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Zero tolerance approach to bad behaviour in schools amount to ‘child abuse’, teachers claim in United Kingdom

United Kingdom/ 02.04.2018/ From: www.independent.co.uk.

‘Las políticas y  reglas estrictas sobre la conducta de los alumnos «son crueles, victorianas, dickensianas». Y castiga más a los niños de la clase obrera ‘

A zero-tolerance approach to discipline in schools amounts to “child abuse”, teachers have claimed.

Extremely strict behaviour policies unfairly punish working class children who may not be as focused in class or as well-behaved because of difficult circumstances at home, teachers have suggested.

The remarks came as the NUT section of the National Education Union (NEU) raised their concerns about the state of children’s mental health at their annual conference in Brighton.

Jonathan Reddiford, from North Somerset, said he felt ‘zero tolerance’ behaviour policies in schools were a “key cause” for mental health problems among young people.

He added that it was “incredibly harsh” to exclude pupils for misbehaving and he said using strict behaviour policies with vulnerable children was “nothing short of child abuse”.

Michael Holland, from Lambeth, added that punishing disadvantaged children with strict behaviour approaches was an “abuse” of their rights.

 He said: “Zero tolerance is intolerance. Zero tolerance doesn’t work. Zero tolerance is cruel, Victorian, Dickensian. It punishes working class children the most.

“It punishes black children and children from black ethnic minority groups [they] are far more likely to be excluded from schools.”

Mr Reddiford told the conference that one Year 7 student he had taught was not very “focused” in class – but it was because he was sharing a bed with three family members and he did not get much sleep.

“For me to then try and exercise some sort of zero tolerance behaviour policy would be nothing short of child abuse,” he said.

Mr Holland added: “We believe in a different vision of education. One where children are not sent home because they have a sharp haircut, or their shoes aren’t totally black. We believe in an education service that respects each child.

“If a child is disruptive because they are exhausted or hungry or both. Or if a child kicks another child because the previous night they witnessed domestic violence at home. We respond with patience. We respond with compassion.»

There was unanimous support from conference delegates to opposing «the move towards ever more punitive behaviour policies in schools» which it said was «feeding a mental health crisis for our children».

The motion said: “The increasing use of detention, isolation and exclusion, often talked of as being ‘zero tolerance’ approaches, usually mean ignoring the varied difficulties children have.”

Delegates also highlighted other experiences of growing mental health concerns about their pupils, which some linked to a narrowing of the curriculum in schools.

Paul Power, of Haringey, who has been a head of year in a secondary school for 16 years, said: “I have seen an increase in anxiety, an increase in depression, an increase in stress, an increase in students talking about suicide, an increase in self-harming.”

He added that reforms to exams had led to more stress. “And to be honest there is only one word for them – and that is child abuse,” Mr Power told the conference.

Delegates voted that high stakes testing has harmful effects on children’s mental health, and called for a renewed campaign to oppose Sats.

On Monday, delegates will debate whether to boycott high stakes tests in primary schools – including the Sats.

From: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/strict-behaviour-school-punish-children-child-abuse-teachers-national-education-union-a8283276.html.

 

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Malaysia has clear education roadmap; on track to achieve TN50: Mahdzir

Malaysia/ March 27, 2018/By THARANYA ARUMUGAM/Source: https://www.nst.com.my

Education Minister Datuk Seri Mahdzir Khalid today took a swipe at critics who condemned the Malaysian education system and policies.

He said Malaysia has a clear and extensive education roadmap that serves as guideline to the ministry, schools, teachers and students.

«We are on the right track towards achieving the National Transformation 2050 (TN50) vision in propelling Malaysia into the world’s top 20 nations.

«The government prioritises quality education, hence the reason we have various frameworks and policies such as the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025, National Education Policy and English Language Roadmap 2015-2025.

«While there are many critics here (in Malaysia) condemning our education system and policies, we continue to strive to ensure our children receive quality education on par with the global standards.

«These critics fail to realise that Malaysia is on the right pathway. We also ensure all strata of society obtain equal education, such as continuing vernacular school system in the country,» he said at the SMK Kota Kemuning 2 groundbreaking ceremony in Kota Kemuning today.

