be that social-distancing itself made people selfish and unwilling to heed legitimate authority.
It could more accurately say “Falsely attributed to Socrates.” See here. So age-old, sorta-kinda-maybe. But there’s no record of Socrates saying that about youth. As that article point out, “Socrates—far from being one of the people sitting around complaining all the time about the youths being corrupt—was actually convicted and sentenced to death for supposedly having been the one who corrupted them.”
Historically, I have read a lot of Victorian school log books, and bad behaviour is not a new thing. I came across one account of a girl in Aberdeen who had returned to school after being very ill with something - measles, I think. Her mother had sent her in with a note saying that little Florence was still delicate and must not be punished for anything. Delicate little Florence spent a merry day sticking her tongue out and making faces at her classmates, and then jumped onto a chair so that she could wave to people and make faces out of a window.
By recollection a report of her behaviour was sent home to her mother, who was told that any punishment-amnesty for Delicate Florence would not continue into a second day of classroom disruption.
More exactly, Socrates was corrupting aristocratic youth, by telling them how unfair it was that they had to follow Athenian democracy like everyone else, and wouldn't it be great if they could lord it over everyone again like their ancestors had.
About 50% of my current class (I'm a student) at a college (not uni) are doing other things (watching football on their device, doing assignments, doing personal projects...) while the teacher teaches. They also ask questions after class that were clearly spelled out (I understand there can be confusion; I've asked clarifying questions... I'm taking about what Ruth mentioned about paying attention) or when a question is asked of them they didn't hear it and have no idea despite the fact the answer was given 10 seconds ago (again, we all have moments of inattention: this is repeated constantly).
I don't know why they turn up.
I've been doing my placement at a primary (first 7 years) and high (secondary; 4 to 6 years) school the last two months. I am impressed with the kids. You have the troublesome ones, and some language is used I don't recall (I wasn't in stetson's class 😉), but overall there is respect (and I am at public (state, not UK public) schools where I live, a low socioeconomic and low formal education area where many kids don't want to be there (65% attendance rates or lower in some instances)). The classroom is very different from my experience last century, and this is only my very limited experience. But I thought I'd share. Staff have told me the mobile phone ban has improved things.
edit: clarified possible Australianisms
I do similar at staff development and the more senior the staff the more likely they are to be checking their phone, looking for opportunities to interject or sneaking out early and less likely they are to be making meaningful notes. Although I do doodle a lot around my notes!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/classroom-incivility-teachers-experts-1.7399126
Even more exactly, this was an argument advanced by Plato using his dead friend Socrates as a literary device. We have no surviving words of Socrates that aren't second-hand accounts.
My understanding(cribbed mostly from I.F. Stone's book on the trial of Socrates) is that it's pretty well-established that Plato and his circle were of the aristocratic party(offspring or associates of the Thirty Tyrants, if I'm not mistaken), and that Socrates' ideological incitement of these kids was likely what turned Athenian democrats against him.
Indeed. The reason for Socrates' trial was likely that he espoused a philosophy that produced people like Alkibiades, Kritias, and Charmides. But under the amnesty that was passed following the fall of the Thirty Tyrants that wasn't something he could be charged with. Hence the rather vague charges about corrupting the use and promoting new gods.
[hobbyhorse galloping in]
One thing that's always kinda irked me is that civics-class portrayal of Socrates as "someone who just wanted to discover the truth". Mostly because of his aforementioned role as the leadership-coach for resentful rich kids, but also because it probably shortchanges the technical philosophy underlying Plato's original discussion of Truth.
Nietzsche considered Plato to be somewhat, shall we say, outdated, but somehow manages to work in quite a bit of admiration for Socrates. Something about provoking the arrogant youth of Athens to weep in shame. And Socrates' manner of death was way cooler than Jesus'.
Less painful, certainly, but also with less effect on the world, as I understand it.
I don’t think we can blame Jesus for the bad actions of people doing things in His Name. The good—ultimately transcendent and redemptive good that affects all of Creation—is still massively more than that, regardless, in my understanding.
It’s the wheat and the tares, basically. It would be more convenient if people who did terrible things in His Name just… wouldn’t, but we still have that free will, and of course doing things in His Name doesn’t mean having Him in one’s heart.
Philosophical “discussion” between Plato and Nietzsche.
That's my point, albeit in reverse.
I think Nietzsche evinced a certain degree of self-awareness of his own status as a "nerd". I think I recall discussing this some time ago on the Ship, so for now I'll just cite the bit about philosophers knowing as much about Truth as they know about women.
Granted, his academic field was other than philosophy, so I guess we can wonder if he meant to include himself there.
