Violence at schools and a stupid idea of the school labour union
Few days ago - in connection to a pupil who attacked his teacher - I heard about an “interesting” idea of the members of the school labour union - they want the teachers to become public servants.
Their argument is that if the attack on a teacher was viewed as the attack on a public servant, the wrongdoes could be punished harder. I think this is a bad idea. Why do some people want the wrongdoers to be punished harder only for attacking certain people instead of punishing them harder for attacking anyone? If the teachers were classified as public servants, so should be all clerks, lawyers, doctors, cleaning ladies, shopkeepers and all citizens. Is there anyessential difference whether a 15-year-old adolescent attacks you with a baseball bat on a street or at school? In my opinion this person should be punished hard in both cases, there’s no reason for changing the law only to the teachers’ benefit. I vote for punishing the minors harder for physical attacks no matter who they attack.
Other think I’d like to mention is my experience with violence in the schools. It hasn’t been such a long time since I went to the high school and I can recall the elementary school experience very well, too. Older people often talk about how young people are “going bad”, how rude and uneducated they are. Yes, in our schools you can find many rude and spoilt brats who can’t behave because nobody has taught them this. However, many pupils/students are not like this and it’s pity that people aren’t also talking about those teachers who are trying to heal their complexes in the schools. If you read an internet article about how a parent complained about a teacher’s behaviour to a child and then you view the discussion, you can read things like “If the child can’t put it’s hand in front of the mouth while caughing, the teacher has right to hit it,” or “He surely was rude to the teacher, it’s good he got hit”. I think this is horrible, if somebody thinks so narrow-minded when he/she is reading an article where the situation hasn’t been described at all and you don’t know who did what to whom, just that the kid got hit. If somebody is convinced that the child is always guilty no matter what happens,it’s either a teacher with a mental complex or somebody who doesn’t remember the time he/she was going to school.
When I went to elementary school, the opinion was already widely spread that the youth is spoils and that we all are brats. Such kids really were among us but I as well remember some teacher with sadistic streak but nobody was talking about them. It’s interesting that they all were women. I respected some of my elementary school teachers but I simply feared the most of them. I feared because I saw how they treated other children. They left the worsthooligans alone because the parents of the worst-behaved kids were often doing scenes at school and the teachers then let their anger out on the others. And so we were hit to the face, to the back and more for things like yawning without the hand in front of the mount or just if we hadcurved edges drawn in our notebooks (note for foreigners - the pupils and students in the Czech republic have to draw edges in their notebooks, so that they can’t write to the very end of the paper. We used to make tiny holes in all the papers at once, so that we didn’t have touse the ruler on each page but some teachers didn’t like that and then we had to draw 2 points on every page and them connect them - so you get the edge. And we had to do this on hundreds of pages. If the teacher didn’t like the edges enough, she just teared the notebook and we had to draw again). I remember one teacher who was looking after us after school and she was especiallygood at punishments for anything and at making this after-school-time a real hell.
I also remember some high school teachers who had some problems in my opinion and who tried to solve these problems in a wrong way. It is also true that our teachers were under the pressure of the directors and parents of some student, these parents caused a lot of troubles to all teachers who dared to give their “brilliant” kids a worse mark than A. I’m on the teachers’ side in this and I wonder why some parents were willing to show how much spoilt their children were. However, I’ll never understand those teachers who always left the worst-behaved and most spoilt alone and then punished the others for really silly things.
I must say, except some cases I had luck on my high school teachers, I really liked them, many of them were not only great teachers but also our friends. On the contrary, I don’t like remembering the elementary school. I got there the impression, that the most cruel ladies get to the smallest children. I can remember a scene when a teachergrasped a kid by the hair, trailed it on the floor through the classroom and when the kid was crying hysterically, she threw it in the corner and hit it several times. And what was the cause? The kid whispered something to it’s neighbour in the class several times. I understand that the children should be taught some discipline at school (and at home above all), but they are no robots and those who think that the children at the age of 6 or 7 would be disciplined like soldiers and quiet like robots, should not be in education at all. And teachers who can’t punish the pupils proportionally to the wrong should be punished as hard as pupils who attack their teachers. Actually, as anyone who attacks anybody.
EDIT: I have to share my experience from the school kitchen, too. The teachers never controlled if we got the food we paid for but they always controlled whether we were waiting totally quiet in the row. They forced us to eat everything we had on our plates, including the fat meat. There were some weird practices in our school. If there was meat for lunch, the cooks gave only fat meat to many kids. Sometimes they “forgot” to give them meat at all and so we got only dry potatoes. If we had buchticky s kremem (small pastry pieces with cream), we often got plain cream, no pieces in it. If we were still hungry, we couldn’t get more. Our teachers sawall this but never said anything, never did anything because they knew that after school the cooks would share with them all they’ve stolen. Bags full with lunch meals, sugar, butter, flour….does it sound familiar? As far as I’m concerned, these practices still work in many Czech schools. And these people want to tell the kids how they should behave.
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