Mahdzir cited Singapore and Indonesia as examples, where he said Singapore abolished vernacular schools and only developed English-medium schools, while Indonesia chose Bahasa Indonesia as its official language.

«But Malaysia as a multinational country continue to allocate funds to build more vernacular schools, catering to the needs of the people. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has also assured that this initiative will continue as long as Barisan Nasional remains the ruling government.

«The government allocated about RM50 million each for Chinese, Tamil, religious and missionary schools.

«But this has angered certain quarters saying that we should abolish vernacular schools to move forward.

«We are only finding ways to inculcate a sense of oneness among students to ensure unity remains in the community when they grow up. (Not to abolish vernacular schools).

«There is no need to involve politics in the education system. I am confident the people of Selangor can see the government’s efforts for themselves and make the right choices.

«Water is a necessity. How can you say it is a developed state if the people still suffer from water crisis? They (critics) should first address this before commenting about the education system.»

It was reported that as of March 31, 2016, there were 2,058 national schools, 578 Chinese vernacular schools, and 360 Tamil vernacular schools in Malaysia.

Based on an operational cost analysis, these schools need RM67,130.65 per student every year compared to RM5,321.84 annually per student in other schools.

Source:

https://www.nst.com.my/news/government-public-policy/2018/03/348505/malaysia-has-clear-education-roadmap-track-achieve-tn50

 

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Trump, guns and the warnings of history

By. Henry Giroux

The ongoing crisis of democracy has two markers: The erasure of memory and the politics of disposability.

In the age of Donald Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears.

This seems especially true regarding the current cult of violence, guns and domestic terrorism.

Such violence is not only evident in the horrors of early fascist and Nazi regimes, but also in the massacre of Vietnamese infants and children at My Lai , and in the guns turned repeatedly on children in the United States, most recently in Florida.

An estimated 188 shootings have occurred at U.S. schools and universities since 2000. There will be no escape from mass violence in the U.S. until it is placed within a broader historical, economic and political context to address the totality of forces that produce it.

Focusing merely on mass shootings or meaningless gun-control laws does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce America’s love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Historical and social amnesia in fact facilitates America’s addiction to violence.

This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in a stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated at the highest levels of the Trump administration and in powerful conservative media such as Fox News, Breitbart News and conservative talk radio stations.

These right-wing media stalwarts have been joined by newcomers like Clear Channel and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

And so the politics of disposability, in which the well-being of citizens, democratic ideals and the social contract are tossed away, is no longer the discourse of marginalized extremists. It’s now trumpeted daily by the conservative media machine and exists at the highest levels of government.

America is watching and listening, and so too is Trump himself. His tweets often make reference to actual fake news, and not just the stories he labels as such because they fail to fawn over him:

 Thank you to @foxandfriends for the great timeline on all of the failures the Obama Administration had against Russia, including Crimea, Syria and so much more. We are now starting to win again!

The politics of disposability is increasingly evident not so much in rise of mass shootings in the United States but in the fact that they are getting deadlier, especially as they involve the maiming and killing of children.

Seventeen people, most of them teens, are now dead at the hands of a 19-year-old shooter armed with an AR-15 assault rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. They won’t be the last to die. The question is not if, but when, in a society that has turned malignant with violence.

Violence is indeed a cancer metastasizing through American society. The proliferation and sales of guns as both an industry and form of entertainment is at the heart of such violence. The profits from weapons of war and death are now a more important investment than investing in the safety, security and lives of young people.

The logic of disposability and the war culture it legitimates was on display recently as Trump listened to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings.

President Donald Trump listens to Florida high school students and one of their parents as they issue a plea for tougher gun laws at the White House on Feb. 21, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

He responded by advocating for teachers to be armed and trained to have concealed weapons. Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the epidemic of violence, mass shootings and the ongoing carnage with a call for more guns. He normalized the insane logic that mass violence can be met with more violence.

“A teacher would have shot the hell out of the gunman before he knew what happened,” Trump said at the annual CPAC conference.

Trump, who was the recipient of US$30 million in campaign funds from the NRA, channels its head, Wayne LaPierre, who calls for more armed teachers. LaPierre trades in fear-mongering, mistrust and even Cold War rhetoric, calling gun control advocates “socialists.”

