Posted: Apr 18, 2019 4:49 am
by tuco
Hermit wrote:
Spearthrower wrote:https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47898657
‘I was put in a school isolation booth more than 240 times'

A girl who tried to kill herself after spending months in an isolation booth at school has said she felt "alone, trapped and no-one seemed to care".

The teenager, who has autism, had no direct teaching and ate her lunch in the room, away from friends.

How the fuck did we get here? :what:

Concept of individualism gone rampant, that's how. Kids - like everyone else - are regarded as evil or good autonomous units. If evil, they are punished, if good they are rewarded. If this concept reflected reality, school isolation would work.

The concept of autonomous individuals does not reflect reflect reality, though. Anyone with just a modicum of experience in educational systems will quickly notice that (a) children with behavioural problems come overwhelmingly from an environment of dysfunctional families, and (b) that dysfunctional families exist overwhelmingly among the poorer strata of society.

Even if the behaviourists' concept of conditioning works, school isolation is an extraordinarily, idiotically, ineffectually blunt instrument to cure misbehaving children. No matter whether they spend one or 240 sessions in isolation, they will always return to the environment that keeps on causing their behavioural problems in the first place.

Schools are not designed to fix those problems, nor should they be. They are meant to teach reading, writing and reckoning skills. (Ideally, they are also meant to instill skills for critical and independent thinking, but that may be asking for too much in our increasingly neo-liberal western societies.)

If some kid turns out to be intractable, get a social worker in. That isn't a particularly good solution either because social workers can't fix poverty, but tackling the core problem is well out of reach while we keep voting conservative fuckwits into government. Thank you, mass media. You've got us over a barrel.


I am not sure I would agree on rampant but that is not important. I tend to agree that let's say progress in the last half century or so with regards to individual rights, children rights included, is part of the problem so to say. However, I view such progress as positive. We've had posters saying how violence was used when they were schooled half a century ago and there is no going back to that anytime soon I think. So the question is, how to reconcile or balance such individualism, such rights, with responsibilities? Hardly through isolation booths.

And yes to the rest.