As to the 'Golden Age' thing, it's a fantasy. I recall reading a log book from a local school in the 1920s. A fascinating document. Among other things, it recorded a parent hurling a house brick at the headmaster. You might argue, at a stretch, that for short periods of history, England was a more orderly and civil place than now, but anyone who has studied any kind of social history knows that there has always been an underlying current of violence. Whether it was 19th-century machine-breakers or 15th-century attacks on Flemings and other foreigners.
(I posted it hear because it was the best extant thread I could find. If there is a better extant field, please, let me know.)
When I went to lay reader school the bishop he said whites think something is always getting worse-- going to hell in a handbasket is a saying. Our ways is more like things freeze up in the fall and then thaw out in the spring every year. Goes around comes around. Kids get thought of as little darlings in one time and then as insect that sting everyone in another time. And then darlings again. Thats not our way. Kids are people. When they do bad things they are hurting about something. Maybe about something thats pretty bad. I don't how christian people get to say a kid is a bad kid. Like what the line that says suffer the children to come to me.
So I said "whites" up there but I don't know a different word to say that. Means the people who are running everying and came here as settlers and their offspring and generations. For those who want to know I come from Cree people and Metis. Maybe this is wrong to say "whites".
My 16 year old grandson tells me it is a big issue in his school.
I don't think Indigenous people in North America and Australia would agree, nor would South Asians.
I feel there's a sort of condescending inverted terra nullius doctrine when modern progressive Europeans think about the world outside Europe, as though there were no empires or conquests or colonising because no history before the Europeans arrived.
I wasn't suggesting that Christianity is the only religion of conquest.
I don't see how Christianity wasn't the primary religion of conquest in North America 300 years ago?
While Europeans were colonising the Eastern seaboard and the Hudson river area in the early eighteenth century, the European invasion of the centre of the continent didn't happen until the nineteenth century. (This was actually one of the points of contention in the American Revolution: the UK didn't want settlers expanding westward.) When they got there they found societies in flux as they had traded horses and guns to the indigenous peoples, who has been using those horses and guns to expand themselves.
(Hunting buffalo wasn't an established American tradition. It's only the horses and guns that made it feasible to build a society around them.)
Three hundred years ago I think most violence in north America would still have been indigenous on indigenous.
From wikipedia on Native Americans in the United States And from wikipedia on Bison hunting
I'm partly falling into the trap I'm decrying here; that is, of thinking of indigenous North Americans as primarily small non-state groups. If the Six Nations weren't yet a state they were in the process of becoming one and were certainly expanding their territory.
In the early eighteenth century there just weren't enough Europeans in North America, they weren't organised enough, the North Americans weren't disorganised enough, and the Europeans didn't have industrial weapon production because the industrial revolution was only in its earliest infancy.
(I am neither endorsing nor justifying the European colonisation of the North America.)
I think the main point being made is that conflict between Native American nations isn't colonialism.
Earlier settlers in North America were still committing genocide or at least attempting to do so and using Christianity as their motivation for doing so, using biological warfare eg weaponising disease is still an act of war even if you're not also using industrialised warfare. I am also puzzled by the claim that Native Americans didn't hunt bison before they had access to horses - as demonstrated, that is just not true. Hunting techniques changed with the use of horses, but suggesting that there wasn't any way to hunt large bovines without horses is just an astonishing claim to make.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
So how about not talking about our nations like you know something okay. I'm going to clear up things for you. We hunted buffalo before horses showed up. When the British showed up they made alliances with the Iroquois Six Nations (the real name is Haudenosauny) against the French and the Huron (real name Wendat). When French went west to James Bay and Lake Superior (real name Gitchee Goomy) they teamed up with my people the Cree (real name Neheyawak) for fur trading. Cree went west with French. My language got lost thanks to Indian Residential Schools and they wanted to kill the Indian in us and make us whites but not whites like them because they racist.
Our Cree people can't talk to the Dene to the north and not to the Anishanbee to the south in their language. Dene might as well be just like Chinese is for English people. We made alliances and treaties and we didn't kill or war on each other unless someone invaded our homelands. Just like the Europeans eh.
So we don't call buffalo bison. We don't like other people calling us Indian. We call ourself Indian if we want to not if they want to. Don't every say red Indian, just like don't say the N word okay. That idea from Trump to say Red Skin for a football team is bad. Let me tell you that it means a dead Indian red with blood. Black Hawks is good. Its an honourable name.
So now maybe you understand a little bit more. Maybe this is off the topic too far. Sorry for that. But how about now maybe when brown kids get mad or hurt in school and get disrespectful to teachers people may know now that they have all their ancestors hurt inside them. May be this is only here but I get the black kids do the same things from ancestors being slaves and the whites wrecking their homelands. They still doing it today you know. Just going to say that there is goodness in all the Creators people, and please don't put out the light that is inside all of the peoples everywhere.