Trump and LaPierre have no interest in preventing school shootings. On the contrary, they want to “prepare for shootings” by turning schools into war zones.

This logic is breathtaking in its moral depravity, its refusal to get to the root of the problem and its unwillingness even to advocate for the most minor reforms such as banning assault rifles, making illegal the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the 2012 mass murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hundreds more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defence for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children.

Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature voting to refuse to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the gallery and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place?

How else to explain that the U.S. House of Representatives, seemingly reduced to an adjunct of the NRA, voted to pass a law that would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines?

These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands. The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle sport, its citizens routinely brutalized by repeated deadly acts of domestic terrorism followed by the criminal inaction of their elected representatives.

Any defence for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is, in fact, criminal. It’s political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobby, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This is how the logic of disposability works. This is how democracies die.

Children have more moral courage

And this debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn the machinery of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity.

Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity so perfectly personified by Trump, pussy-grabber-in-chief.

Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations?

First step: Expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018.

Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight not for a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a truly democratic order.

Source:

https://theconversation.com/trump-guns-and-the-warnings-of-history-92027

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Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism

By. Henry Giroux

Passing thoughts on the willingness of the politicians and merchants of death who allow the unimaginable to become imaginable, allow financial gain to prevail over the lives of innocent children, and are more willing to protect guns at the expense of the lives of children.

President Trump listened recently to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings. He responded by advocating that teachers be armed and trained to have concealed weapons.

Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the issue of mass violence, shootings, and the ongoing carnage with a call to arm more people, putting more guns into play, and stating that violence can be met with more violence. This logic is breathtaking in its insanity, moral depravity, refusal to get to the root of the problem, and even advocate minor reforms such as banning assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School of 20 young children and 6 teachers a decade ago, 11,000 more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defense for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children. Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature refusing to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Majory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the galleys and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place. How else to explain that the House of Representatives – reduced to an adjunct of the NRA – voted to pass the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act (H.R.38) which would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines. These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands.

The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

I find it extremely difficult to watch the debates about gun violence on the mainstream media. The call for reform is so limited as to be useless. Instead of banning assault rifles, they celebrate Trump for suggesting that he raise the age to 21 in order for people to buy a weapon of war. Instead of preventing violence from engulfing the country and schools, he calls for arming teachers and the press celebrates his willingness to entertain this issue. Instead of speaking about justice and allowing people to speak who are against deregulating laws restricting or abolishing the merchants of death, the media allows an NRA hawk to speak at the town meeting and rather than calling her out for being a spokesperson for violence rather than justice, they congratulate themselves on promoting balance.

The corporate media has become a normalizing force for violence because they lack the courage to challenge the corporations that control them. They also benefit by peddling extreme violence as a spectacle. They refuse to begin with the issue of money in politics and start instead with what one parent called non-starters. Guns disappear from the conversation and appeals to fear and security take over. Young people have to lead this conversation and move beyond the mainstream media. And when they do appear they have to flip the script and ask the questions they think are important.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle, sport, and deadly acts of domestic terrorism. Any defense for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is criminal. This is the discourse of political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobbies, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn machineries of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity. Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity. Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations. First step, expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018. Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight for not a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a democratic socialist order.

Source:

https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/henry-giroux-on-gun-violence

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Killing Children in the Age of Disposability: The Parkland Shooting Was About More Than Gun Violence

By: Henry A. Giroux

Donald Trump may have startled Republican lawmakers with his sudden and unexpected support for background checks and other gun control measures, but a closer look at his comments to lawmakers reveals his continued adherence to the core of the pro-gun script that he has been following all along.

At his meeting with lawmakers on February 28 Trump buckled down on the idea that the real problem is the existence of gun-free zones, arguing that eliminating gun-free zones «prevent [mass shootings] from ever happening, because [the shooters] are cowards and they’re not going in when they know they’re going to come out dead.»

The president’s repeated efforts to disparage the idea of gun-free zones fit with the earlier call for arming teachers made by Trump and one of his most powerful financial and ideological backers — the dark knight of gun violence, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Meanwhile, Trump has shown no interest in preventing school shootings by hiring more guidance teachers, support staff and psychologists. Trump’s call for a comprehensive gun bill may have made for «captivating» television, but it rattled NRA lobbyists and initiated a tsunami of calls to their allies on Capitol Hill. Nothing surprising to this reaction. It gets worse. Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the NRA, met with Trump a few days after Trump made his remarks and suggested in a tweet that the president had backed away from his apparent embrace of gun control.

Moreover, there is little confidence following Trump’s remarks that Republicans would even remotely endorse legislation for gun control. The NRA «paid $5 million to lobbyists last year» and there is no indication that the time and money spent buying off cowardly politicians will prove ineffectual.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders.

The deeply troubling call for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors. Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety. As  Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, observes:

The data … that does exist … shows that more police in schools leads to more criminalization of students, and especially black and brown students. Every single year, about 70,000 kids are arrested in school…. [Moreover] since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.

In addition, the proposal points to the insidious fact that mass shootings and gun violence have become so normalized in the United States that, as Adam Gopnik points out, «we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid’s school, there’s a plan to cope with him.» Such statements make visible a society rife with the embrace of force and violence. How else to explain the fact that, at the highest levels of government, horrendous acts of violence, such as mass shootings involving school children, are now discussed in terms of containing their effects rather than eliminating their causes.

Protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people.

In this logic the underlying causes of mass shootings and gun killings disappear and the emphasis for dealing with such violence reproduces an act of political and moral irresponsibility in its call to curtail or contain such violence rather than address the underlying causes of it.

We live in an age in which the politics of disposability has merged with what Jeffrey St. Clair has called the spectacle of «American Carnage.» The machineries of social death and misery now drive a mode of casino capitalism in which more and more people are considered waste, expendable and excess. The politics of disposability now couples with acts of extreme violence as pressure grows to exclude more and more people from the zones of visibility, justice and compassion. This is especially true for children. Violence against children in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. As Marian Wright Edelman points out,

Pervasive gun violence against children is a uniquely shameful all-American epidemic. Consider that since 1963, over three times more children and teens died from guns on American soil than U.S. soldiers were killed by hostilities in wars abroad. On average 3,426 children and teens — 171 classrooms of 20 children — were killed by guns every year from 1963 to 2016. And gun violence comes on top of other major threats of global violence that threaten our children.

A culture of cruelty, silence and indifference to the needs of children, built on the backs of the conservative media politicians and the gun industry and lobby, has become a central and ethically disturbing feature of American society. This is a culture of political corruption and social abandonment that «has a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others.» This culture of violence has a long history in the United States, and has become increasingly legitimated under the Trump regime, a regime in which lawlessness and corruption combine to ignore the needs of children, the poor, elderly, sick and vulnerable. In the age of neoliberal brutality, protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people. As is apparent from its policies, our society no longer views young people as a worthy social investment or the promise of a decent future. On the contrary, as John and Jean Comaroff note in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, instead of becoming a primary register of the dreams of a society, youth have become «creatures of our nightmares, of our social impossibilities, and our existential angst.»

Viewed largely as a liability, the institutions that young people inhabit have been discarded as citadels of critical thinking and social mobility. As a result, such institutions, including schools, have become zones of social abandonment — often modeled after prisons — that appear to exist in a state of perpetual danger and fear, especially for students marginalized by race and class, for whom violence operates routinely and in multiple ways. Children are now defined largely as consumers, clients and fodder for the military or the school-to-prison pipeline. As a result, their safety is now enmeshed with the weaponized discourse of surveillance, and security personnel and police patrol their corridors. Horrific shootings boost the ratings and profit margins of the mainstream press, undercutting these news outlets’ will and ability to use their resources to address the culture and political economy of violence that now amounts to a form of domestic terrorism in the United States.

The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them.

As Brad Evans and I have argued in Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle, violence has now become the defining organizing principle for society in general. It is also worth noting that the spectacle, marketing and commodification of violence powerfully mediates how the American public both understands the relations of power that benefit from the production of violence at all levels of society and how the visceral suffering that is produced can be neutralized in a culture of immediacy and «alternative facts.»

Of course, this logic is part of the politics of distraction that has become a trademark of the Trump administration. At the same time, it creates more profits for the gun industries and makes clear that most people, including children, have no safe space in the US. The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them. It gets worse. Rather than engage young people and other gun rights advocates in a debate about gun control, some conservatives mimic the discourse of humiliation and lies used relentlessly by Trump in claiming that «bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.»

As objects of moral and social abandonment, young people are beginning to recognize that the response to their call for safety, well-being and future without fear is cruel and cynical. In addition, their struggle against gun violence makes clear that the Trump administration, the NRA, and the industries that trade in instruments of violence and death, are waging a war against democracy itself. The call to arm teachers also speaks to the Trump administration’s efforts to further militarize and expand the weaponization not only of the armed forces but also of spaces in which large numbers of students congregate. In his call to arm 20 percent of all teachers, Trump is suggesting that 640,000 teachers be trained and given guns. The Washington Post estimates that the costs of training teachers sufficiently could reach as high as $718 million while the cost of providing teachers with firearms could amount to an additional $251 million. According to the Post, «the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm … creeps past $1 billion.» Furthermore, putting 640,000 more guns in schools is not only a reckless suggestion, it also further enriches the profits of gun makers by adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. Why not invest this amount of money in providing support staff and services for students — services that could meaningfully support those facing mental health issues, bullying, homelessness and poverty?

When combined with a culture of fear and a massive government investment in a carceral state, the politics of disposability eerily echoes the damaging legacy of a fascist past in the US, with its celebration of violence, concentration of power in the hands of the few, massive inequities in wealth and militarization of all aspects of society. There is no defense for weapons of war to be sold as commodities either to children or anyone else. Gun violence in the US is not simply about a growing culture of violence, it is about the emergence of a form of domestic terrorism in which fear, mistrust, lies, corruption and financial gain become more important than the values, social relations and institutions that write children into the script of democracy and give them hope for a decent future.

When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence.

A war culture now permeates American society — extending from sports events and Hollywood films to the ongoing militarization of the police and the criminalization of everyday behaviors such as violating a dress code or doodling on a desk. War has become a permanent element of everyday life, deeply etched into our national ideals and social relations. And those responsible for the bloodshed it produces appear immune from social criticism and policies that limit their power.

This debate about school shootings is not simply about gun violence; it is about a neoliberal order that has tipped over into authoritarianism, one for which the highest measure of how a society judges itself ethically and politically is no longer about how it treats its children. Violence on a grand scale certainly has produced a high sense of moral outrage within the US public at times, but not over the fate of young people.

People in the US need a new language to talk about violence in order to capture its many registers and the threads that tie them together. Under such circumstances, school violence cannot be understood outside of the deeply inordinate influence of money and power in US politics. The call to model schools after prisons would have to be examined against the rise of the punishing state and the Trump administration’s celebration of a «law and order» regime. The anger fueling what might be called white rage would have to be analyzed against the gutting of jobs, wages, pensions, health care benefits and the massive growth of inequality in wealth and power in the United States.

US society has become an abyss in which violence, disposability and the logic of social abandonment and terminal exclusion work against the interests of most children and for the interests of the rich and powerful. Weapons now operate in the service of what might be called the necro-power of casino capitalism. How else to explain the fact that there are more than 13,000 homicides a year in the United States, or that on average, seven teens are killed with guns daily. Yet the response on the part of politicians is either silence and inaction, or a more aggressive push to put more guns in circulation?

A cult of militarism has dragged extreme violence into the very soul of the US and has become a source of pride rather than alarm and anger. This depraved transformation is accelerated by a crisis of agency in which every relation is reduced to an exchange relation, one in which, as political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, «everything from learning to eating become matters of speculative investments — ranked, rated, balanced in your portfolio.» When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence, unsympathetic to the growing multitudes of disposable individuals and groups, and unmoved by a culture of deepening collective cynicism. Casino capitalism has numbed large segments of the American public into moral and political callousness. One consequence is an indifference to a society in which the killing of children is routine.

Mass shootings and gun violence in the US cannot be abstracted from what I call the death of the social, which involves the collapse of an investment in the public good, the ongoing destruction of democratic values, and the undermining of the common good. A toxic mix of rugged individualism, untrammeled self-interest, privatization, commodification and culture of fear now shapes American society, leaving most people isolated, unaware of the broader systemic forces shaping their lives, and trapped in a landscape of uncertainty and precarity that makes them vulnerable to having their anxieties, anger and rage misdirected.

The students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle.

All too often, the only discourse available for them to deal with their problems is provided by the disingenuous vocabulary of fear and security delivered in the call for gun ownership, the allure of violence as an antidote to their individual and collective anxieties, and a hateful appeal to racism, Islamophobia and demonization.

The hijacking of freedom and individual responsibility by extremists is corrosive and rots society from within, making people susceptible to what C.W. Mills describes as «organized irresponsibility» in his book The Politics of Truth. The right-wing attack on the welfare state, community and democracy functions to dissolve crucial solidarities and bonds of social obligation, and undermines mutual responsibilities. In the absence of the discourse of community, compassion and mutual respect, fear and violence have become the new currency mediating social relations at all levels of society. In a society in which the war of all against all prevails, the call for more guns is symptomatic of the shredding of the social fabric, the hardening of society, the evisceration of public trust, and a ratcheting up of a political and economic investment by the ruling elite in the machinery of cruelty, inequality and militarism.

Violence in the United States is part of a wider politics of disposability in which the machineries of social and political death accelerate the suffering, hardships and misery of children. For too long, youth have been written out of the script of justice and democracy. Gun violence, mass shootings and state violence are simply the most visible elements of a society that organizes almost every aspect of civil society for the production of terror and fear, and which views young people within the specter of uselessness and indifference.

Fortunately, the students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, shunning the coarse language used by apologists for systemic violence while embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle. These young people are refusing to privatize hope or allow the ethical imagination and their sense of moral outrage and social responsibility to be tranquilized. They are not only outraged over the brutal actions of the defenders of gun violence, they feel betrayed. Betrayed, because they have learned that the power of the gun industries and the politicians who defend them do not consider their lives worthy of protection, hope and a future free of violence. They recognize that US society is unusually violent and that they are a target. Moreover, they are arguing convincingly that mass shooting in the United States have a direct correlation with the astronomical number of guns present in this country. But there is more at stake here than an epidemic of gun violence, there is the central idea of the US as defined by carnage — violence that extends from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery to the rise of mass incarceration and the instances of state violence now sweeping across the US.

At least for the moment, young people are refusing to live with a modern system of violence that functions as a form of domestic terrorism. Engaged in a form of productive unsettling and collective dissent, they are fighting back, holding power accountable and giving birth to a vibrant form of political struggle. The distinctiveness of this generation of survivors is clear in their use of social media, their willingness to speak out, their planned marches, their civic courage, and their unwillingness to continue to live with the fear and insecurity that have shaped most of their lives. Hopefully, this moment will transform itself into a movement.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43732-killing-children-in-the-age-of-disposability-the-parkland-shooting-was-about-more-than-gun-violence

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Australia: NSW Education boss Mark Scott in Batemans Bay to meet southern principals

Australia/March 13, 2018/By Ian Campbell/Source: https://the-riotact.com

The principals of 50 public schools from across Southern New South Wales have gathered in Batemans Bay to meet with chiefs of the NSW Education Department.

Schools from the Monaro, Far South Coast, Illawarra, Shoalhaven, Southern Tablelands, Southern Highlands and Queanbeyan were all represented, part of a road trip by Department Secretary, Mark Scott, Deputy Secretary School Operations and Performance, Murat Dizdar, and Deputy Secretary Educational Services, Georgina Harrisson.

“We have 2,200 schools and we want them to be great schools and you don’t have great schools without a great principal, and so we are asking them – what kind of support do they need in order to provide great leadership?” Mr Scott says.

The Batemans Bay forum came just two weeks after the release of the 2017 Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey, a nationwide check up on over 5,500 principals in state, religious, and independent schools.

Ninety percent of respondents said they were passionate about their work, however, a few alarm bells were rung:

*44% or close to 1 in 2 principals say they have been threatened with violence;

*The survey pointed to high levels of job demands, 1.5 times greater than the general population, emotional demands 1.7 times higher, and emotional labour 1.7 times higher when compared to the general population;

*Stress and burnout were flagged as issues, with principals saying the sheer quantity of work and a lack of time to focus on teaching and learning are impacting on them.

Mr Scott says he got a sense of that stress and pressure when talking to principals at Batemans Bay on Monday. “If we are a world class system then we are providing outstanding support for principals,” he says.

“We are looking at how the Department and the system can better support principals and also how principals can better support themselves.”

Students from Batemans Bay High School and Broulee Primary combine for the 2017 Southern Stars Concert. Photo: Bay High Facebook.

Students from Batemans Bay High School and Broulee Primary combine for the 2017 Southern Stars Concert. Photo: Bay High Facebook.

The influence of the outside world is a big part of the daily challenge for teachers and principals. “The complexity [of the job] is not all to do with teaching and learning,” Mr Scotts says.

“The complexity in part is because of broader pressures in society – pressures around families and the stability and security of the environments young people come from.

“Schools are often the one secure anchor point in a child’s complex and turbulent world, so schools often need to broker an array of support for students that often extends well beyond what has been traditionally provided in a school,” he says.

That traditional work of schools; preparing kids for their future, was also front and centre in the day-long meeting at Batemans Bay.

The former ABC boss, says his Department has been doing a lot of work trying to imagine the world of the future and the skills our kids will need.

“In the last year, we’ve done a big research project called ‘Education for a Changing World‘ tapping into a global array of leading academics in this area,” Mr Scott says.

“To be successful we know that a young person will need to have very strong literacy and numeracy skills because frankly, they are going to spend their entire career learning.

“Young people are going to need a growth mindset, we know that they are going to need to be able to take on new challenges, learning new things, they are going to have to back themselves,” Mr Scott says.

Cooma cheers one of it;s own, Emily Blyton, top marks on the 2017 HSC. Photo: Monaro High Facebook.

Cooma cheers one of its own, Emily Blyton, top marks on the 2017 HSC. Photo: Monaro High Facebook.

Fostering a love of learning in each child is central to Mr Scott’s vision of the future, and indeed his challenge.

“We once may have thought we take young people to school to teach them knowledge, in a way now we feel they are at school so we can help them learn to learn,” he says.

“We think less in terms of a class and think more about where each individual student is up to.

“Our great teachers are aware that every student is different and at a different point in their learning – it’s a long way from a row of desks that’s for sure,” Mr Scott says.

NSW public education is the largest education system in Australia, with 810,000 students in 2,200 schools, looked after by 85,000 staff.

The Departments tour also takes in meetings at Newcastle, Coffs Harbour, Tamworth, Wagga Wagga, Dubbo, Sydney, Penrith, and Liverpool.

Source:

NSW Education boss Mark Scott in Batemans Bay to meet southern principals

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Pakistan: Quality education vital for progress: Tirmzi

Pakistan/ March 13, 2018/Source: https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/

Federal Minister for Norcotics Control General (r) Salahud Din Tirmzi said that education played a vital role in economic development of the country and urged the students to get quality education so that they could contribute towards national progress and stability.

Addressing the annual prize distribution ceremony of Jinnah Preparatory School held at the auditorium of Rawalpindi Arts Council on Sunday, Salahud Din Tirmzi said that education was the only way to overcome poverty, ignorance, unemployment and extremism.

He said, “It is the need of hour that we invest in education and provide a conductive environment to the kids for education to enable them to combat the challenges of the future.”

He appreciated the high standard of education at Jinnah Preparatory School, which had provided opportunities to the students to express their capabilities and talents in an efficient manner. He congratulated the parents of students who secured positions in the annual examinations.

Jinnah Preparatory School Head Abdul Qadir Hai said that no society could progress without education and mutual cooperation of parents and teachers.

Later, the chief guest awarded prizes and certificates among the students who showed outstanding performance in different categories.

The ceremony was also attended by parents, faculty members and students. The well prepared kids of Jinnah Preparatory School presented beautiful tableaus, dramas, skits, a fancy dress show and a cultural show.

Source:

Quality education vital for progress: Tirmzi

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